Dammed

The road into the tiny Guatemalan community of Pacux borders a small but imposing cemetery. Its wall is plastered with peeling black-and-white I.D. photos of those buried within—the murdered relatives of the Mayans who live in this army-built settlement. On a June day in 2012, I walked past the cemetery and into the settlement, my arms laden with a stack of surveys for my research. I was greeted casually and without curiosity by heavily sunned residents squinting into the thick heat. Some women carried baskets on their heads and, against their backs, infants swaddled in bright woven cloths that matched their mothers’ blouses and skirts. The men, pushing carts or passing on motorcycles, favored jeans and cowboy hats.

Pacux shares many features with other Guatemalan villages: simple wood and concrete homes, chickens wandering free, outdoor wood-fired cooking stoves, communal washing areas. Yet where a rural village might be open and airy and surrounded by cropland, Pacux is tightly enclosed, with just space enough for a person to squeeze between the small houses and the vegetables growing in scanty tufts behind them.

My visit came thirty years after the massacres at Rio Negro, the farming village the Pacux residents once called home. In five separate onslaughts, the Guatemalan army had taken 444 lives. Massacres of indigenous people were not unusual during Guatemala’s civil war, a conflict that left more than 200,000 dead or missing. But the Rio Negro massacres were unique in one respect: their purpose was to dislodge a community that refused to leave its land and clear space for the reservoir that would be created by the new Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Pacux, which houses Rio Negro’s survivors, is four hours from the blocked-up river and the submerged fields that once fed them. Its only landmarks other than the cemetery are an abandoned school and a small infirmary with no medicine or staff, symbols of the government’s unfulfilled promise of compensation.

I was in Pacux to study the dam’s lasting effects on the community. As I ventured deeper into this village—where the community was forcibly resettled—I met older men and women who sat idly in the shade of their homes, sharpening their machetes, watching their grandkids, watching me as I scribbled down notes. Their settlement was ill fitting despite the decades they’d had to adjust. They remained a people calloused by the land, and raised to draw from it organization and sustenance, yet here in Pacux they had only a grid of shoddy homes and thin, scattered plots to evoke the fields and orchards they once cultivated.

One man told me about the violence that had brought him to this place. Returning from the hills where he’d been gathering firewood, he saw the army entering his village and hid, listening to the shouting and the shots and the wailing of children. He emerged the next day to find the village destroyed and his wife, brothers, and two sons dead.

“The massacre was tough,” he told me, nodding slowly beneath his broad cowboy hat.

Others spoke of the pain of dislocation. “After the water came, we went to live in the hills,” one elderly woman told me. “We didn’t want to come here—we were afraid of the army.” Her pupils were veiled by translucent gray cataracts, and moved between my face and her lap as she sorted corn. “But you couldn’t have a life out there, so after some time we came.”

Another survivor said his family, like a few others, tried going back to what was left of their land. They built small houses on the steep slopes next to the reservoir—a sudden lake the size of 25,000 football fields—but struggled to grow food or catch good fish. “Before, we had pigs, cows, donkeys. We could go to the orchards and get fruit.” He smiled for a moment, and his wispy moustache splayed out before turning downward again. “When we went back, everything was under the water, and the soil was bad.”

One evening, I left Pacux sweaty and drained and repaired to the small concrete room I had rented nearby. The shower was a cold dribble. As I squirmed beneath it, I thought of clumsy metaphors for the river. For several hours a day there was no water in town and the electricity often flickered out. My inability, during those hours, to wash my hands or flush the toilet was an inconvenience—trivial next to the privations faced by the communities that had inhabited the riverbanks for generations. They suffered the loss of a connection that was difficult to grasp for someone like me who conducts his daily life mostly unconscious of the natural resources needed to sustain it.

I thought of children washing at a shared standpipe in the midday heat, of elders sorting corn on Pacux’s stoops, of the handful of haggard men languishing in front of the booze shop on my corner. I dried off, slipped under the mosquito net that hung lumpily over my bed, and reviewed my notes for the day. I was searching for solid evidence of the dam’s impact on the identity and dignity of community members, aware that I’d need to present something more substantial than these impressions I found so hard to shake. I also wanted to know why, thirty years after Chixoy, Guatemala persisted in building new dams, and why indigenous people continued risking their lives to keep dams out.

I kept thinking of my visit with Juan de Dios. De Dios was the director of ADIVIMA, an overworked and under-resourced Guatemalan NGO staffed by Mayans intent on righting the state’s wrongs. “Mayan lives are worth nothing in Guatemala,” he’d stated flatly.

De Dios, compact and powerfully built, and conspicuously free of sweat in the summer heat, sat at a desk in his modest office. We were a hundred kilometers and as many mountain switchbacks from the capital, Guatemala City, but just steps from Pacux. He wore jeans, with short sleeves hung over thick arms. I’d arrived practically unannounced on my way to the settlement, yet he put aside a pile of work to welcome me, and to decry the offenses perpetrated against the community that raised him.

Together with a few international allies, ADIVIMA sought justice for the human rights violations attendant on Chixoy’s construction—the land grabbing, torture, disappearances, rape, and murder. Its mission had been at the center of national and international litigation for eighteen years, and those who pursued it had long grown accustomed to death threats.

“If we protest on the highway we are met with bullets so that trucks can pass, so they won’t be slow to deliver their minerals,” de Dios told me that day in his office. “Or their onions, their milk. Can you imagine? A human life, valued less than a bag of onions?”

A few weeks later I was back with him and ADIVIMA, in an open-air hut shaded by a mango tree and guarded by two state police. I looked on as Rio Negro survivors huddled around a list of victims the organization had submitted to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in its case for reparations. In many instances, entire families had been killed and their birth certificates and I.D. cards lost. A young staff member explained that the court needed evidence that the individuals in question actually existed.

The group mulled over the highlighted names dimly projected on the screen. They closed their eyes, pressing each other to think of anyone they knew who could vouch for the dead. They came up with godparents, nephews, neighbors.

“They’ll have to testify,” the staff member said. “They’ll have to sign.” He pressed his thumb against his palm, miming a fingerprint—the legally acceptable signature from those who are illiterate.

Juan de Dios watched it all from the back, uneasily. The case highlighted the violence against Rio Negro, a phenomenon easier to characterize, and more amenable to demands for justice, than the erosion of a community over time. He would see that whatever reparations were awarded were put to good use, but a deep worry showed on his face, a worry I now understand was about the continuity of his people, and the long, slow effort to restore self-determination to a community robbed of it.

The previously inhabited land “holds emotional relationships with our ancestral past, and is a pathway for relationships between members of the community,” he wrote in a sixty-eight-page document describing Chixoy’s consequences. “It is our collective heritage, which allows the perpetuation of our culture.”

Later that summer, one of the men I interviewed in Pacux testified with de Dios before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It was the man who lost his wife, brothers, and children. Rio Negro, he told the judges, was “a marvel—for its river, for the hills, the lands, the strength that was the river, the varieties of fish, and the archaeo- logical sites that are there. Our grand- parents did their ceremonies before planting, did their ceremonies when harvesting their crops.” The community opposed the dam, he said, “because for them the land is sacred.”

The coming year brought encouraging news. In October 2012, four months after de Dios and his delegation testified, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the State of Guatemala responsible for human rights violations and ordered a suite of reparations that included formulating a plan to rescue the culture of the Rio Negro Mayans.

Then, in January 2013, a Guatemalan court ordered Efraín Ríos Montt—who held power during the Rio Negro massacres—to stand trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. The case was brought by survivors of massacres elsewhere in Guatemala. On May 10, 2013, Montt was convicted and sentenced to eighty years in prison. It was an important victory—though ten days later a court overturned the conviction and scheduled a retrial for 2015.

Meanwhile, I made some progress of my own. I finished analyzing my data and found evidence that many children of displaced Rio Negro families have stopped using their indigenous language—an indicator of cultural loss, the main focus of my research. But a much more salient point stuck with me, one that eluded my surveys: indigenous communities in Guatemala were tired of being pushed aside. They wanted some control over decisions about their resources, and a development agenda that did not impose its greatest costs on minorities and the poor, time and time again.

Advocates like Juan de Dios can fight for reparations. They can win state-funded development support for their community, and force the State of Guatemala to finally accept responsibility for the atrocities it committed. But they cannot bring back this community’s way of life—its harvest festivals and rites of passage, its intimate relationship with the land. The best an advocate can do is show the state that indigenous people will insist on their due, even in the face of death threats, and even after thirty years.

NOAH COHEN-CLINE, F13, heads the Food Systems Track of Clinton Global Initiative. He conducted his research in Guatemala as a fellow at the Tufts Institute of the Environment.