The demarcating and titling are almost done but the “sanitizing” will take real maturity

The Caribbean Coast has witnessed significant progress in the government’s restitution of indigenous peoples’ rights, particularly regarding their especially important historical land rights. But as many of those lands are today inhabited by both new and old settlers, the process is not without major interethnic conflicts and tensiones.

Ceferino Wilson

I’m a Miskitu, born in Waspam on the Río Wanki, the river that divided Nicaragua and Honduras. I’m an agronomist by profession but have been involved in governance initiatives, political advocacy, environmental management and the restoration of indigenous peoples’ rights in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN). I want to tell you about my experience in these areas.

Our government structure

Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast is made up of two autonomous regions, the RAAN in the North and the RAAS in the South. There’s also a Special Development Zone or Regime further south. The RAAN and the RAAS are administered by their respective Autonomous Regional Council, each chaired by a directive board and made up of 45 councilors elected every four years plus the legislators elected to the National Assembly from that region. It also has its own autonomous regional government, roughly equivalent to the executive branch in central government, whose job is to implement everything the Regional Council decides and legislates. It is headed by a coordinator, usually referred to on the coast as governor, who is one of the elected regional councilors selected for the job by the plenary of Council members.

These two autonomous regions have 21 municipalities: 9 in the RAAN and 12 in the RAAS. In addition to this autonomous regional government, what distinguish our model and organizational system from the one on the Pacific are the indigenous territories and communities. One or several communities form a territory. There are four indigenous peoples on the coast (Miskitus, Mayangnas, Ramas and Ulwas), two Afro-Caribbean communities (Garífunas and Black Creoles) and of course mestizos (mixed Spanish-indigenous descendants) from the other side of the country who have migrated eastward over time. Of all those, only Miskitus, Mayangnas, mestizos and a small percentage of Creoles, who are dispersed through various neighborhoods in the city of Bilwi, live in the RAAN.

Our land claims go way back

The indigenous peoples lived on the coast long before the Nicaraguan State was formed. In 1894 the coast region was annexed by a covenant ratified by the governments of Great Britain, which had treated the coast as a protectorate rather than a colony for the previous two hundred years, and what was by then the independent Nicaraguan government. In that agreement it was already stipulated that we were the owners of our territories and the natural resources in them. The very first titling of certain indigenous lands took place as early as 1905.

There have always been land claims on the Atlantic Coast. The first indigenous organizations making them were formed in the early seventies: the Miskitu and Sumu Peoples’ Alliance for Progress (Alpromisu) and Sukawala, the organization that exclusively represented what were then known as Sumu people and today are known as Mayangnas. With the advent of the Sandinistas, Alpromisu became Misurasata, which stood for Miskitu, Sumu, Rama and Sandinista Asla Takanka (working together, in Miskitu), which continued demanding rights over our ancestral lands.

The FSLN wanted to create cooperatives on the coast, like those it was forming in the Pacific, but Miskitu communities already perceive land as communal property and have their own ways of working it so didn’t accept what the FSLN ordered. Misurasata leader Stedman Fagoth also submitted a map of indigenous lands to be titled to the communities on them that was far more extensive than the FSLN was prepared to accept at that time. These conflicts and other tensions between the FSLN and the coast people led to war by the end of 1981, first with Misura in the north, headed by Fagoth and operating out of bases in Honduras, and by mid-1982 with Misurasata in the south, headed by Brooklyn Rivera with bases in Costa Rica. The first battles with Misura along the Río Wanki led the government to relocate the river communities to what’s now known as Tasba Pri (Free Land.) In those years many indigenous and other coast people fled to neighboring Honduras and Costa Rica or—either voluntarily or compulsorily—joined one of the armed opposition groups or the Sandinista Popular Army.

Autonomous government comes to the coast

In 1985, Brooklyn Rivera and the FSLN began negotiations to establish peace agreements. Rivera demanded that the Sandinista government recognize indigenous peoples’ right to organize autonomously and collectively in our lands, to manage and govern ourselves according to our own ways and lifestyles. While those talks fell apart after several sessions, the government had the previous year recognized the coast’s historical right to autonomous self-management after spending several years studying other autonomous systems around the world. Following three years of study and as much consultation of the coast people remaining in their communities as the dangerous military conditions would permit, Law 28, the Autonomy Law, was enacted in 1987.

That same year, the two rival main Miskitu leaders, Stedman Fagoth and Brooklyn Rivera, united their respective military organizations under the name Yapti Tasba Masraka Nani Asla Takanka (Yatama), which means Sons of Mother Earth. Two years later, it and its leaders would return to the coast restructured as an indigenous social organization in time for the national and autonomous elections, in which it participated with notable success.

The first autonomous elections had been scheduled for 1988, but Hurricane Joan’s destruction of Bluefields and other areas of the RAAS precluded that possibility. They were instead held at the same time as the 1990 national elections, when the first coast authorities were chosen, and the first Autonomous Regional Councils and Regional Governments were formed, with Yatama winning a significant plurality in the RAAN. But 1990 was also the year when the FSLN government fell from power and a new style of national government was installed.

With Violeta Chamorro’s government (1990-97) came a transition to peace and many who had participated in the war on both sides in the Pacific side of the country returned home demanding integration into civilian life, which meant ensuring them land so they could produce and feed their families. The Chamorro government decided to give 35 hectares of land to the families of the veterans and agreed to form development polls. While that process went anything but smoothly and equitably, a lot of land was given out and a number of development poles were formed—many of which are situated inside the very indigenous territories that are now being demarcated and titled.

The landmark Awas Tigni ruling

A very important event took place during Arnoldo Alemán’s government (1997-2002): the North Atlantic Regional Council agreed to the national government’s concession to a Taiwanese lumber company to operate in lands owned by the Mayangna community of Awas Tingni without the community’s approval. The Mayangna peoples’ representatives sued the national government in Nicaraguan courts, but when this lawsuit wasn’t successful, they took it to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, which agreed to hear the case.

In 2001, the Inter-American Court ruled that the government had violated indigenous property rights and ordered that it redress this by compensating the community. It also ruled that a law be enacted to demarcate and title not only Awas Tigni, but all lands traditionally inhabited by indigenous peoples on the coast. One year later, with President Bolaños now in office, the National Assembly passed the “Law Regulating the Communal Property of the Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Communities of the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast Autonomous Regions and the Bocay, Wanki, Indian and Corn Rivers” (Law 445). The following year, 2003, the Autonomy Law was finally regulated after years of having remained at a relatively toothless conceptual level, and draft regulations prepared by the coast government being shelved by the previous central governments. These two steps were essential to the recognition and restitution of indigenous peoples’ collective rights.

Land demarcation is approaching
the last phase, which is the hardest

The demarcating of indigenous lands in compliance with Law 445 proceeded slowly during the Bolaños government (2002-7) but speeded up with the FSLN’s return to government in 2007. The decision to streamline it was made in May of the previous year when Daniel Ortega signed a governance agreement with Brooklyn Rivera, who has remained at the head of Yatama. That agreement has facilitated access to different decision-making areas for Yatama, in political alliance with the FSLN, not only in the RAAN, but also in central government structures.

The restitution of indigenous property rights laid down in Law 445 has five phases. The first is that the indigenous community must formally request that the lands be demarcated and titled. The second is the resolution of any internal conflicts that may arise among the communities in the larger territory to be demarcated. The third is the measuring, marking of boundaries and demarcating of each territory. The fourth phase is titling, and is the one most of the coast’s 23 indigenous territories are now in, with 17 already titled by mid-2011. The fifth and final phase is called the sanitizing process.

This last phase will be the hardest and most complicated. Sanitizing means one of two things: either expelling from the territory all those who are not indigenous or negotiating with them to reach an agreement to live together harmoniously on lands owed by indigenous people.

Once that process is concluded the law states that indigenous peoples will have the right, institutional capacity and legal backing to decide who does or doesn’t live within their traditional areas in the future and can use the police or army to enforce this right, and the government will have to ensure their decision is respected.

Who are these non-indigenous people?

We use two names for these people: mestizos or settlers. They are those who only speak Spanish and have come to settle on our land or, in some cases, have lived on it for many years. They aren’t descended from any of the coast indigenous peoples. In some cases they’ve been driven onto our lands by poverty and marginalization, by the need to survive.

Most lands on the Pacific are already occupied, in some cases by very few people, which results in many people living in rural areas having problems accessing land. Hearing that the reverse is true on the coast—a lot of land and very few people—these landless poor made up their minds to come and live on our lands.

We can get along with families who have lived on indigenous lands for many years and come to an agreement with them. The law grants them certain rights to live here. But there are also big rich landowners and cattle ranchers from the Pacific who come to the coast, buy a lot of land and change the way the soil is used, turning forests into pasturelands for cattle. Many of these mestizos are just waiting for the indigenous communities to get their land titles so they can start doing business: buy the lands and forests and take over our natural resources. We certainly can’t come to an agreement with them.

We’ve always noted that when non-indigenous people settle on indigenous lands, in a process that some call colonization and others mixing blood, they always get a lot of attention…and quickly. They settle today and tomorrow they already have a school, the next day a church, and not long after that a health center. They quickly acquire what indigenous communities only get after a long time or a major struggle. The municipal and governmental authorities prioritize them. If we look at this reality in the long term, we can see that we’re facing a very gentle form of colonization. Today they’re just a small social group but soon they’ve become a large group with bases rooted in the territory, making it hard to remove or evict them.

Contradictory logics of the process

The official logic of the sanitizing process is clear: if the rights to our lands are restored to the indigenous communities, it means the government accepts that we’re automatically the owners of those lands. This enables us to establish our own standards, criteria and parameters about who we allow to live there.

But when non-indigenous people realize what the process means, they reject it and start thinking about how to defend themselves to avoid being thrown off those lands. Anyone who knows they’re going to be evicted from where they live is logically going to react in this way. So will knowing they can’t say who can come in and who can stay on what they’ve come to believe is their property. What we’re currently trying to iron out and promote are negotiation channels between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, knowing that we’ll be able to negotiate in some cases and not in others.

The sanitizing process also stipulates that the government must ensure minimal living conditions for moving and relocating the mestizos who have been living on indigenous lands, and must compensate them for any improvements they made to the lands they leave behind. All this requires a substantial budget. Where is the government going to find the resources to comply with such conditions? Where will it find the lands to move the non-indigenous peoples to when they leave the coast? It doesn’t seem to me that we have the financial, technical or logistical capacity to do this in Nicaragua.

The law says that people who’ve been living in any of the Coast’s indigenous territories since before 1987 have rights over the property they have inhabited. Land titles issued before that date, agrarian reform titles given by the Sandinista government in the eighties or land titles given in Somoza’s time have been legally recognized. No-one can evict from these lands anyone who has one of these titles. With those people, we have no choice but to find negotiation channels so they can stay there, living harmoniously with indigenous peoples. The tensions and conflicts will be with those coming now or those who came after 1987 and can’t show a land title. Legally, they are usurping lands and using the natural resources illegally.

Mestizos and indigenous peoples
have different cultural norms

The sanitizing process is also logical because mestizo settlers have different forms of production and lifestyles that transgress indigenous cultural norms. The first such norm is the change in soil use: cutting down forests and using the land as cattle pasture. This affects our natural resources and therefore affects us because our communities depend on these resources. Our communities also have cattle, but very few. Perhaps more recently because the government’s Zero Hunger program has given away cows, pigs and hens but, even so, the possible long-term impact of introducing these animals has to be analyzed and evaluated.

The second cultural norm upset by those coming from the Pacific is that they put up fences which forcibly prevent indigenous people from passing through their lands. This takes away our rights to free movement in our traditional lands for hunting, fishing, recreation and worship.

Indigenous people’s agricultural and fishing systems and productive practices depend on soils with forest cover. Deforesting large areas where our people plant, harvest, hunt, fish and obtain lumber for their houses and firewood to cook with, makes traditional lifestyles vulnerable. When the communities can’t use their soils in the traditional way, there’s tension, conflicts and even food security problems. We’re already noticing how climate change is affecting our lifestyles on the coast and indiscriminate felling of trees produces even worse droughts.

We’ve been losing vast tracts of forest. To be honest, we’re losing them through actions by our own peoples too but, essentially, we indigenous people use natural resources—sometimes well and sometimes not so well—and live off them, but when this is exacerbated by other people’s invasion and usurpation of these resources, often exploiting them illegally, the situation gets more critical. We’re already seeing that the coast’s forests have been drastically reduced. What’re we going to bequeath to future generations? One of our most enduring concepts as indigenous peoples is our links with nature.

In some cases there’s little tension
and in other cases there’s a lot

At this stage we’re learning to negotiate and in some cases have already done so. For example, some 4,000 Ramas are currently living alongside 20,000 non-indigenous people in the Ramas’ own territory in the South Atlantic, over which they have full rights. What has been achieved there is a negotiation that commits the non-indigenous people to live in a specific territory, with a long-term projection of how far they can expand and the commitment that they respect the area assigned to them. Will they comply with this agreement? Will there be institutions strong enough to ensure that they do? We don’t know.

In some other cases there’s a lot of tension. For example, the multiethnic community of Tasba Pri, situated along the road connecting Puerto Cabezas with Managua, is inhabited by both Miskitus and mestizos. The Miskitus are asking that the territory be demarcated in their name and the mestizos are asking for a separate mestizo territory to be demarcated and titled to them. There have been conflicts in Tasba Pri for the last 15 years, involving strikes, blockades and even killings. When they throw up blockades they stop all commerce between Puerto Cabezas and Waspam. Certain groups have recently found this to be the perfect way to force the government to sit down and negotiate. Tasba Pri may end up demarcated as a multiethnic territory, although as yet there’s no consensus or agreement.

Even new technologies
have exacerbated tensions

When the first property titles were issued on the coast in 1905, there was none of the mapping technology we have today. There was no GPS to locate places exactly. Tensions have arisen with these new technologies: How far does my property reach and where does yours begin? Why do some properties overlap?

This overlapping also causes conflicts among indigenous people themselves that have nothing to do with the settlers. And they’re greater when no indigenous people live in the overlapping area. The law says the decision about such conflicts rests in the hands of local authorities and if they can’t resolve them the Autonomous Regional Councils have the last word.

There’s no land for the
government to sell to ease tensions

The national government and most municipal authorities on the coast can’t grant, sell or lease land because there’s no state land there for them to dispose of. It’s different for the municipal authorities on the Pacific, who manage lands and have the authority to issue land titles to them.

The primary authorities making any decisions about land management on the coast are those in the indigenous territories and communities themselves. We have an example in Bilwi, considered the capital of the RAAN and seat of its autonomous government. Bilwi, in the municipality of Puerto Cabezas, is located on territory belonging to the community of Karatá, which leases an area to Bilwi’s municipal government for its offices and installations. The more than 10,000 inhabitants of Bilwi must also pay lease taxes to the Karatá territorial authorities, renewable every five or so years. To respect the conditions of the lease, the Mayor’s Office has had to develop ways to negotiate with this Miskitu community so it can implement urban development works and maintain harmonious relationships between the institution and the community.

Now we have to be mature and flexible

Nobody can take away from us the right we won to the demarcation and titling of territories that indigenous peoples on the coast have ancestrally and traditionally occupied. Now we have to be more intelligent and mentally mature as we enter into the sanitizing process, more open to negotiation and consensus, so as to avoid armed confron¬tation.

If 70% of those who live on the Atlantic Coast are mestizos, how do we think we’re going to expel them? How can we imagine casting them out when the government doesn’t have the lands or resources to relocate them? This reality check must lead us to build negotiation channels between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples that enable us to coexist. It’s all going to depend on our ability and the flexibility with which we sit down and talk and negotiate until we find non-conflictive solutions.

We need participation and coordination among everyone: among the churches, irrespective of their denomination (Moravian, Baptist, Evangelical and Catholic), the community governments, the territorial governments, the NGOs and the state institutions, and between them all. I think it would be best if the churches participate in these negotiation processes because there’s a church of some kind in every indigenous community, and they know the communities very well. The pastors and priests are the closest to the tensions and conflicts and the ones most closely related to the leaders and the people.

It will also be very important for women to participate not only by attending but also by speaking up, presenting their arguments, making decisions. In the last 15 years we have made great progress in indigenous women’s participation, but we need to push further.

I acknowledge that women are better managers and planners than men and bring very important elements to community development, contributions that often go unnoticed or that we’re unwilling to recognize. Women’s participation will thus also be fundamental in the negotiation processes we’re entering. We have to trust them; they’re very good negotiators.

Everyone must show maturity at this stage. If, as a political organization, Yatama assumes the leadership in this stage of the process without considering civil society it would marginalize many people because Yatama doesn’t represent the interests of all the Coast’s inhabitants.

More power to the indigenous territories,
less to the municipal governments

One of the main political demands on the coast right now is that the Autonomy Law be reformed to move the administrative and organizational functions of the coast’s municipalities to the indigenous territories. We’re building the skills needed to meet this challenge, admittedly advancing more in some areas than in others. The basic idea of the proposal is that the indigenous territories decide about their own develop¬ment and receive resources directly from the central government so they can implement and administer their own works of progress. We don’t want our progress be in the municipal authorities’ hands any longer.

Amongst Miskitu people, the community’s advisers are those in the Council of Elders. They are listened to because they have knowledge, wisdom and can guide younger generations that are developing and forming. The Síndico, or warden, manages and regulates the use and exploitation of natural resources and the Wihta, the community judge, settles community conflicts and dispenses justice. They are the two authorities elected by the community assembly to represent them. They can elect young people, adults, elders and even women, although very few women have been chosen to fill leadership positions in the communities and territories.

The community or territorial assembly is the maximum expression for decision-making. It’s made up of members of the community or communities who want to participate in discussing a problem. If, for example, the assembly decides that mestizos may live in the territory, then this has to be respected. The decision doesn’t have to be written down anywhere, because our tradition is oral and agreements made there have to be complied with. The Síndico and the Wihta ensure compliance.

The latest case of the coast’s
perpetual logging problem

Illegal logging is a perpetual problem on the coast. Many trucks carry illegally trafficked lumber. They mostly operate at night to pass through the blind spots. There are two or three strategic points in the RAAN where they have to pass, and if a truck is carrying 5-8,000 feet of logs, the man responsible has to be able to bribe or convince whoever is at those points to let them pass through. What strong, serious, institutional authority have we built that can ensure that this doesn’t happen? We the people are the first link in that responsibility and the institutions form the next link. But when the people who work in the institutions barely earn basic pay, they are easily bribed. The National Forestry Institute (INAFOR) has very few staff in the RAAN and limited technical, economic, financial and logistical skills to control such a vast territory. We may have the best laws in the world, but they’re useless if there’s nobody to implement them and ensure they are complied with.

The latest tension we’ve faced in the RAAN is the road they began to make into the heartland of the invaluable Bosawas Reserve, which belongs to the Mayangna Sauni Arungka indigenous territory and is administered by its Matumbak territorial government. Nearly three miles had already been built before the Mayangna people reacted. The worst part was that the road didn’t just open up into an indigenous territory but into Bosawas, declared a Biosphere Heritage by UNESCO in 1997, and was made to facilitate the extraction of lumber. It’s well known in the territory that the company responsible is Albaforestal, one of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) companies in Nicaragua. Albaforestal had already been negotiating with some indigenous communities for the right to exploit timber and supported the drawing up of management plans to facilitate consolidating certain forestry companies that sprang up after Hurricane Felix toppled thousands of trees on the coast in 2007.

The first consideration about the Bosawas road conflict is that indigenous people aren’t exempt from responsibility because, for someone to come and build several miles of road, they had to know about and allow it. With the administrative autonomy the communities have, someone could have approached one of them and been given permission to open up the road. I don’t know who that was, but I can’t believe that all this machinery could be brought into the territory and work for months without the people in the communities knowing what they were doing.

At the same time the Matumbak Mayangna territorial government rightly claims that to open a road into their territory they had to have made not only an environmental impact study, but also notified all concerned about what they were about to do and its magnitude. They should have notified INAFOR, the RAAN government’s Natural Resources Secretary, the RAAN Council’s Natural Resources Commission, the municipal mayor’s office (in this case, the municipality of Bonanza), MARENA—given that Bosawas is a protected area—and also the territorial government and the affected communal governments.

None of this was done. Everyone claimed ignorance when the Matumbak territorial government reported what was happening, causing even more tension. Even the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure (MTI) had to have known about such a work, because no road is built without them knowing about it.

Organizational weakness at all levels

What happened? We have to investigate it, determine accountability and hold those responsible to account. The most obvious institutions responsible are Albaforestal and the Nicaraguan government through its institutions, although there was also indigenous responsibility.

This case demonstrates organizational weakness at all levels: national, regional, municipal, territorial and communal. It teaches us that we must direct our attention at improving our administrative systems and information flow, ensuring that every link in the chain is informed in order to make the best decisions.

Everyone in Nicaragua, including the coast, knows that Albaforestal is linked to the presidential family, the country’s greatest power. The only thing indigenous people can do about it is what they did: accompanied by Brooklyn Rivera, Armando Edwin, the president of the Matumbak territorial government, went to the National Assembly and took the first step: he made public what was happening. Given the Yatama-FSLN relationship, it was interesting that Rivera, the Yatama leader, attended that meeting and charged that indigenous rights had been violated. Could it be a sign that something is happening with that alliance.

After that revelation to the National Assembly no one can now claim to be ignorant of the facts. We can only wait and see how the investigation ends and what is decided. But in this case, as in that of Awas Tigni, the Matumbak government could sue the Nicaraguan government and Albaforestal for damages and injury to the community and to Bosawas, a protected ecosystem in Nicaragua and declared heritage of all humanity. And if they don’t get an answer within Nicaragua, there are international channels they could use. Naturally, they would need human and financial resources to do this, which indigenous people don’t have, but I’m sure that NGOs and civil society organizations would be interested in supporting them.

The Matumbak territorial government is reacting very critically to the construction of the road because it knows mestizos are linked to this work who didn’t consult the indigenous territorial authority, are destroying natural ecosystems and are threatening the traditional ways and lifestyles of its indigenous population. The road has strengthened its demand that the demarcation and titling phase be concluded and that they pass onto the sanitizing process. That process promises to be tense because approximately 4,000 inhabitants (500 families) live in the Mayangna territory of Sauni Arungka, which is already titled. In addition to the road issue, they are currently having conflicts with the settlers who live in their territory so their main demand is that they be evicted, in accordance with the sanitizing option stipulated in Law 445.

The Yatama-FSLN alliance deserves credit

The current FSLN government has gained a lot by restoring our rights. Nicaragua has signed many international agreements and treaties on indigenous peoples that it is now honoring. As the official author of the conflict in the eighties, Daniel Ortega bore a large burden of responsibility for the coast’s reality. Restoring our rights is good for his international image.

The relationship and alliance between the FSLN and Yatama since the 2006 elections, when between them they won a sizable majority in the RAAN autonomous government and of course the FSLN returned to the central government, has streamlined the process of restoring indigenous peoples’ rights. Liberal governments had no interest in restoring our rights. It was the Sandinistas who pushed through the Autonomy Law in 1987 and knew all about the conflict on the coast in the eighties, since two of the main political heads of that conflict were Daniel Ortega and Brooklyn Rivera. When they became allies everything began to change and we’ve been achieving in these last five years what we couldn’t in the previous 20.

Through that alliance we have now demarcated and titled most indigenous lands. We’ve also seen indigenous professionals put in strategic positions in central government in response to our demand that since the coast’s autonomous regions have over 80% of the country’s natural resources, they should be managed by indigenous people. We now have a native Creole from the RAAS heading up INAFOR, a strategic institution for granting concessions, extractions and utilization of forestry resources; and a Miskitu from the River Wanki as the executive director of the Nicaraguan Institute of Fisheries (INPESCA), one of the pillars of our economy. We also have indigenous professionals in the Foreign Ministry, the National Assembly and Central American Parliament, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, MARENA, the Health Ministry and the Superintendence of Property. So far, the number of indigenous professionals with positions in central government has been limited and only achieved through Yatama according to quotas defined and set by the FSLN. All of them have helped us negotiate certain cases and reach agreement, although we need to recognize that they have created a lot of tension in other cases because we don’t yet know how to use these new arenas appropriately.

While the Yatama-FSLN alliance has brought us many benefits, it hasn’t meant more votes for the FSLN nationally. This strategic alliance between two decision-makers—Ortega and Rivera—hasn’t been reflected electorally at the base, which continues to vote just for Yatama or just for the FSLN, or not vote at all—as happens in every election, where the abstention rates on the coast are always very high. There’s no clear trend indicating to the FSLN that coast people linked to Yatama vote for the FSLN in national elections.

As an indigenous political party, Yatama started with the philosophy of getting Miskitus to participate, but in recent years it has diversified, establishing negotiation channels with Mayangnas and Creoles, and opening up participation internally, within its organizational structure. Brooklyn Rivera has been its central figure for 30 years.

Miskitu power structures

In our culture there are two ways to access power. One is to be an authority: a person elected by a communal assembly, which involves men and women from the community who wish to participate. In addition to this elected authority, there’s the leader who’s not necessarily elected, but is recognized as an important figure in the community. This is true of Brooklyn, and also of Fagoth. In spite of the fact that much of the indigenous population criticizes them as corrupt or self serving, and may even oppose them, they are listened to and followed on certain specific subjects because they are political figures who have been part of our mindset for many years. In the communities, these two are the last word in resolving, avoiding and mediating conflict and sometimes also in generating it.

This responds to our traditional community culture, which always recognizes the leader as an influential person, a central figure, a decision-maker, someone to be consulted about everything. It’s somewhat similar to what happens in the FSLN with Daniel Ortega. I’m sure he could stop being President and still be the most influential person in his party and the country. So far, I can’t see anyone to replace Brooklyn, just as I can’t see anyone to replace Daniel Ortega. I think that parties in Nicaragua haven’t worked at generational transition, even though it’s quite important and we must focus on long-term thinking. As we’re not immortal we should be thinking about who will replace us and who will maintain the fundamental ideals of each organization.

In our culture, leaders may spend many years in different management areas and thus must show that they’ve contributed to the development of their people and their communities. People keep them in office if they feel represented. If not, they’ll elect someone else. The turnover rate in these posts can be rapid but there are no built-in indicators to measure these authorities’ efficacy. Perceptions and deductions of what each person can or can’t do predominate, based on what people see, feel and have heard.

Nicaragua is seen as
an indigenous paradise

Miskitus who live on what is today the Honduran side of the Río Wanki, who share deeply rooted cultural ties with Nicaragua’s Miskitus and whose territory was actually part of Nicaragua until 1960, still aren’t recognized by the Honduran State and are rapidly losing their rights to use and exploit the land and its natural resources, which belong to them. Many indigenous peoples in other countries still don’t even have official acceptance of the term “indigenous peoples,” and continue to either marginalize or try to assimilate them. Because our Constitution already ensures us an autonomous government and our rights to land, property, language, health and education, all indigenous peoples who are still struggling for those rights in Latin America and the rest of the world see Nicaragua as a paradise.

Ceferino Wilson is a Miskitu agronomist and social worker on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast.

Print text

Send text