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ECLAC REPORTS PRIVATIZATION HAS BEEN BAD FOR REGIONAL POWER.

Article Excerpt
Representatives of government and industry officiated at the opening of a hydroelectric facility on the Samala River in Zunil, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala on May 7. With fanfare and pomp, the bureaucrats and executives of the Italian firm ENEL Green Power congratulated each other on bringing in a power plant capable of producing 47 megawatts of electricity.

Executives explained that the plant was capable of producing more power than is used in the department, and that the excess will be sold in the wholesale market. That there can be excess while large numbers of people in rural Guatemala go without electricity is a mystery recently studied by Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and found not to be a mystery at all, but rather an enormous racket of international proportions from which only countries that have not privatized their electrical sectors have managed to escape.

More than a decade has passed since the process of privatization began, and, says an article distributed by the Mexican news agency Proceso, nine million people in the region remain without electricity, rates have tripled, complaints have multiplied, and "the Central American experience of privatization has basically benefited the fat fish: gigantic transnationals that dominate the generation and distribution markets, large companies that buy in the open market at prices lower than those available to domestic users, and generating companies that avoid renewable energy and long term projects and concentrate on fossil fuel fired plants constructed...

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