According to Witness for Peace, nearly 400 indigenous people, most of them women and children, have been murdered in the area of the Chixoy Dam in a series of massacres since 1980. The people had opposed the resettlement necessary to make way for the dam.
The dam project is financed by the World Bank, which states in a memo that it did not know that the residents of the resettlement community of Rio Negro had been massacred prior to approval of a second loan for the Chixoy Dam. The memo does not address the question of why the World Bank continues lending to a government it knows is carrying out a "scorched earth" policy.
