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Derechos | Equipo Nizkor
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16Oct16
Nicaragua Dispute Over Indigenous Land Erupts in Wave of Killings
The wailing came from a house perched along the river as people gathered outside. Two indigenous men had been abducted during a skirmish with nearby settlers, and no one knew where they were.
"Why did they do this to you?" a sister of one of the men shouted, slumping over his neatly made bed and howling in her native Miskito tongue.
A few days later, the men were found, decapitated — the latest in a series of Miskito Indian men killed in battles over land in Nicaragua.
Indigenous communities all over Nicaragua's Caribbean coast say they are under attack by settlers who have taken over their ancestral lands.
Thousands of Nicaraguans have moved into the lush tropical rain forests that are home to the country's nearly 180,000 indigenous Miskito people. The newcomers — called "colonists" by the Miskito — have been lured by the promise of gold and the abundance of lucrative timber. Some of the settlers have also been forced from their lands by drought.
"It's our territory," said Isidro Charles, a Miskito farmer who had accompanied one of the decapitated men to the village's communal lands when men with AK-47s snatched him.
With the law on their side, and a bitter history of war, the Miskitos sometimes pushed back, confronting the settlers with large groups of people. The settlers responded with a vengeance, raiding indigenous towns.
One indigenous village was burned to the ground. At least 600 indigenous people have fled to neighboring Honduras, where they live in dirt and squalor, advocates say. The killings of at least 30 Miskitos have been documented; the settlers say at least 80 farmers have also been killed, but have been unable to provide a list of names.
During a recent visit to Francia Sirpi, a remote community several hours' drive from the coast, more than a dozen indigenous men showed off gunshot wounds they had received from attacks while fishing or hunting. One teenager lost a leg. In December, three communities were attacked in a single day, with two men killed. Three others were kidnapped that day and have not been seen since.
Now the men patrol the far-flung indigenous communities with homemade weapons.
"They are trying to get us out of here," said Vina Ernesto Efrain, 44, who saw her nephew gunned down the day a group of heavily armed men showed up in her village. "I haven't been to my farm since, which means they took it from me."
The series of attacks harks back to another time, when these indigenous communities battled the leftist Sandinista government in a quest to keep their land in the civil war in the 1980s.
Thirty years later, even after the native communities were granted autonomy over the lands and given preferential treatment under the law, critics say a new land grab is underway as the Sandinista government looks the other way.
The resulting violence is steeped in irony in Nicaragua, a Central American nation that was an international pioneer in granting important land rights to indigenous peoples. But those same rural communities, clinging to their own languages and cultures, still sting with resentment against the Sandinista government over wartime cruelties that were supposed to have been resolved decades ago.
The Sandinistas are poised to assume another four years in office after elections on Nov. 6, and the Miskitos worry that old grudges still loom large. And that more settlers will come.
"At first it was five families, and that turned into 2,005," Norberto Wilson, 53, said, referring to newly arrived settlers.
"We would go to tell them that the land is ours, and they would say, 'We are Nicaraguan too,'" said Mr. Wilson, who fled his home in a town called Klisnak late last year for Suhí, Honduras, where he lives in a large bamboo shack with more than 20 other relatives. "As Nicaraguans, they have a right to live wherever they see land?"
The bad blood goes back ages. The Miskitos, unlike other Indian peoples in the Americas, were never conquered by the Spanish. For a long while, the region was a British protectorate. Even now, the Miskitos call the descendants of people who came from Spain hundreds of years ago to colonize the Americas "Spaniards."
Antonio Monterrey, the secretary general of a farmers' association formed in response to the land disputes, blamed the Miskitos for the attacks.
"Why are the indigenous being murdered? Because they provoked the murders," Mr. Monterrey said. "They initiated the violence. It's illogical to say they will evict us. There will be bloodshed."
Mr. Monterrey said Spanish-speaking farmers had been killed as well, usually after mobs of Miskitos tried to force them out and shake them down for money.
"First a group of women came, then another 80 people came. I negotiated, and they left in peace," said Alfredo Montiel, 35, who bought several lots of land in Miskito territory last year. "I do not want to keep paying anyone."
Mr. Montiel said he had bought the land from a local indigenous leader. He acknowledged that the law prohibited such deals, but insisted that many of the buyers were peasants who did not know any better and said it was unfair for the farmers to lose their investments.
The Nicaraguan government has denounced a few corrupt indigenous leaders who sold land and arrested more than a dozen notary public agents who signed off on dubious deals. But the farmers and the Miskitos say the government has not done enough to settle the issue.
Although some farmers have been forced out, hundreds of them remain, said Lottie Cunningham, a Miskito human rights lawyer.
"A lot of people don't understand. In the city, if you have money, you go buy a pound of chicken. These people depend on the forest and fishing," Ms. Cunningham said, noting that many of the villages are hours away from any town and reachable only by boat. "All these land sales were illegal. The attorney general, the prosecutors, they offer no answers for the murdered or the injured."
So far, her group has counted 30 killings of Miskitos.
Publicly, President Daniel Ortega has sided with the Miskitos, insisting that the law is clear: Indigenous lands cannot be sold.
"It's fraud! You cannot sell the land!" Mr. Ortega said in a speech last year. "They arm themselves there however they can with homemade weapons, maybe some rifles left over from the war, to remove them. Some of the communities have organized to evict the settlers."
But in practicality, people on both sides of the dispute say the government has allowed the settling and the violence to continue unabated, partly because several of the indigenous leaders implicated in the illegal land sales are Sandinista government officials.
The government formed a special commission under the prosecutor general's office to tackle the issue. The prosecutor general, Hernán Estrada, referred questions about the matter to the Foreign Ministry, which did not respond to requests for comment. The National Police also did not respond.
Before the violence took off late last year, Mr. Estrada told a government news site that his office had at least 17 criminal cases pending against notary publics who had signed off on fraudulent land titles.
"We had to send a clear signal that we are already in a direction to eliminate such practices," Mr. Estrada said.
Ms. Cunningham said the tension between Miskitos and the Sandinistas dates back to the early 1980s, when the Sandinistas, fresh from their revolutionary victory, ran the Miskitos out of their homes and burned down villages in a mass displacement.
The animosity was so strong that when the Sandinistas won the 1979 revolution and launched literacy campaigns in Spanish, the Miskitos took up arms. The Sandinistas have been back in power for a decade now, and that bitterness remains.
"What happened last time they took our lands?" Mr. Wilson asked as he looked around the refugee shelter where he lives. "War."
The war ended with a peace agreement in 1987, when Mr. Ortega gave indigenous communities autonomy over nearly half the country's territory.
"It was a model throughout the Americas," said Laura Hobson Herlihy, a University of Kansas anthropologist who has studied the Miskitos for two decades and calls Mr. Ortega's wartime concession "astonishing."
"No indigenous group had ever achieved that kind of regional territorial autonomy. He might have given away too much, and maybe he does regret that."
[Source: By Frances Robles, The New York Times, Esperanza Río Coco, Nic, 16Oct16]
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 | This document has been published on 18Oct16 by the Equipo Nizkor and Derechos Human Rights. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. |