A Voice For the Voiceless
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Reviving Pacux
The Rio Negro survivors focus much of their attention on improving conditions in Pacux, the settlement in Rabinal where the villagers were relocated in 1983.
Pacux is a dusty settlement of unpaved roads a few blocks wide and a few blocks long, bounded on all sides by farm fields. Approximately 125 families live in Pacux. Another seven have left and returned to the small part of Rio Negro that was not submerged by the lake at Chixoy dam.
Family life in Pacux.
In addition to the houses, INDE built a church, a community center, and an elementary school, all out of cinderblocks.INDE provided four farms near Pacux, as part of the reparations. The land at Rio Negro was fertile farmland, but these four fincas at Pacux are of such poor quality that only one is really usable for farming. Three have too many rocks and ravines. The usable one adjoins Pacux and a brook runs alongside it. Corn, beans, and peanuts are cultivated there.
This farming takes place in the wet season, and Jesus explained that the ground is too hard to work in the summer or dry season. However, he said, if the community had the use of water pumps, it could irrigate during the dry season, and thus have two harvests. In the summer, corn, beans, and peanuts could be grown, as well as melons and other fruits and vegetables. Money is also needed for fertilizer.Some Pacux residents find work by travelling to the south coast of Guatemala to work seasonally on the coffee and cane harvests at the large fincas, where they earn 15 Quetzales a day. Others stay in Rabinal and work as day-laborers on farms or in construction. These people earn about 15 to 20 Quetzals a day, or $2.00 to $2.50. But this is not steady work because Rabinal is a poor municipality.
The hundred or so houses that INDE built in Pacux to resettle the families of Rio Negro between 1980 and 1983 are wood structures on concrete pads, some with cinderblock foundations. Most are little more than huts, constructed with horizontal siding and very few windows. Built in the early 1980s, they are already showing signs of rot and disrepair. One house had a cracked concrete pad, a tilted cinderblock wall, and breaks in the wood siding. "We are not satisfied with the houses that were built for us," said Jesus.
"We are not satisfied with the houses that were built for us,"
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Jesus Tecu Osorio"They were supposed to be constructed from cinderblocks. The metal roofs and wooden walls make it very hot. When we light a cooking fire in the house, it is too hot. There are many problems with water, too. It is not always available-sometimes only a couple of times a week in the summer, for a couple of hours a day."
Cristobal Osorio Sanchez, President of the Pacux Improvement Committee, also complained: "INDE has not fulfilled all of its promises. It did not construct the houses well. Our big problem is that we do not have enough work to be able to fix our houses.
"We would like to build a factory in Pacux, to make juice, for instance, something to sell. Or a chicken-processing factory. We need a water pump. We have requested this of the municipality, but they won't help us. We would also like to pave the streets. A cinderblock factory is needed, and it would be a source of work for the women. There are many widows."
"We would like to go back to Rio Negro, but we have no money to rebuild. Now, seven families live there. They have no houses-just shelters of straw with some tin roofing. But there is no place to plant, because the land where we used to plant is under water. Those people are living from fishing. But they lack nets, and equipment for transporting the fish. They sell them now in Puerto Viejo, by the dam."
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