Bosawas is Nicaragua's largest and most important ecological reserve.

Nicaragua's Frontier
The Advancing frontier in Nicaragua

Story by Xiomara Chamorro (La Tribuna). Photos by Manuel Esquivel (La Prensa). Originally published in Nica News 12 (March 1998)

Go travel to Walakitán, the most remote Miskito community in the mountains of Jinotega, costs more than going to Miami, and is a lot more dangerous.

To penetrate the mountainous interior of Jinotega, one must travel by jeep, horseback and dugout canoe for three days, following the trails used by both sides during the Contra War of the 1980s.

Thus, one enters Bosawas, a loosely-defined territory of more than 14,000 Miskito and Sumo Indians living in 24 isolated villages, who claim this land as their historical territory and refuge.

Bosawas is Nicaragua's largest and most important ecological reserve, and possibly its richest reservoir of natural resources. Gold and precious tropical woods like mahogany abound, and unfortunately, so do the men who covet them.

Eight Miskito Indians who were meeting in Wina with settlers and representatives of MARENA, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Natural Resources, were kidnapped by armed groups apparently aligned with land development interests that are stealing Indian land.

The use of armed force and intimidation by terratenientes, or land barons, who strive to grab and legalize unclaimed land, is not new. Most countries in the hemisphere, including the United States, were settled by pioneers using these same tactics.
In Nicaragua, these land grabs are also linked to powerful timber interests who negotiate with the land barons for rights to harvest the valuable timber in exchange for help clearing the land for cattle pasture.

The mutually-exclusive goals of the indigenous groups, the international nature preserve of Bosawas, and the expanding agricultural frontier are caught in the throes of an intensifying and inevitable conflict of interests.

The indigenous groups have the backing of international conservation organizations like the Nature Conservancy; but the land development, ranching and timber interests promise to raise cash production in a country that is deeply in debt and has sweaty palms about its obligations to the World Bakd and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Conservation and regional indigenous interests are clearly on a collision course with the economic and mercantile needs of the Nicaraguan government in Managua.

The Bosawas Preserve was financed largely by the Nature Conservancy and approved by the government of Violeta Chamorro in 1991. The present Liberal Party government of Arnoldo Aleman never liked the influence of the Sandinistas in the Chamorro government, and has balked at accepting many of their obligations.

The creation of the Bosawas Preserve was well-received in the international arena, and it reflected well politically on the legitimacy of the Chamorro government; but it was not so warmly embraced by the indigenous people on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua.

"The indigenous people of Jinotega and the Northern Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) looked upon this as an imposition," explained Victor Campos, director of the Humboldt Center - an advocate for the Indians.

"It's possible that the idea of the reserve was looked upon with approval from the point of view of the Pacific coast, but the question of the Indians is this: How can a government which was imposed upon these native cultures have the right to preserve something that was already theirs?" Respect for the land and of the rivers - and living as one with nature - have always been part of the indigenous culture. Conflict seems inevitable with a distinct and imported modern culture which puts a cash value on a 100 year-old mahogany tree.

The creeping advance of the agricultural frontier is accomplished by homesteading and subsequent legal documentation, in accordance with long-standing Nicaraguan laws.

According to Campos, this is the way it functions.

The Indians have no titles of land ownership. Theirs is the implied, but not legalized, right of imminent domain, which is ruled by the traditional occupation of lands which are an ancestral heritage.

Under this scenario, any Indian can approach a land baron with an offer to sell a specific tract of land. The seller and buyer, along with two witnesses then draw up a bill of sale, which is validated by a lawyer.

Often, neither party has ever visited or even seen the property in question.

This notarized bill of sale is then presented to a judge, who can declare that the seller has been in possession of the described property for ten or more years and present the buyer with a temporary title to the land.

In ten years, the new owner can apply for a real title and he will own the land free and clear, apparently regardless of whether or not it lies within the boundaries of Bosawas or any indigenous lands.

Inexorably, the pastures and farmlands advance as the chainsaws harvest the valuable, and often endangered, tropical hardwoods.

"This supposed sale of lands (under the homestead act) has created a black market for traffickers who are able to wrangle legal possession of indigenous or protected national lands like Bosawas," maintains Campos.

The timber companies negotiate directly with the representatives of the absentee landowners for rights to the timber. Often the harvest of some of the trees is illegal, but the logs are transported clandestinely to the sawmills by middlemen, some of whom are protected by former military groups.

"These timber rustlers only target about 12 species, but to reach these, they destroy about 40% of the forest by opening access roads with bulldozers and dragging out the fallen trees," according to Campos.

	The indigenous groups have the backing of international conservation organizations like the Nature Conservancy.

Another element affecting the advancing agricultural frontier are the large numbers of former soldiers from both sides who had to be pacified with promises of free land by the Chamorro government after 1990.

In 1993, the Humboldt Center began to mark the limits of the traditional indigenous lands in order to try to preserve them from the encroachment of the spreading frontier.

Their signs marking the limits of Bosawas were chopped up with machetes by the colonos, or settlers, who reacted furiously to the perception of land legalization for the native inhabitants.

MARENA has recognized these problems and has recently completed a project with the Nature Conservancy to use Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology to map the perimeter of Bosawas and document the traditional lands of the Miskito and Sumo in the area.

Political pressures, however, continue to impact the policies affecting Bosawas and indigenous lands. Internally, Nicaragua is under pressure from abroad to settle land ownership problems left over from the Sandinista era, and international financial institutions are pressing for debt service.

While the government in Managua is close to organized pressure groups, Bosawas is miles away with primitive, or non-existent communications.

The Miskitos and Sumos are creating regional indigenous organizations, but the distances and remoteness of their location makes their political effectiveness tentative.

According to Campos of Humboldt, there are presently three formulas for the legalization of Indian lands:

1. By executive decree, if the Nicaraguan government in power decides to settle the issue of land ownership.

2. National legislation by the congress, subject to the conditions of the creation or modification of laws by the National Assembly.

3. Decision by courts of law to award Indians title because of the right of possession by imminent domain, an alternative that the Indians believe unlikely.

The Sumos and the Miskitos have populated these vast mountain reaches for generations, even before the territory was an official protectorate of the English crown and was used by British privateers to raid the Spanish Main.

Until the 20th century, there was little contact between the two coasts of Nicaragua. The mixed-blood Indians of the Atlantic Coast can trace their origins to the Chibcha-speaking Indians of South America and the Caribs of the present-day Caribbean.
The pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Pacific Coast were of Mexican origin and spoke Nahuatl. These tribes controlled the trans-isthmian trade route through Lake Nicaragua and their only presence on the Atlantic Coast was at the mouth of the San Juan River, known as the desaguero in colonial times.

For centuries, the two halves of Nicaragua remained mutually exclusive, and it was not until the turn of the century that the country was united under the harsh leadership of General Zelaya, who incorporated the east coast into Nicaragua.

Even under the dictatorship of the Somoza family, who ruled Nicaragua as a personal fiefdom for almost half a century, the Atlantic Coast was left to its own devices. Somoza formed a pact of benign neglect with them, known as the kupiakumi, or all of one heart, in the Miskito dialect.

This history and litany of bitter experiences has left deep wounds among the people of the Atlantic Coast. Even today, Costenos refer to the inhabitants of the Pacific as "Spaniards" and often treat them with suspicion and distrust.

During the recent Contra War, the Indians were rounded up by the Sandinistas and put into relocationcamps far from their traditional homes near the Honduran border, because it was thought that they were providing aid to the contra-revolutionaries.
Many of them fled across the border to refugee camps in an exodus that remains a sore point in their history.

"The Miskitos and Sumos who stayed inside Nicaragua were in a particularly difficult situation, because the Yatama (Indian Contra), thought they were siding with the Sandinistas - and the Sandinistas thought they were agents of the Contra," explained Campos.

In 1990, with the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, many of the misplaced Miskitos and Sumos decided to return to their ancestral lands in the mountains of Nicaragua, near the Coco, Bocay and Waspuk rivers.

Most of them did so without any help from the Nicaraguan government or international institutions. They had no official refugee status because they were considered to have been "internally displaced".

Despite all of these travails, they maintained a firm grip on their language, culture and ethnicity, and somehow managed to settle back into their traditional tribal locations, only to find that a new wave of invaders was approaching from the west.

Until Nicaragua can come to grips with its own historical past and create an environment of peaceful democracy in which differences are respected, the future of these native peoples is threatened, not helped, by the progress of the country into the 21st century.