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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Last Flight Out (cont.)


	I love Chalillo: BEL engineer and dam fan Joseph Sukhnandan (Xavier Guardans)

LATE ONE NIGHT at a bankside clearing along the Macal, the eyes of crocs glow red in the beam of Greg Sho's flashlight. Darkness has silenced the rah-rah of the macaws. By the light of a small fire, the woman known as the "Zoo Lady" is telling me what compelled her to take on Fortis and the government.

Originally from Baltimore, Matola came to Belize in 1982 to assist filmmaker Richard Foster on a wildlife documentary. When Foster lost his funding, he left Matola with custody of two jaguars, a puma, an anteater, a tayra, three coatimundis, five curassows, and a cage of parrots. On a whim, Matola posted a yellow sign that read BELIZE ZOO beside the Belize City-Belmopan highway. Over the next 20 years, with equal parts charm and grit, she managed to turn her roadside attraction into a world-renowned education-and-research center. These days, Belizeans tune in to Matola's radio broadcasts and wave when she buzzes by on her motorcycle. "I've been all over Central America, and I've never seen an area richer in biodiversity," Matola says. "Here's one of the last pristine places on earth. It's nature untouched. Destroy that for—what?—seven megawatts?" (One megawatt can power a thousand American homes; Belize's power grid can currently deliver 54 megawatts. According to the NRDC, at full capacity, the Chalillo Project would produce about one-tenth of the country's electricity.)

Matola fired the opening shot in the spring of 1999 by placing an ad in The Cayo Trader, a local paper in the Macal River farm town of San Ignacio. "The implementation of this dam will be the death knell for the remaining scarlet macaws of Belize," it read. "This is environmental crime of the highest degree."

"I didn't know what I was getting myself into," she says now. The government returned fire, charging Matola with peddling "exaggerations, half-truths, and distortion of facts," and hinting that she had a "hidden agenda."

Matola pressed on, lobbying cabinet ministers and cajoling John Brice-o, the deputy minister of natural resources, to join her on a canoe trip up the Raspaculo. But in July 1999, Barry Bowen, a member of the senate and the wealthy bottler of Belikin Beer, the national beverage, stopped by the zoo and advised Matola to back down. "You're hitting your head against a brick wall. The dam's going to happen anyway," Matola recalls Bowen saying. "I don't want to see you get hurt by this." A few months later, a pro-government newspaper declared that Matola and her allies "must now be put into our crosshairs as enemies of this state."

And then the government got nasty. Less than a year into her anti-dam campaign, the Ministry of Natural Resources—Brice-o's department—announced it had found a site for a long-planned national landfill: right next to the Belize Zoo. "They wanted to dump the trash from 200,000 people into this mega-landfill less than a mile from the Sibun River," Tony Garel, the wiry 37-year-old president of BACONGO, told me later. "They had no plans for liners or anything. The waste would have leached into the river."

Matola figured her zoo was done for, but she refused to back down. With the help of Garel and BACONGO, she lobbied Belizean politicians, and then took her case to officials at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C. The IDB, a sort of regional World Bank that finances development projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, was putting up $6.6 million of the dump's $7.4 million cost. Confronted with the plan, the bank sided with Matola and BACONGO, and threatened to withhold its money unless a more environmentally suitable site was found. Lo and behold, a better site was found ten miles away from the zoo.

Garel put it this way: "That was the first time we realized that if we fought the government over an environmental issue, we just might win."

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