The World Bank Group has delayed disclosure for more than a year of an internal investigation examining an investment in a doomed Guatemalan dam project that has been linked to the murder of a local activist.
The investment by the bank’s private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation, supported Hidro Santa Cruz, a project by a Spanish company to build a hydroelectric dam near a mostly indigenous community in northwestern Guatemala.
Two security contractors employed by Hidro Santa Cruz are now on trial for the murder of a local activist, Andrés Pedro Miguel, who led community opposition to the dam’s construction in the face of alleged repression, displacement and corruption.
Residents of the heavily Mayan Q’anjob’al community of Santa Cruz Barillas charged in a complaint to the IFC’s internal ombudsman that company security guards and other personnel “have acted with impunity, to a criminal extent, causing terror among community members.”
The IFC’s Board of Directors must decide how the lender will respond to the ombudsman’s investigation into the case, which was completed in November 2018 but has not been made public.
Kate Geary, the co-director of the watchdog group Bank Information Center Europe, said the case poses a crucial test of the bank’s commitment to protecting communities harmed by its development projects.
“I can see for IFC, they just want to walk away,” Geary said. “We think they have a duty of care to the people who suffered as a result of their investment.”
The World Bank’s response is expected to be closely scrutinized following the U.S. Supreme Court’s February 2019 Jam vs IFC decision, which stripped the bank of immunity from lawsuits related to its lending activities. The Hidro Santa Cruz case represents perhaps the most serious allegations by an affected community to be considered in the aftermath of the historic court ruling.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in an earlier investigation, had discovered that the bank often failed to follow its own rules for resettling these communities and ensuring that they were protected from violent evictions and other human rights abuses.
Source: ICIJ
