The World Bank’s history of investing in projects resulting in murder and human rights abuses suggests that efforts to reform the bank is a fool’s errand. During the early 1980s, in neighboring Guatemala the World Bank lent hundreds of millions of dollars for the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam project during the bloody military dictatorships of Fernando Romeo Lucas García and Efraín Ríos Montt. One of the results of the World Bank’s project was a series of planned massacres that left 440 Mayan Achi men, women, and children murdered.
A little over 20 years later the World Bank lent Canadian mining giant Goldcorp (then Glamis Gold) $45 million for an unpopular gold mine in Guatemala which not only spilled more indigenous blood, but was also an investment marred by violating indigenous rights and the improper evaluation of the project’s environmental impacts.
Around the world, from Ethiopia to Indonesia and Peru, the World Bank finds itself embroiled in controversies surrounding human rights violations, environmental destruction, and social discord. NGO’s for years have been calling for sweeping reforms at the World Bank, but to no avail.
It’s time to recognize that the World Bank is an institution incapable of reform, and is indeed unworthy of reform efforts. The only humane option is to focus efforts to close the bank immediately and to start building alternative financial institutions that promote local, community-led development projects guided by the principals of sustainability and solidarity rather than free market doctrine.
Otherwise, the pile of corpses will continue to grow in the name of progress and development—and reform.
We've seen happening again, and again, and they sail on, untouched by the massacres, broken lives, spirits, minds they've left in their wake. Filthy people.
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