The land disputes date back to efforts in the 1960s to entice landless farmers to the fertile region of the Bajo Aguan. The initial agrarian reform laws contained protections intended to ensure that the land remained in the hands of small landowners by limiting the amount of hectares individuals could accumulate. In 1992, the Law for Modernisation of Land gutted many of the protections written into the original agrarian reform efforts, creating pressure on peasant land cooperatives to sell their land to large landowners.
From 1975-1985, the World Bank (WB) and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) spear-headed this “development” project, investing 100s of millions of dollars into the Guatemalan military regimes of those years. The 1982 Rio Negro massacres (February 12, March 13, May 14, September 18) were planned and carried out by the military regime, forcing local “civil defense patrols” to do most of the brutal killing, so as to forcibly (and obviously illegally) evict the Rio Negro villagers, and some 25 other remote villages up-river from where the Chixoy Dam wall was built.
CHIXOY DAM REPARATIONS CAMPAIGN: 30th Anniversary of the March 13, 1982 Rio Negro Massacre, & Still the WB (World Bank) and IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) Have Not Paid Reparations and Compensation
Retired army general Otto Perez Molina, elected on an "iron fist" platform by Guatemalans weary of unrelenting violence, will take office on January 14. Despite his victory, questions remain unanswered both about his past and about the methods he will use to suppress the country's escalating disorder.
The Rio Negro massacres were among hundreds committed during Guatemala's internal conflict, in which the majority of over 200,000 Guatemalans killed or disappeared by the military regimes were unarmed indigenous Mayan civilians.
Letter to the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, responding to a denigrating letter from the World Bank and no response from the Inter-American Development Bank to the on-going demands for justice and reparations
The systemic exploitation and poverty and inter-connected racism and repression in much of Central America, that Rights Action has been denouncing and resisting for years, are directly and indirectly related to and caused by "Wall Street".
JUSTICE & REPARATIONS NOW, 30 YEARS DELAYED, FOR MAYAN-ACHI VICTIMS OF THE CHIXOY DAM PROJECT IN GUATEMALA
Concerning the Illegal, Forced Evictions and Other Human Rights Violations Caused by the Chixoy Hydro-electric Dam in Guatemala, a Development-Investment project of the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank in partnership with Successive Military Regimes (1975-1985)