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Wolfensohn, Indian Killer
by Alexander Cockburn
Copyright The Nation, June 30 1997
Reprinted with author's permission
Every age contributes its own dollop of cant to the business of wiping out
Indians. Today the humdrum business of ethnocide is spray-painted with
uplifting language about "sustainable development," with more menacing words
like "resettlement" inconspicuously lurking.
Back in 1992 the huge Chilean utility Endesa embarked on the first of a
series of hydroelectric dams on the Bio-Bio River some 300 miles south of
Santiago. Endesa duly applied to the International Finance Corporation for
funding.
The I.F.C. is part of the World Bank, now presided over by James Wolfensohn,
a fellow often touted in the press as a veritable Renaissance man: patron
of the arts and philanthropies tempering bankerly skills with steely
resolve to discipline the proconsuls in the World Bank Group, who have made
that institution a byword for arrogance and double-dealing. As we shall
see, the Bio-Bio saga displays Wolfensohn in none of these guises, but as a
chicken-heart.
In the late eighties, battered by justified charges that it had financed
scores of projects that doomed indigenous groups, the World Bank drew up
some protocols designed to stop this happening again. The new policy laid
heavy stress on the informed participation of such groups in the devising
of projects and policies affecting their way of life.
The I.F.C. staffers, who signed a secret dam agreement with Endesa,
concealed from the I.F.C. board of directors the facts as they well knew
them. There was not going to be one dam but several. Out of the 5,000
members of the Pehuenche tribe, almost a thousand were scheduled for
resettlement across the construction of six dams. The Indians weren't told
that. Instead the I.F.C. colluded with Endesa in trumping up a "model
agreement," inaugurating a whole new era of harmony between Indian and
white man. A newly established Pehuen Foundation would take a tiny slice of
net corporate income from an Endesa subsidiary - around $130,000 a year -
to launch "sustainable development" of three Indian reservations around the
new reservoir.
The bulldozers rolled, and by 1996 the Pangue dam was virtually completed,
watched with increasing disquiet by Chilean groups certain from the start
that an environmental catastrophe would go hand in hand with disaster for
the Pehuenche. In 1995 these Chileans took their concerns to Wolfensohn,
and not long thereafter the I.F.C. retained the anthropologist Theodore
Downing, former president of the International Anthropological Association,
to go to Chile and undertake an independent review.
Off went Downing, and the Pehuenche for the first time encountered an
interlocutor who listened to them. Downing filed his report on May 7, 1996.
It was devastating. The Pehuen Foundation was a self-serving fraud. There
was no "sustainable development" but merely the establishment of a corrupt
system of stinted welfare handouts. The ancestral Pehuenche forests - more
than 100 million acres vital for their survival - were being relentlessly
logged, at the incredible rate of 8 percent a year, with what Downing and
the Indians computed to be anywhere from $6 million to $18 million worth of
timber already hauled off. In other words, the Indians were involuntarily
subsidizing the dam that was finishing them off.
Downing's report was sent to Endesa, which promptly threatened to sue the
I.F.C., whose natural instinct was to keep Downing's report from all
inconvenient eyes, starting with those of the Pehuenche. The I.F.C. made
the report available only to non-Indian members of the Pehuen Foundation
board. By now the Chilean government and private Chilean groups were asking
for the Downing report. The I.F.C. claimed that it favored "disclosure" and
would hold confidential only "what is considered in the legitimate business
interests of the company." To which Downing tartly inquired, "Since when did
controlling the internal affairs of an indigenous group become a legitimate
business interest of a power company?"
In December 1996 Downing filed the first human rights complaint ever lodged
by a consultant against the World Bank or the staff of the I.F.C., charging
them with racism in treatment of the Pehuenche. Ludicrous cover-ups have
followed. The I.F.C. launched its own "review," which, inevitably, said
Downing's human rights complaint lacked merit. Meanwhile, in April of this
year, the I.F.C. was hatching yet another agreement with Endesa, probably
to deport the Pehuenche to the uplands. The agreement is secret, as
ethnocidal schemes mostly are.
What of Wolfensohn? After an initial reproof of Endesa and agreement to
retain Downing and also Jay Hair, formerly president of the National
Wildlife Federation, to conduct yet another review, Wolfensohn has presided
over interminable deception and cover-up, starting with the suppression of
both Downing's and Hair's reports. Hair was most recently shunted into the
presence of Wolfensohn's friend Lloyd Cutler, big-time Democratic
lawyer-fixer, who reportedly insulted Hair's report and insisted its
publication would be legally perilous. One supposition here might be that
the Clinton Administration is eager to have fast-track approval of Chile's
entry into NAFTA and doesn't want any ugly talk about ethnocide darkening
the mood of uplift. Meanwhile, it looks as though the World Bank Group is
backtracking on those brave commitments on resettlement and overall policy
toward Indians.
As he strolls through the splendid new I.F.C. headquarters in Washington,
D.C., Wolfensohn might spare a moment to reflect upon the nasty little fact
that even as the I.F.C. was moving into this palace it was signing
arrangements that would displace a small, indigent tribe from its ancestral
home. He and his subordinates have partaken in a conspiracy that will see
the Indians either "resettled" at higher elevations, which could see them
die of cold or scattered in shiftless alcoholism on the outskirts of tourist
or corporate enclaves. This is what is meant by "ethnocide." Since
Wolfensohn is Australian by origin he can perhaps concentrate his mind by
studying the current furor in his native land over the carefully meditated
plans, only a few decades old, to wipe out the Aborigine.