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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Last Flight Out (cont.)


	Geology 101? Brian Holland takes issue with BEL's definition of granite. (Xavier Guardans)

THIS IS WHERE the Mennonites and the geologist come in.

Belize is dotted with tiny colonies of Mennonites, most of whom immigrated in the fifties from Canada and Mexico. Each colony occupies a unique position on the continuum of modernity. The more Amish types stick with horse-drawn, steel-wheeled buggies. Others, known in the rural districts as the "mechanized Mennonites," are quite handy with heavy machinery—just the folks to call when you need to bust a road through the jungle.

In January 2002, with international protest growing, a shady group of dam proponents decided to cut to the chase. Somebody—BEL says it wasn't them, honest—approached the mechanized Mennonites with money and a map. In a few days, they carved a road through the heart of the forest to the Chalillo site—a road that, according to the secret agreement hammered out by Prime Minister Musa, will be paid for by the taxpayers, not BEL. (The government doesn't deny that a road was built; it just denies that the road has anything to do with the dam.)

By the time anti-dam activists obtained a restraining order, it was too late. FORTIS JUMPS THE GUN! announced the Belize City Reporter, perhaps the only sizable newspaper in the country not aligned with either the People's United Party (Musa's party) or their opponents, the United Democratic Party (UDP). "While BEL officials in Belize were giving their assurance that nothing would be done until all the proper studies are complete and all the legal permits are in hand," The Reporter stated, "Mennonite bulldozers tore through this forest reserve, toppling trees and scarring this once placid place."

Belizeans expect a little corruption from their government officials, but the midnight road-cutting caused an outrage. Abdulai O. Conteh, the 54-year-old chief justice of the supreme court, who came to Belize from Sierra Leone as part of the British Commonwealth's judicial pooling program, ordered construction to halt while he heard BACONGO's lawsuit against BEL and the government. Belize's environmental laws are surprisingly progressive, requiring public hearings and environmental-impact assessments before building, say, a major dam. There had been an assessment—which included a report by scientists from London's Natural History Museum noting that the dam would mean "probable eventual extirpation" of the local scarlet macaws—but no public hearings. The road builders pushed on regardless. Why? They wanted to get moving, it seems, before the rainy season.

BACONGO's charges were presented by Dean Barrow, the 52-year-old leader of the UDP, who recently lost a bid to unseat Prime Minister Musa. Barrow also happens to be the father of Jamal "Shyne" Barrow, the 22-year-old aspiring rap star who shot three people in a New York City nightclub four years ago for supposedly dissing music mogul Sean "P. Diddy" Combs. As if things weren't colorful enough, Dean Barrow's younger brother, Denys, argued the case for the government. "It's a small country," a former BEL official told me. "Good lawyers are hard to find."

While Conteh mulled the case, a geologist named Brian Holland started tapping the Chalillo site with a rock hammer. Holland is no tree hugger. He's a rugged 55-year-old American expat who runs Belize Minerals Ltd., a mining operation that supplies magnesium-rich dolomite to banana growers. He makes it his business to know what's under Belize's soil, and he suspected that the rock at Chalillo was a far cry from granite, which is what Fortis's geological consultants said they had found.

"This is a survey map made by British geologist C. G. Dixon in 1955," he tells me, unfurling a chart of the upper Macal River one day during a visit to Matola's Tropical Education Center at the Belize Zoo. "It's one of only two surveys of Belize ever published. I got it for 40 bucks off the Internet." Dixon's survey shows Chalillo sitting one and a half miles east of the Cooma Cairn Fault—an active earthquake zone, Holland notes.

There is granite at Chalillo, the map indicates, but it lies under three and a half miles of sandstone and shale. This made Holland question the viability of the entire project. He's now one of its most outspoken critics. "This is what those idiots identified as granite!" he says, holding up a crumbly stone he chipped off the rock walls at Chalillo. "This is Geology 101 stuff, man!"

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