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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Last Flight Out (cont.)

IN LATE DECEMBER 2002, Chief Justice Conteh did not overturn the Department of Environment's decision to green-light the Chalillo dam. He did, however, force the government to hold a public hearing on the project, explaining, "I realize that this order would, in effect, sound like putting the cart before the horse. But so be it. The cart must be stopped. This would not necessarily overturn or upset it. But stop it must, until a public hearing is held."

At first, anti-dam activists looked on the bright side. "This is a step forward for democracy in Belize!" wrote Ari Hershowitz, director of the NRDC's Biogems Project for Latin America. Then came the public hearing on January 16 in Santa Elena, which BEL packed with supporters who hogged the microphone. "If anything at all, last week's meeting was less than a public discussion—it was a public farce," wrote The Reporter.

Now, in an attempt to stall the project, BACONGO is suing BEL to have a new environmental-impact assessment done, and has filed an injunction to halt construction at Chalillo until all appeals are heard. (BEL could start building, but if the enviros' legal appeals are successful, the public assessment period could go back to square one, at which point BEL would be forced to stop work on the dam indefinitely—a very costly gamble.) "Fortis is hell-bent on doing this," Matola says. "The only way to persuade them not to may be to tie them up in court."

One thing you should know about the dam is that it will be built 30 miles upstream from the 15,000 residents of San Ignacio and Santa Elena, dusty farm towns that sit on opposite banks of the Macal and combine to form Belize's third-largest city. If the dam failed, the townspeople would have about an hour to find higher ground—that is, if the phone line from Chalillo still worked.

I stopped by to see if anybody was worried. "It's big-time worries," Thomas Caretela told me. Caretela, 42, works on a research farm beside the Macal. His wife and six children live in Santa Elena. "If that thing burst, there's no insurance for anybody here. The government will just cry, 'Act of God!' But, for sure, God himself wouldn't build that dam."

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