State, class, and ethnicity in Nicaragua: capitalist modernization and revolutionary change on the Atlantic Coast 9781555871635

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Tables (page ix)
Preface (page xi)
1 The Atlantic Coast: A General Overview (page 1)
2 A Conflictive History (page 13)
3 The Atlantic Coast and Capitalist Modernization (page 60)
4 The Atlantic Coast and the Sandinista Revolution (page 96)
5 From Confrontation to Autonomy (page 142)
6 Final Considerations: The Unequal Development of Social Revolutions (page 188)
Bibliography (page 200)
Index (page 211)
About the Book and the Author (page 221)

Citation preview

State, Class, and Ethnicity in Nicaragua

State, Class, and Ethnicity

in Nicaragua Capitalist Modernization and Revolutionary Change on the Atlantic Coast Carlos M. Vilas Translated by Susan Norwood

Lynne Rienner Publishers * Boulder & London

Published in the United States of America in 1989 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU

©1989 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vilas, Carlos Maria.

State, class, and ethnicity in Nicaragua : capitalist modernization and revolutionary change on the Atlantic Coast / by Carlos M. Vilas

p. cm.

Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 1-55587-163-1 1. Nicaragua—Politics and government—-1979— 2. Indians of Central America—Nicaragua—Atlantic Coast—Government relations— History—20th century. 3. Social conflict—Nicaragua—Atlantic Coast—History—20th century. 4. Nicaragua—Economic policy.

I. Title. F1528.V56 1989

972.85'053—dc19 89-3604

CIP

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of

the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for , Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

To

Carmen Maria, Guillermo, Pedro,

Pablo, with whom I make my road.

And to amoon flowing over Yulu.

Contents

List of Tables iX

Preface x1

1 The Atlantic Coast: A General Overview i

2 A Conflictive History | 13 3 The Atlantic Coast and Capitalist Modernization 60 4 The Atlantic Coast and the Sandinista Revolution 96

5 From Confrontation to Autonomy 142 6 Final Considerations:

The Unequal Development of Social Revolutions 188

Bibliography 200

Index 211

About the Book and the Author | 221

vii

Tables

of Total Population 3

1.1 Department of Zelaya: Intercensal Average Annual Growth

1.2 Atlantic Coast: Ethnic Distribution of the Population, 1981 4

in the 1960s 73

3.1 Department of Zelaya: Changes in Agricultural Structure

3.2 Department of Zelaya: Changes in the Average Distribution

of Land Area and Cattle in the 1960s 73

3.3. Main Petroleum Exploration Concessions on the

Atlantic Coast in the 1970s 78

1973 and 1983 112

4.1 Evolution of Health Indexes on the Atlantic Coast,

4.2 Land Reform Titles to Indian Villages, 1981-1985 113 4.3 Agrarian Reform on the Atlantic Coast:

Evolution of Land Titling 114

5.1 Special Zone II: Changes in Ethnic Distribution in Managerial

Positions in the Main State Institutions 157

5.2 November 1984 General Election Results in the

Department of Zelaya 170

1X

Preface

At about four o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 23, 1987, in Rosita,

a town in the mining area of the Atlantic Coast, homage was given to several members of the Ministry of the Interior who had fallen in combat a year earlier in the counterrevolutionary attack on Alamikamba. There were about three hundred people in Rosita, mestizos and Indians. An army truck was the stage, and all the town's leaders were up there. The event began with a brief speech by a Moravian pastor, a Sumu; he talked about the men who had died, mixing Bible verses with passages from José Martf and Sandino. He likened the revolutionaries’ struggle in Alamikamba to the struggle of the just for a peaceful world. Later on, a Sumu boy, fourteen or fifteen years old, got up on the truck with a guitar, and behind him a member of the Ministry of the Interior, a fat, ugly man about thirty years old in a dusty, worn-out olive-green uniform. "I am here to give homage to the compafieros who were killed in Alamikamba, and I'm going to sing a song. It's a very beautiful song we used to sing together sometimes," said the fat man. I was expecting to listen to a song like "El yanqui se va a joder," "Revoluci6n, revoluci6n," or the like. The boy started playing the guitar, and the fat man in olive green began to sing: Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrds vemos la senda que nunca Se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante,no hay camino: solo estelas en la mar.

Traveler, there is no road, We make the road as we walk. The road is made as we walk, and, looking back, we see the path we will never walk again. Traveler, there is no road: Only our wake in the sea.

xi

xii PREFACE ——Antonio Machado and Joan Manoel Serrat in the depths of the mountains

of Rosita, on that late afternoon already announcing the night with its profusion of stars. Their song, I realized, was the best synthesis of this revolution that had invited me to participate. A powerful feeling took hold of me, unrepentantly, as if somehow I had begun to sink, feet first, through the dusty ground of Rosita, into the truest part of this town, these people, these mountains, this country. I, an Argentine, a white, middle-class intellectual, traveler of a thousand roads.

"The road is made as we walk." Or, as the Sandinista martyr Ricardo Morales Aviles put it: "We have taken the first step, and never will we stop walking.”

Shortly after the Sandinista victory on July 19, 1979, the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua gained international notoriety. The Coast had long been there, with its extreme poverty, pillaged of its natural resources, its people dying of Silicosis, its rivers contaminated, but never before had so many people in Latin America, the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world— including Nicaragua—shown such interest in it. For a number of reasons, the Atlantic Coast rapidly became one of the most conflicted areas of the country, and the one where violent contradictions with the revolutionary government exploded first. Some persons’ and groups’ concerns about the impact of these contradictions on the people came up against others’ interest in manipulating the contradictions in order to weaken the revolution. The revolutionaries tried to defend themselves; to go ahead; to understand the historical and present-day specificities of a region that had been exploited and impoverished as had few others, that had remained isolated from the changes in Nicaraguan society in the almost three decades preceding the revolutionary victory. Today, an autonomous government, supported by the ethnic groups that live there, is beginning to be created on the Atlantic Coast. This may also be the region of Nicaragua where the peace process has advanced the furthest—a process that began long before the five Central American presidents signed the Guatemala accords in August 1987. It is curious that none of this good news has received anything like the attention gained by the previous years’ bad news.

I knew almost nothing about the Coast until a relatively short time ago. In my book The Sandinista Revolution there is not even a passing reference to the Coast and the Costefios—an implicit geographical reduction of the

Sandinista Revolution, and of Nicaragua, to the Pacific and the centralnorthem areas of the country. I began to study the region, its history, and its

present-day problems in a systematic manner when I joined Nicaragua's Center for Research and Documentation on the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA) in

PREFACE xiii

October 1984. This book is a result of the almost four years I was with CIDCA; it evolved naturally from the research, advisorships, and related tasks I conducted then, more than as an intentionally pre-fixed research project. My main goals have been to identify and discuss the way in which the Coast has been conceptualized, both before and after the revolution, by the

groups that act within the Nicaraguan state; to analyze the social bases of those groups; to characterize the policy actions inspired by the differing viewpoints; and to consider the changes made in the state and in the region it acts on, as well as the network of tensions, contradictions, movements, and reactions these changes produce.

The state is seen as the synthesis and expression of coalitions of politically dominant social forces, with specific ethnic identities. In a multiethnic society like Nicaragua's, class domination combines with the domination of one ethnic group over others. For the purposes of this research, I have distinguished two main stages: the modernizing or developmentalist stage of the Somocista state, starting in the 1950s, and the revolutionary stage after 1979. In the first chapter, I present the general features of the region and its main socioeconomic, ecological, and demographic aspects, and discuss the impact of the unequal development of capitalism in Nicaragua on the configuration of two strongly different socioeconomic formations: the Atlantic and the Pacific/central-northern regions. In Chapter 2, I present a historical background to the tensions and conflicts that exploded in such a

violent way after the revolutionary triumph. In Chapter 3, I consider the impact on the people and economy of the Atlantic Coast of the process of

capitalist modernization that took place in Nicaragua after 1950. The developmentalist approach of international organizations and U.S. govern-

ment agencies caught on in certain dominant sectors in Nicaragua and changed the prevailing viewpoint about the Coast. As a result, new government mechanisms were designed and new policies carried out to

promote the exploitation of natural resources, the expansion of the agricultural frontier, and rural population movements.

In Chapter 4, I discuss the unequal regional development of the conditions that led to the birth and progress of the revolutionary process. I

present the main aspects of what I understand to be the viewpoint that initially inspired the Sandinista Revolution's approach to the Coast, the policies that grew out of this viewpoint, and the tensions and contradictions they generated within many sectors of the Costefio population. In Chapter 5,

I examine the way these contradictions were brought to light by the revolutionary process on the Coast; the rapid move from hesitant support to Opposition on the part of many Costefio leaders; and the skillful manipulation of the escalating conflict by internal opposition and U.S. government agencies, which led to the outbreak of war on the Atlantic Coast. I examine the resettlement of the Indian villages, in particular the Tasba Pri case, and

XIV PREFACE

discuss the autonomy process starting in 1984. I consider also the change in attitude toward the Coast by the revolutionary government and that of the Costefio leadership toward the revolution, as well as the evolution of the peace process on the Coast. In Chapter 6, I discuss on a more conceptual level some of the material of the preceding chapters, arguing that the conflic-

tive nature that the ethnic and regional question assumed on the Atlantic Coast in the first stages of the Sandinista Revolution (in comparison to the passivity shown during the Somoza period and that of foreign domination) may be seen as both a manifestation of and an effect on the periphery of the unequal development of revolutionary processes in a multiethnic society.

I am a political scientist with particular interest in the problems of development and transition. I have tried to make good use of the contributions of other social and human sciences with a longer tradition of dealing with the kind of questions arising in this book, and also of the advice of colleagues much better qualified than I in the fields of history, anthropology, and the analysis of ideologies. However, I believe that it is valid to look at the topics dealt with here from the point of view and in the categories of political science; it seems to me that this approach can aid in overcoming some of the limitations of other disciplines. The writing of this book, and the research it is based on, were conducted during my four-year affiliation with CIDCA. I took advantage of the center's excellent working facilities and, above all, of a permanent dialogue with my fellows there and with colleagues who had ties of one sort or another with

CIDCA. However, this is my personal work and does not express institutional opinions. Betty Mufioz collaborated with me in the research on which Chapter 3 is based, and discussed several parts of the book with me. Her work for her B.A.

thesis on the state and natural resources on the Atlantic Coast and my research for this book were carried out in parallel during 1985 and 1986, allowing us to establish a fruitful dialogue. Ondina Castillo was my research assistant during part of 1986. I would also like to express my appreciation for the comments made by Juan Luis Allegret, Judy Butler, Claudia Garcia, Galio Gurdian, Charles Hale, Susan Norwood, German Romero, Kathy Yih, and Joel Zamora on different parts of the work. I must also thank Ana Marfa Hernandez, director of the Documentation Center of CIDCA, for her advice in

finding materials and her patience with my prolonged delays in retuming them. Richard N. Adams, director of the Institute of Latin American Studies of

the University of Texas at Austin; Carol Smith, of Duke University; and Edmundo Gordon, from CIDCA, were kind enough to send me long written opinions on a previous draft of the manuscript, which were extremely useful in improving the final version—although they are not responsible for the limitations it surely must have. In particular, I should like to thank them for

PREFACE XV

their interest in the book when it was still in an embryonic stage; Chapter 2,

which was not in the original plan of the book, is the result of a wise recommendation by Carol Smith. Conversations held at different times during the research with Ronas Dolores, Ray Hooker, Orlando Nufiez Soto, and Manuel Ortega Hegg helped me clarify several points; the same is true of

my meetings with Rodolfo Stavenhagen and Martin Diskin during their visits to Nicaragua. I also benefited from discussions with my colleagues at the Institute fiir Soziologie of the University of Hannover, who participated in a joint project, which I coordinated, with CIDCA on the Atlantic Coast:

Klaus Meschkat, Volker Wuenderich, Eleonore von Oertzen, Lioba Rossbach, and Emesto Richter. We were not always in agreement, but the scholarly interchange was, at least for me, enriching.

In the course of the research I talked with and sometimes formally interviewed many officials of the national and regional governments and also people of the Coast—leaders, ex-combatants, women and men on the street and in the countryside. When one lives in the place where the research is carried out, and research 1s part of one's daily life, it is difficult to distinguish

between looking for data and simply living. It would be impossible to mention here all those persons who in one way or another contributed— sometimes without any idea they were doing so—to this book. But I should like to mention specially the interest, cooperation, and hospitality of Dr. Mirna Cunningham, Subcomandante José Gonzalez Picado, and Reverend René Enriquez Bent.

Partial or preliminary aspects of many of the topics dealt with in the book were presented in classes, seminars, and talks at the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Florida at Gainesville, the Center for International Studies of Duke University, the Kellogg Institute of Notre Dame University, Merrill College of the University of Califomia at Santa Cruz, the Development Studies Unit of the University of Stockholm, the Institute for Development Studies of the University of Helsinki, Centro de Estudios sobre América in Havana, the Fifth Nicaraguan Conference on Social Sciences, and the National Cadres School of the FSLN, as well as in public talks in the CIDCA office in Puerto Cabezas. On all these occasions the participants’ comments, criticisms, questions, and reactions helped me clarify my ideas. The friendship of Ileana Rodrfguez created the conditions so that I could once and for all finish writing the manuscript.

The English translation was done by Susan Norwood; I should like to mention here my recognition for the interest she took in the work. —Carlos Vilas

~The Atlantic Coast: A General Overview

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE REGION! The eastern region of Nicaragua, known as the Atlantic Coast, encompasses the departments of Zelaya and Rfo San Juan—a surface area of 25,693 square miles, equal to 56 percent of Nicaragua's territory. It extends south from Cape Gracias a Dios to San Juan del Norte on the Caribbean coast and west approximately 90 miles, where it borders on the departments of Jinotega, Matagalpa, Boaco, and Chontales, as well as Lake Nicaragua. In 1982 the Atlantic Coast was divided into three administrative zones: Special Zone I, with its capital in Puerto Cabezas, extending from the Rfo Coco on the Honduran border to the Rfo Grande de Matagalpa; Special Zone

II, with its capital in Bluefields, taking in the rest of the department of Zelaya, with the exception of Rama and Muelle de los Bueyes, western municipalities that became part of Region V (departments of Chontales and Boaco); and Special Zone III, the department of Rfo San Juan. In September 1987, passage of an Autonomy Statute for the Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua created two autonomous regions: the North Atlantic and the

South Atlantic, which correspond to the former Special Zones I and II, respectively. This book will mainly deal with this part of the Coast, with some reference to the department of Rfo San Juan. Almost 90 percent of the waters of all the rivers in Nicaragua, many of

which are navigable, run through the Atlantic Coast. Some, like the Escondido and the San Juan, are used as means of transportation between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Indian villages dot the banks of the Coco, the Wawa, the Bambana, and the Prinzapolka rivers, among others. This vast and abundant fluvial system has traditionally been a way of life and a means of

transportation for the Coast population. It was also used by foreign companies for the transportation of the resources they were exploiting—ore, lumber, and bananas. The Atlantic Coast has two major types of natural vegetation: The pine savanna, which spreads over some 1,730 square miles of the northeast corner of the country between the Coco and Wawa rivers and extends into Honduras,

characterized by the predominance of the species Pinus caribaea. AS a result of exploitation by U.S. companies for more than half a century, there 1

2 THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

are now only sparse populations of young pines, and the constant rains have leached the soil. The wide-leaf evergreen forest takes up the greater part of the Coast, with species of great economic value: mahogany, cedar, tuno, and bay, among others. This type of forest has also been subjected to intense exploitation by foreign lumber companies, small farmers, and cattle raisers.

The heavy rainfall (an average of 97.5 inches a year, but reaching 225 inches a year in some areas, such as San Juan del Norte) favors the growth of vegetation and the proliferation of fungi and other diseases that prevent the growth of certain crops. A clayey soil in a humid and rainy climate is ideal for root crops but not for basic grains, which require better drainage. These characteristics have influenced the lives of the Coast populations since preColumbian times. Because of the low fertility of the soil, the Indian cultures

that settled there, particularly along the rivers and the seacoast, depended fundamentally on hunting and fishing.

The contrast of Atlantic Coast climate with that of the rest of the country is notable. In the Pacific region the climate is primarily tropical Savanna, with a dry season that lasts between four and six months and

rainfalls varying between 19.5 inches and 39 inches a year. The predominating wide grassy plains, naturally fertilized by volcanic ash, are suitable for agriculture and cattle. In the mountainous subtropical central region, with median temperatures between 50° and 68° F., pine and oak forests and tropical dew forests predominate, and conditions are favorable for permanent subtropical crops and cattle raising.

Population’ Population figures for the Atlantic Coast are imprecise, as are those for the rest of the country. The 1971 population census—the last carried out to date—calculated the population for the department of Zelaya at 145,508 persons. On the basis of this figure, the Nicaraguan Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC) estimated 139,929 inhabitants in 1980. A CIDCA study estimated the population as 282,081 inhabitants for the department in 1981, based on the housing precensus carried out on the Coast in that year (CIDCA 1982),

In addition to natural growth, socioeconomic factors have contributed to this doubling of the population in a decade. According to CIDCA (1982:47), it is closely related to the rapid eastward advance of the agricultural frontier.

Table 1.1 shows that the most rapid population growth occurred in the 1960s, when there was the greatest amount of displacement toward the agricultural frontier. The relatively rapid growth rate in the 1940s was a result of the reactivation of gold mining and rubber production during World War II. Although ethnic identity is a complex and dynamic matter, and does not

always conform to rigid categories, we may count as present-day ethnic

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW 3

Table 1.1 Department of Zelaya: Intercensal Average Annual Growth of Total

Population (in percentages)

1.0 0.3 5.1 2.4 6.2

1906-1920 1920-1940 1940-1950 1950-1963 1963-1971 Source: Instituto Nicaragtiense de Estudisticas y Censos, INEC, national censuses.

groups of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua the Ramas, Sumus, Miskitos, Creoles, Garifunas, and mestizos. According to linguistic features and other cultural characteristics, the first three groups belong to the Macro-Chibcha family, which originated in South America. The Creoles derive from an originally African population brought to the region as slaves, and the Garifunas were deported to Central America after an uprising on their native Caribbean island.

Table 1.2 presents the ethnic distribution of the Coast population in 1981. Events occurring after this information was gathered changed the number of inhabitants of the Coast, their geographical location, and the ethnic composition of the population. Displacements caused by the war from

1981 on reduced the number of inhabited areas and resulted in a greater concentration of population in urban centers. The total population of Puerto Cabezas, estimated at 5,000 inhabitants in 1980, had grown to around 25,000 by the beginning of 1987; Bluefields, which in 1980 had less than 12,000 inhabitants, in 1986 had about 30,000. On the other hand, extensive areas, such as the southern bank of the Rfo Coco, and large areas of La Cruz del

Rio Grande, Tortuguero, and Punta Gorda have, in 1989, almost no inhabitants. At the beginning of the 1980s two-thirds of the Coast population was mestizo, whereas the "traditional" ethnic groups represented 36 percent of the total. This ethnic profile, quite different from the image of homogeneity still

prevailing in academic and political circles, is an effect of the capitalist transformations that took place in Nicaragua, particularly since the beginning

of the 1950s. Before referring to these events, it is necessary to describe briefly each of these groups and communities.

Ramas. This is the smallest of the Coast's ethnic groups. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles of the region do not mention them, but rather

their ancestors the Votos and other groups linguistically related to them. Rama communities under the domination of the British and the Miskitos were reported during the eighteenth century in the Punta Gorda—Monkey Point area to the south of Bluefields. The Ramas suffered particularly intense consequences of the European conquest: epidemics, wars, and slavery. To avoid being captured and enslaved by the Miskitos and sold to the British, the Ramas were forced to move from one place to another in search of refuge. At present, their main settlement is on Rama Cay, a small island in the Bay of

4 THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

Table 1.2 Atlantic Coast: Ethnic Distribution of the Population, 1981 Population

Ethnic Group Number Percent Present Lanugage

Rama 650 2 Rama, Creole English Sumu 4,851 1.8 Sumu Miskito 66,994 24.6 Miskito Creole 25,723 9.5 Creole English Garifuna 1,487 i) Creole English, Garifuna Mestizos 172,046 63.4 Spanish Total 271,751 100.0 Source. CIDCA (1982). 4)nly on the Atlantic Coast; the approximately 540 Miskito families living in Managua are not included.

Bluefields; there are also small groups nearby in Wiring Cay, Monkey Point, Cane Creek and, further south, Punta Gorda.

Sumus. The Sumus population is dispersed throughout a region that extends from the Rio Grande de Matagalpa in Nicaragua to the headwaters of the Patuca River in Honduras. The Miskitos pillaged, captured, and enslaved the Sumus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; some Sumu communities were finally dominated by the Miskitos, in that period allied with the British, who ruled the region (see Chapter 2). Although most Sumus live in small, isolated communities, there were, before counterrevolutionary war began, located in the Bambana River basin a few large villages such as Wasakin, Fruta de Pan, and Espaniolina, some of which were founded with the help of Moravian missionaries.

It is possible to distinguish three Sumu linguistic groups living in geographically separate areas: (1) the Panamahka Sumus, about 2,000 people, who live in the basins of the Bambana, Tungki, Pis Pis, Uly, Waspuk, and Kwabul rivers (the largest village, with approximately 616 inhabitants in 1981, was Musaw4s on the Waspuk River); (2) the Twahka Sumus, around 1,000 people, living mainly on the banks of the Bambana and Bocay rivers (the largest village is Wasakfn, in Central Zelaya); and (3)

the Ulwa Sumus, some 1,600 people, who live dispersed along the Rfo Grande de Matagalpa and the Prinzapolka River and its tributaries.

Miskitos. The Miskito population is at present dispersed along the Caribbean

coast of Honduras and Nicaragua, with a refugee community in Costa Rica. The majority live in Nicaragua, from Cape Gracias a Dios in the north

to Pearl Lagoon in the south. There are also Miskitos living around the mining towns of Siuna, Rosita, and Bonanza, and along the banks of the main rivers of the northeastern Atlantic region. Before the triumph of the revolution in mid-1979, they lived in small villages and practiced small-scale

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW 5

farming and fishing, as well as seasonal salaried labor for foreign-owned companies. The Miskito population and territory expanded mainly by means of the conquest of other Indian groups, the assimilation of foreigners, and natural demographic growth. They Miskitos expanded initially toward the northeast, reaching the Black River in Honduras in 1750. During the following hundred years the Miskitos came to occupy the entire coastal region, reaching as far

south as Chiriquf Lagoon in Panama and as far north as the Chamelecén River on the Honduran border with Guatemala. Today, the Miskitos are the most numerous Indian group, and the second

largest of all population groups of the Atlantic Coast. In 1981 the counterrevolutionary war led to the displacement of 21,000 people from their villages on the Coco River on the Nicaraguan border with Honduras. Ten thousand of these crossed into Honduras, 8,000 were resettled

in other parts of the Coast, and some 3,000 moved to Managua or other places.

Creoles. This is the name used by the descendants of Africans (slaves, runaways, and freed slaves), mixed in different degrees with other groups. African immigration possibly goes back to the arrival of the first buccaneer ships in Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, and Cape Gracias a Dios in the sixteenth

century. This immigration became constant after the creation of the Providence Island Company in 1633, which brought in slaves as labor for its

plantations on the Coast. When the British left the region in 1787 in compliance with the Treaty of Versailles with Spain, many Africans stayed on the Coast, either as slaves of the British who remained in the area, as freed slaves, or by escaping. In this period, Jamaican merchants also began to arrive on the Coast and soon became permanent residents. In the nineteenth century, with the rapid development of the enclave economy around the activities of the U.S. lumber and banana companies, the growing demand for labor was supplied primarily by the immigration of blacks from the Antilles and the southern United States. The present-day Creole population lives mainly in the city of Bluefields; other important centers are Corn Island, Pearl Lagoon, and Puerto Cabezas. The Creoles work primarily at skilled and semiskilled labor and as office employees, and there is a high percentage of technicians and professionals among the Creoles, in comparison with the Indian groups.

Garifunas. This group, whose members physically resemble blacks, has a number of cultural and linguistic features characteristic of the Indians who lived in the Lesser Antilles at the time of the European conquest. After the "Carib War," from 1795 to 1797 in the island of St. Vincent, the British

shipped the surviving Garffunas to the island of Roatan in the Bay of

6 THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

Honduras. The cruel conditions of the trip caused the death of more than half those people; only a few more than 2,000 arrived. At the beginning of the

nineteenth century, the Garifunas began to move to the mainland on the northern coast of Honduras, attracted by better employment opportunities. For thirty years after 1880, the rise of the mahogany industry and the banana plantations in Nicaragua's Atlantic regions motivated a Garffuna migration to Pearl Lagoon and Bluefields (Bell 1899:3-4; Davidson 1980).

Mestizos. Mestizos presently make up most of the Atlantic Coast's population, although they are concentrated in the western municipalities. At the beginning of the 1980s approximately 164,000 mestizos, or 95 percent of the Coast mestizo population, lived in the western areas of the department of Zelaya that form the agricultural frontier. The first references to a mestizo presence on the Atlantic Coast date from the 1860s, when foreign capital began to enter on an unprecedented scale. In 1886 mestizos from the Nicaraguan town of Granada founded the small town of Rama on the river of the same name; within a few years Rama had become

an important center for commerce between the Atlantic and the Pacific regions. At that time mestizo workers started arriving on the Coast. During World War II, the rise of gold mining and the rubber industry attracted large contingents of the Pacific region's labor force. Later on, the expansion of cotton growing and export cattle raising in the Pacific, together with natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, expelled great numbers of peasants to the Atlantic Coast, first on the initiative of the people affected and later as a policy of the Somocista government—a question to which I will return.

The Ethnic Labor Hierarchy This brief presentation of the historical background and present demographic

weight of the ethnic groups living on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua demonstrates the diversity of situations and interests that make up the ethnic

context of the region. The existence of multiple population groups constitutes a fundamental element of past and present in the Atlantic Coast. The tension between the Atlantic and the Pacific regions, which has been

given particular attention by observers, is complemented by this sharp differentiation within the society of the Atlantic Coast. On this level of analysis, regional unity gives way to the multiplicity of ethnic groups, cultures, histories, interests, types of socioeconomic organization, modes of

production, and forms of articulation to other parts of the country, other countries, and other groups on the Coast. On this level, the regional or geographical viewpoint must be complemented by the social and cultural dynamic arising from ethnic multiplicity within the region.

The rise of capitalism on the Coast and the characteristics of its historical development (which will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 2)

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW 7

gave birth to a sharp and dynamic ethnic differentiation and hierarchization in

the region, as has been pointed out in several studies (CIERA 1981; Rice 1984; Yih and Slate 1985; Bourgeois 1985; Hale 1987a). Miskitos, Sumus, and Ramas were left on the bottom rung of the ethnic occupational hierarchy, doing the hardest, least desirable, and worst-paid jobs as gatherers of rubber

and chicle, lobster divers, pit workers in the mines, and so on. The Coast mestizos were on a higher rung, mainly as small- and mid-size farmers or farm workers on the agricultural frontier; together with the Indians, this group showed the greatest degree of illiteracy. Above them were the Creoles,

mainly skilled or self-employed workers, small urban businesspeople, fishermen, boat crew, teachers, and technicians. Finally, at the top were the

middle and upper classes of the Pacific regions, owners of the means of production or political and economic managers. In addition to this small stratum must be included, in the period before 1979, the tiny layer of administrators and managers—North Americans and Europeans, all of them white—of the foreign companies, as well as owners of ships and other capital resources. After the triumph of the revolution and the nationalization of the

companies, this group left Nicaragua; the foreign administrators and managers were replaced by mestizo managers, mainly from the Pacific region. Similarly, the Chinese population, which before 1979 virtually monopolized retail trade in wide areas of the Atlantic Coast—particularly in

the urban centers such as Bluefields, Puerto Cabezas, Waspam, Rosita, Bonanza, Siuna, Barra del Rfo Grande—was seriously affected by the revolution's trade policies, and most of them left the Coast. This historical process of socioeconomic differentiation and occupational hierarchization has been accompanied by tensions and conflicts among the

different ethnic groups. If from a regional perspective the major split is between the Costefios and the "Spanish" (meaning people from the Pacific),

from an ethnic perspective there come to light tensions among different Costefio populations, over and above their common regional denominator, or, with respect to the Sumus, Miskitos, and Ramas, their shared identity as Indians. Finally, socioeconomic and occupational differentiation fosters specific tendencies toward changes in ethnic identity and assimilation, when the material base of the members of a given ethnic group, or their position with regard to the power structure, undergo significant modifications (see Vilas 1988 and Chapter 3 in this book). A marked social underdevelopment and deep poverty form the background

for this process of differentiation and hierarchization of the Atlantic Coast

population. At the beginning of the 1960s, almost 70 percent of the population of the department of Zelaya lived in rural areas. This figure was greater than that for the country as a whole (around 50 percent), and in the larger municipalities the percentages of rural population were even greater: 92 percent in the municipality of Waspam, 91 percent in Cape Gracias a Dios,

8 | THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

96 percent in Rama, 98 percent in La Cruz del Rfo Grande. Given the type of

Capitalism that developed in Nicaragua, it is the rural area that shows the greatest underdevelopment and impoverishment. As in the rest of the country, the land suitable for farming and livestock was concentrated in very few hands, even though it was on what is known as

the agricultural frontier. According to the agricultural census of 1963, 46 percent of the landholdings were farms of less than 10 manzanas (1 manzana

= 1.75 acres), constituting only 2.3 percent of the suitable land in the department; another 10 percent of the holdings were farms of less than 20 manzanas, bringing the total to 4.1 percent of the land. Holdings of 1,000 manzanas or more represented only 0.5 percent of the number of farms in the area but occupied more than 35 percent of the land.

The Gini coefficient for the concentration of landholding was .81— similar to that for the rest of the country and slightly lower than in the western departments, where export crop raising had increased in the preceding decade (.83 in Chinandega and .90 in Ledén), and in other departments with large peasant populations (.85 in Masaya and.86 in Matagalpa). However, the differences between the coefficients for these departments and for Zelaya are less than one would have expected for the agricultural frontier, suggesting that at the beginning of the 1960s the concentration of land was already well advanced even on the agricultural frontier. In Chapter 3, I will return to this issue.

In this context, living conditions for the great majority of the Coast population were precarious: extremely high degrees of illiteracy, frightful sanitary conditions, poor food, the proliferation of infectious diseases, and generalized malnutrition. At the end of the 1970s, 75.4 percent of the adult population of the municipality of Rama was illiterate; in the municipalities of Puerto Cabezas and Bluefields the illiteracy figure was 75.3 percent; in the department of Rfo San Juan it was 96.3 percent. In the middle of the same

decade the department of Zelaya had only 1.8 hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants and 2.4 doctors per 10,000 inhabitants—much less than the minimum established by the World Health Organization (WHO) of 5 beds per

1,000 inhabitants and 13 doctors per 10,000. There was a deficit of approximately 75 graduate nurses and 203 nurses’ aides with respect to WHO's minimum requirements. Contamination of the rivers by Canadian and U.S. mining firms further aggravated the problem of the generalized lack of

drinking water, especially in the rural areas. Tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, yellow fever, gastroenteritis, parasitosis, and anemia were widespread among the Indian population.3

CAPITALIST HETEROGENEITY AND THE NATION STATE Capitalism and foreign domination developed differently in the Pacific region than on the Atlantic Coast.The structural heterogeneity that has been pointed

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW 9

out as one of the main features of peripheral capitalism in Latin America (Evers 1979) was very marked in Nicaragua. Over the course of a complex history, two different socioeconomic structures arose in the two regions. The

ecological and demographic features of each region were integrated in particular ways with the different modes of articulation to the international economic system. Each of these structures acquired, in the course of history,

its Own socioeconomic and cultural specificity and its own type of incorporation into different parts of the world market.

From the mid-nineteenth century on, capitalism had worked a violent transformation on the relations of production in the Pacific and centralnorthern regions of Nicaragua. Between 1870 and 1890, a number of laws forced the sale of Indian communal land and, in 1881, decreed the forced recruitment of Indian labor for public works. The expansion of commercial Capitalism additionally undermined Indian economies. Indian communities were destroyed, and direct producers were expropriated and moved off their lands, breaking down the direct relationship between the producers and their

sources of consumption; in this way the labor force was forcibly proletarianized.* Coffee growing, in combination with cattle raising, was consolidated through capitalist transformations. This process was carried out

mainly by local growers, who started to make up an incipient agrarian bourgeoisie; the most important means of production—the land—and control of the labor force built up the basis for their political dominance. Foreign monopoly capital did not take land away from this class, although in the end it would subordinate it through financing, trade mechanisms, and, in general, Operations outside the production process. The proletarianization of the labor force, following the initial destruction of the Indian communities, was slow and limited by the seasonal nature of agricultural work, as well as by the low population density and the existence of an open agricultural frontier. This process contrasts with that which took place on the Atlantic Coast. Foreign capital—British at first, North American later on—was decisive. From the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. monopoly capital assumed the

form of enclaves, characterized also by the predatory nature of the exploitation of natural resources, principally lumber. This type of exploitation was promoted by generous concessions from the Nicaraguan

government; in this respect, there was a clear continuity between the practices of the Mosquito Kingdom, the Liberal government of José Santos Zelaya, the Conservative restoration supported by U.S. military intervention, and the Somoza dictatorship. The breadth of capitalist penetration on the Atlantic Coast led to the development of a working class that was much broader than its counterpart in the Pacific and central regions, at least until World War ITI. According to a study by CIERA (Center for Research and Study on the Agraran Reform), the U.S.-based Bragman's Bluff Lumber Company, a subsidiary of the Standard

10 THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

Fruit Company, dedicated to the felling and exportation of lumber in the area around Puerto Cabezas, had by 1925 the greatest number of full-time salaried

workers in all of Nicaragua—close to 3,000 workers. In general, the sawmills had crews of between 500 and 2,000 full-time workers. The same is true of the banana companies: Standard Fruit in the north and the Cuyamel

Company in central Zelaya together employed close to 5,000 full-time salaried workers in the same period (CIERA 1981:59). Despite its enormous capacity to employ wage labor, this enclave capital did not completely destroy the direct relationship between the workers and their means of production. Different situations arose depending on the natural resource being exploited and the areas of the Coast where the companies were established. The companies’ use of an almost exclusively male labor force

combined with the survival of the Indian villages to form an unstable employment situation in which Indian workers went back and forth between their villages and their jobs in the companies. This situation was reinforced

by the general instability of the region's economy, with short cycles and marked phases of expansion and recession.

The demand for labor by the companies fit relatively well with a corresponding demand for manufactured consumer goods and tools (rum, machetes, iron and glass utensils, firearms, flour, salt) that were deeply rooted cultural necessities for the Indian groups, particularly the Miskitos (Helms 1971:20, 30; Jenkins 1986:174-175). Employment in the companies enabled them to have access to the cash with which to purchase these goods,

either in the company store or from local merchants. However, the dependence on salaried work seems to have been greater for people from the

coastal villages than for those inland, because of the unsuitability for agriculture of litoral land. In the inland villages, subsistence agriculture served as a refuge in periods when, because of the fall in international prices or other factors, the companies’ activity decreased or ceased altogether. In

addition, the involvement of Indians in salaried employment took place primarily in the mines and lumber companies of the northern part of Zelaya;

in southern Zelaya, the banana companies, which made up the most economically active part of the economy, mainly employed mestizo workers.

The incorporation of Miskitos into wage labor in this area seems to have been a relatively recent phenomenon.

One of the most frequently noted features of the foreign companies’ activity on the Atlantic Coast is its sporadic nature, strongly dependent on rises and falls in the international market and on increased production costs as the most accessible resources were exhausted and it became necessary to relocate to less accessible areas. The exploitation of resources took on the form of a series of rapid booms and no less spectacular recessions. During the

expansions, the male work force was attracted to the plantations or the mines, leaving village agriculture in the hands of the women and children.

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW 11

Matrilocality, as a form of social organization in agrarian communities based on seasonal migratory male labor, was additionally strengthened by the ups and downs of the Coast economy. In times of recession and crisis, the men

returned to the villages, where they took charge of hunting, fishing, and similar activities.° Under certain conditions, village agriculture oriented part of its surplus

production for sale. This was the case with rice production on the Coco River, which developed after the departure of the Standard Fruit Company and

the failure of the banana plantations at the beginning of the 1940s. Smallscale rice production in the villages found a market in the mines and the productive and administrative centers of the lumber companies on the Coast. All of the first harvest was generally sold, except for what was put aside for seed; the second harvest was kept for family consumption, but if it was poor the family was left without enough rice to eat. In the 1950s and 1960s, dependence on the sale of rice in order to obtain manufactured goods became sO great that what was kept for family consumption never lasted until the following harvest. As a consequence, during a large part of the year the diet of the villages was basically made up of cassava and bananas (with which they prepared bunia or wabul), and of very low nutritional value (Helms 1971:135; CIDCA 1986). In addition, the dominance of monopoly capital—at first foreign capital and later also Somoza capital—over the Costefio labor force took two clearly distinct forms. In some cases, the Coast economy was integrated into the

international market in terms of the product but not the producer. The dependence on capital (on the company) was defined by such factors as type of product, the quality that was demanded, delivering schedule, and financing. In other cases, the process went beyond the product and converted the labor force itself into a commodity. The banana industry, and to a lesser extent the lumber industry, combined both types of subordination—formal and real—of

labor to capital: The production of bananas on the plantations owned by

foreign companies was complemented by purchases from local small producers; much the same thing happened on a smaller scale with the lumber

companies. In the mines, on the other hand, there was an absolute predominance of wage labor and small-scale production by independent miners (giiiriseros) was marginal. In fishing, a division of labor developed between the industrial fishing carried out by capitalist enterprises oriented almost exclusively toward exports and small-scale fishing oriented both toward exports—especially in the case of lobster fishing—and the internal market, 80 percent of which was supplied this way in the 1970s INFONAC 1975).

Finally, the purely extractive character of the enclave, its predatory nature, and the resulting depletion of resources generated contradictions in the development of the material productive forces; which made it impossible to

12 THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

establish new capitalist labor relationships once companies left. It was very difficult under these conditions for the extractive activity to continue, for example, in the hands of small local capitalists that might have been able to buy the assets abandoned by the foreign firms and thus become something like the nucleus of a regional bourgeoisie. At the same time, the persistence of small-scale cash production in the villages acquired greater importance for the survival of the group. The different types of capitalist development in the two regions of the

country were complemented by domestic and international political characteristics that deepened the differentiation and set the scene for the appearance of contradictions that would explode later on. As shall be seen in Chapter 2, the Spanish crown, which colonized the Pacific region early on, never had an effective presence in the Atlantic. After independence in 1821 and the dismemberment of the Central American Federation in 1838, the young Nicaraguan state became involved in intense internal struggles and was not in a condition to alter this situation. However, the struggle for political control of the Atlantic Coast—the Mosquitia, as it was called then—by the dominant groups of the Pacific region was to become a constant throughout the nineteenth century.

NOTES 1, This part of the study is based mainly on data from CIERA (1981), Castillo and Zurita (1984), and Mufioz, Olivares, et al. (1985). 2. See, in general, CIDCA (1982).

3. From August 1946 to October 1967, two-thirds of the more than 15,000 clinic cases dealt with on the Escondido River were caused by malnutrition and/or poor hygiene: intestinal parasites (5,920), anemia and malnutrition (4,805), gastroenteritis (724). See Hodgson (1977); also Williamson (1979); Smutko (1983). 4. See, for example, Wheelock (1981). In the repression of the revolt of

August 7-10, 1881 alone, more than 500 Indians were killed, but the pacification operations in the region lasted until December; the Indians were implacably pursued (see Miranda Casij 1972).

5. Nancy Gonzalez has pointed out that this type of family group is typical of societies with recurrent migratory low-wage labor. The source of salaried labor is far from the man's home, and he must leave for months and even years at a time. As wages are low, the man's salary is not sufficient to maintain his family. Women and children stay in the villages and complement the male salary with small crops and livestock. The father/husband image

disappears from the household for long periods of time. See Solien de Gonzalez (1965); also Helms (1978).

A Conflictive History

A detailed review of the historical formation of Atlantic Coast society is beyond the purview of this book. Studies that deal with this subject from a general perspective already exist,! and I am not a historian. It is doubtful that, for the sake of methodology, one must be familiar with the Coast's entire

history in order to understand more recent problems or go back to the seventeenth century in order to understand what is happening in the last third of the twentieth century; still, it cannot be denied that the past constitutes part of the present for many of the actors of today’s regional dynamics and is lived by them as an ever-renewed reality. From the perspective of the Indians and Creoles, it is clear that the contradictions that exploded after 1979 are at

bottom one more link in the long chain of confrontations, tensions, and misunderstandings with the Pacific and the "Spanish."* Thus, I present in this chapter a summary of the most relevant aspects of the historical

development of the Atlantic Coast, for a better understanding of its contemporary problems.

TWO MODES OF COLONIZATION The history of the Atlantic Coast was shaped by three main elements: (1) British colonial expansion and, later, U.S. neocolonial expansion; (2) the subordinate dynamics of the cultures and institutions originating in the

region; and (3) the formative process of the Nicaraguan state and the integration of its territory. These three elements are not independent but rather closely integrated, although in the last analysis the determining element is the process of colonial and neocolonial expansion. As a result of this process, which developed over four centuries, new population groups were incorporated into the region, and the life of the original inhabitants of the Atlantic Coast changed in every way possible (language, for example, was affected, as were religion, settlement patterns, family structure, clothing,

technology, and nutrition). At the same time, relations between the Nicaraguan state and the Coast were strongly conditioned by the direct and

indirect presence of the metropolitan powers. Just as the success of the Costefios' aspirations toward autonomy was linked to the receptiveness of British authorities and of British colonial interests in general, the Nicaraguan 13

14. A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

State's attempts to integrate the Coast into its territory rested to a greater or lesser extent on explicit and implicit alliances with the U.S. government's interest in neutralizing the British presence in the region and controlling the routes of transisthmic communication. One of the most striking aspects of the history of this part of Central America is the contrast between the failure of Spanish attempts to control the Mosquito Coast—Taguzgalpa as it was called early on by the Spanish—and the success of the British. Spain's failure and Britain's triumph were caused by different and even opposing strategies and methods. Spain looked for direct

control based on the domination—and, in fact, the destruction—of the aboriginal societies, in accord with the system it had developed in the rest of

America and the Caribbean. The British, to the contrary, opted for an approach involving indirect control through an alliance of metropolitan political and economic interests with indigenous institutions and cultures. However, the British approach was not a matter of setting up parallel or superimposed institutions. Rather, it was a dynamic interaction in which the Indians’ contact with buccaneers, merchants, and British authorities changed their lives—from the Indians’ forms of production to the most specific aspects of their existence, always with the active consent of the aboriginal authority structures. In contrast with the failed Spanish attempts to establish

a crude and open domination, the British adopted a strategy that in contemporary terminology we could call hegemony: domination by consent. The consent of the indigenous population of the Coast was not obtained

by magic or in a vacuum. British colonialism developed a system of exchange with the Indians by means of which the economic and political interests of nascent British capitalism found enthusiastic supporters and allies. For Great Britain, "civilizing" was synonymous with establishing

relations of commercial exchange with the indigenous population and gradually involving these people in market relationships. In the perceptive words of an eighteenth-century British observer:

Their wants will undoubtedly increase in proportion as they grow more civilized; and, in order to gain the costlier articles of dress and convenience, they may soon be taught, that nothing more is required on their part, than an advancement of skill, and redoubled diligence in selecting and procuring commodities of superior value, or larger collections of the same kind, for carrying on their barter, and due payment of their annual balance. [Long 1774:319]

Friendship with the Indians would permit Great Britain to establish “profitable colonies" and “lucrative trade" with the Indians and neighboring tribes. In fact, the Miskito Indians, "considered to be a British colony," are “superior to any others,” in the sense of having sufficient means of defense

without requiring troops or ships from Great Britain, "and possessing a

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 15

greater fund and variety of materials for an advantageous commerce" (Long 1774:320). Native institutions were modified gradually over several centuries. The British, giving a basic recognition to these institutions, promoted their own interests through their development, influenced them and reoriented them. The Miskitos, and later on the Creoles, assumed themselves to be subjects of the British, opposed to any attempt to unite with the Spanish colony in the Pacific and, after independence, with Nicaragua.

It must be pointed out, however, that up to the end of the eighteenth century British merchants dealt almost exclusively with a single group: the Miskitos—and, more specifically, with Miskito leaders. The commercial exchange that formed the basis for the relationship only occurred with the Miskitos, who, in turn, resorted to more coercive methods with other Indian groups. Moreover, it seems clear that the practical effects of the relationship with the British—access to manufactured goods, firearms, and so forth—were felt mainly by the leadership and not by the population as a whole. At any rate, the British approach to the people of the Atlantic Coast contrasts markedly with the Spanish strategy. Whereas the British appealed to a combination of exchange and indirect rule, the Spanish attempted an open and direct form of domination. This was not an approach especially designed for the Coast, but rather an extension to the Coast of the approach applied in

the Pacific region. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the main economic activity in what is now the western part of Nicaragua was the trade

in Indian slaves, basically oriented to the mines of South America. It is difficult to give a good estimate of the extent of this trade. According to Radell (1976), it involved the exportation of about half a million Indians from the western part of the country during the first twenty years of the Spanish colony. During the same period, between 400,000 and 600,000 more died of different diseases, were killed in combats against the Spanish, or fled. Another 250,000 were annihilated in the second half of the sixteenth century.

In Radell’s estimate, the country's population of around 1.3 million at the time of contact fell to 40,000 by 1550 and 10,000 by 1600. Radell's figures are clearly exaggerated. It is difficult to imagine that an economy like that existing in westem Nicaragua in the sixteenth century— with low agricultural yields, without systems of irrigation or with extremely

rudimentary and little-used systems, and with grain storage and other problems (see Garcfa Bresso 1987)—could have been able to feed almost a million and a half people. Nevertheless, there can be no denying the impact of colonial contact on the demographics of the Indians living in the Pacific region of what is today Nicaragua. The Indians of the eastern region were protected by a natural barrier of

mountains, swamps, jungles, torrential rains, and insects, which kept Spanish expeditions out. But the idea of Spanish conquest remained

16 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

throughout the sixteenth century and was strengthened in the late seventeenth century by every incursion by Costefio Indians into Spanish settlements. In some cases the wish to dominate combined with the desire to exterminate.

The most explicit formulation of this extreme view is found in the recommendations of one of Long's contemporaries—the Catholic Bishop of Le6én (Nicaragua), Fray Benito Garret y Arlovi. In 1711 the bishop proposed to the king of Spain that he put together a fleet of battleships in order to procure their total extermination, because . . . if there remain any survivors of those barbarians it will be to rest now and later that these lands should suffer the same cruel insults... . Your Majesty's dominions run a great risk if this cruel enemy is not exterminated... . The conveniences which Your Majesty's royal crown will find in

this idea of devastation (beyond that which is the principal aim of Your Majesty's Catholic zeal, to seek redress for the holy faith and to relieve the souls now moaning in that horrendous captivity) are the following: The first, the security of conserving for Your Majesty the

castle of the San Juan River. . . . The second is that, once exterminated the Miskitos, the thousand men [of the expedition] upon returning can clear the three torrents in the San Juan River. . . . The third and last . . . is that once [we have] destroyed the Miskitos, infamous thieves for the English, and cleared those three passes, Your

Majesty's royal coffers shall obtain most singular monies, because trade will return to life. [Garret y Arlovi 1711]

The bishop's request was not granted, but the illustrious prelate gives us

a good example of the range of alternatives offered, or suggested, to the Spanish crown, in contrast with the British approach to the Coast. For Great Britain, commercial expansion depended on its alliance with the leaders of the Indian groups; for Spain, on their complete domination. This difference in perspectives and strategies corresponded in turn to two different types of power structure in the metropolis. The British monarchy integrated into the power structure certain members of the merchant aristocracy and of the rising

liberal bourgeoisie who had made their own revolution at the end of the seventeenth century. By contrast, Spanish colonialism was based on an absolute monarchy of a distinctly feudal type, firmly imbued with the religious fanaticism of the Counter-Reformation and the Reconquest. The ascendancy of Great Britain in the region was based principally on its

commercial supremacy, which was in turn based more on British predominance in world trade and industry than on a direct influence on the internal political affairs of the region. British policies seem to have been dictated by commercial interests rather than by strictly political or "state" considerations and, in good measure, were formulated or inspired by the merchants who had settled in the region rather than by the civil servants of the Foreign Office or the Colonial Office. Spanish policy, on the other hand,

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 17

was basically the result of political and ideological motivations in which

economic considerations were strongly dependent on extraeconomic arguments, and, in any case, both had been defined by civil servants far away from the scene.

FROM THE CONSOLIDATION OF BRITISH HEGEMONY TO THE QUESTION OF TRANSIT The first contact between the Indians of the Coast and the Europeans came with the establishment of the Providence Island Company in 1631, founded by British Puritan businessmen who established sugarcane and tobacco plantations. The company brought African slaves to the island; in 1633 they numbered some 400. In the same year the British population of the island was 540; 500 of these were men. British settlers later widened their activities

in the area, including attacks on Spanish ships navigating in the area and trade with the Indian population of the coast across from the island. The trading post they established on the mainland on Cape Gracias a Dios quickly

became the most important post of the Providence Island Company. From the outset the colonists were able to establish excellent relations with the Indian population of the Cape. In 1641 the Spanish attacked and destroyed the

settlement on Providence Island and British activity moved to the Coast. About the same time, a group of shipwrecked Africans (possibly runaways from Providence), found their way to shore, in the Miskito Cays, where with the passage of time they integrated with the Indian villages of Sandy Bay and Cape Gracias a Dios. Between 1655 and 1685 privateering was revived in the Caribbean. Many of these privateers were tobacco farmers who had been unable to convert their holdings to sugarcane (Gordon 1985). The Coast's geographical features—

bays and lagoons—made it an attractive refuge from storms and a safe anchorage for repairs. Some of these privateers made contacts with the inhabitants of Cape Gracias a Dios; they took refuge with them, lived with their women, and settled in their villages. The Indians provided food and accompanied the pirates on their raids. Their interaction with the pirates gave the Indians access to some firearms. This technology, monopolized until then by the Europeans, reinforced the group's alliance with the British and gave them a clear superiority over the other Indian groups of the region. In 1685 pressure from Europe brought Caribbean privateering to an end. The pirates settled down and dedicated themselves to trading with the Indians and, to a lesser extent, to subsistence agriculture. The Miskitos came to be the intermediaries for commerce on the Coast. They traded with other Indian groups inland and with the Europeans. They exchanged slaves, cacao, sarsaparilla, animal skins, turtleshell, and balsam for weapons, ammunition, tools, kitchen implements, and jewelry. They later came to have an interest in cotton cloth, rum, and mirrors, developing a

18 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

growing dependence on products manufactured in Europe. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Miskitos, alongside their traditional crops such as cassava, pineapples, and squash, planted crops brought by the British and other Europeans: plantains, bananas, and sugarcane. Bananas and plantains rapidly became the main element of their diet and were used to make their alcoholic beverages.

According to travelers of the period, the Miskitos lacked a stable, structured political organization and only in times of war came together under a leader of special prestige. Their access to firearms, the political and military support of the British, and their cultural and biological mixture with Africans and Europeans gave the Miskitos a military advantage over the other Indian

groups of the Mosquitia. As the Miskitos expanded along the coast of Central America out of their setthements in Cape Gracias a Dios and Sandy Bay, other Indian groups either moved inland in order to avoid contact with

them or were absorbed into the Miskito population. Their military superiority allowed the Miskitos to raid and enslave other Indian groups. In 1720 a number of Miskito Indians participated in the British repression of a runaway slave uprising in Jamaica.? Miskito political domination increased with their military, economic, and cultural predominance. As early as 1657, the Miskitos believed that in order for an individual to be legitimated as chief, he must be recognized as such by the British. Several chiefs—who at some unrecorded moment began to be called kings—went to England, others were ratified by the governor of Jamaica and, later on, by the superintendent of Belize. In addition, several socalled (by the British) princes were taken to England, Jamaica, or Belize for their education. It is often said that the Miskito kings were crowned by the British, but this practice began only in the nineteenth century—that is, when the Mosquito monarchy was already in a clear decline. During the seventeenth and eighteen centuries the British authorities gave the king a commission, by

virtue of which he was to take over certain functions related to English interests in the area. The first king commissioned in this way was Jeremy I (1687-1720), taken for this purpose from Cape Gracias a Dios to Jamaica: he

was followed by a long line of succession. It is interesting to note that although before King Jeremy three other kings are attested (Olien 1983), by the middle of the seventeenth century the legitimacy of the king, and not only of a given line of succession, had come to depend on recognition by Bnitish authority. According to Long (1774), when the king was not invested by British

authorities, he was not recognized as king by his subjects. Long, whose main interest, as we have seen, was in establishing a solid relationship between the Miskitos and the British merchants in Jamaica—of whom he was one-—-may have overstated the importance the people attributed to the

king's recognition by the British. Be that as it may, it can be said that

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 19

Starting some time in the eighteenth century, the king's legitimacy began to be based on the British commission as well as on his line of descent.

There later appeared other ranks besides that of king, with their own territorial provinces: a general, a governor, and an admiral, whose titles were clearly influenced by British nomenclature. Those who held these positions were chosen among those who had risen to leadership through their successes in trade and pillage, and they also established lines of descent. In 1757 there existed three Indian groups 1n the Mosquitia (Olien 1983): (1) the original Indians, between the Pearl Lagoon area and Bragman's, who obeyed the governor; (2) a group of primarily Sambos, from Bragman's to Little Black River in the north, whose chief was called the king; and (3) a mixed group of Indians and Sambos to the west of Little Black River, whose leader was the general. There later appeared a fourth authority, the admiral, in the Pearl Lagoon area. The chiefs’ functions were hereditary; they had more or less the same power, and the king was a kind of first among equals but with privileged access to the British.

Tensions and conflicts arose among these Indian leaders, which the Spanish tried to exploit. In the 1780s the Spanish gained access to Admiral Alparis and attempted to get him to confront Miskito King George II; but the king's power was consolidated, thanks to the support of the British. Later on,

the Spanish managed to win Governor Colville Briton to their side; he accepted the Catholic faith, swore fealty to the Spanish crown, and adopted the name of Carlos de Castilla but was defeated in his confrontation with Admiral Alparis, once again allied with the king. Completely isolated and abandoned by almost all his people, the governor was killed in Tuapi in 1790. When, in the following year, Alparis broke his alliance with the king, he suffered the same fate as Briton/Castilla. The tragic fate of Don Carlos symbolizes the failure of Spanish attempts to supplant the British on the Atlantic Coast. The Miskito king remained unmoveable in his loyalty to the

British crown, although the departure of the British for Belize in 1787 substantially reduced the internal importance of his post. It seems clear that the king's loyalty to Great Britain was swayed by British smugglers who argued, possibly with good reason, that the Spanish had little to trade with the Indians (Floyd 1967:181). These conflicts seem frequently to have developed along ethnic lines, particularly between the Sambos, living in the area of the Cape and Sandy Bay and led by the king, and the "pure Indians" (Tawiras, Ulwas, Twahkas, and others) living farther to the south and west, corresponding to the areas held by the governor and the admiral. The conflicts grew into all-out wars at the end of the eighteenth century. In about 1806, a British traveler declared that as a result of the confrontations the Sambos had almost exterminated the

"pure Indians," although this account seems slightly exaggerated .(von Oertzen 1986).

20 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

In the course of time, the differentiation between the Miskito leaders and their followers came to be manifested in economic terms. Possibly the most notorious case was that of General Lowry Robinson, during the first half of the nineteenth century. Robinson became a rich cattle raiser, with 5,000 head

of cattle on the Black River (now the Tinto River, in what is presently Honduras). On several occasions he defied the authority of King George

Frederick (1816-1824) and, in 1843, signed an agreement with the government of Honduras by which he recognized Honduran sovereignty over his territory.* In the mid-1700s the settlement on the Black River began to prosper and grow as a center of contraband trade with Spanish settlements. A large part of this commerce was controlled by William Pitt, the richest British resident. In the south, another powerful resident, Henry Corrin, of Bluefields, controlled

the Indian slave trade and was also involved in trade with the Spanish. In addition, the development of sugarcane plantations increased the importation of slaves from Africa and caused a greater concentration of capital than had the tobacco plantations that had preceded them. In 1739 Captain Robert Hodgson was sent to the Black River (now in Honduran territory) as the first superintendent of the Mosquito Coast, with instructions to cement relations with the Miskitos and Sambos of the area. Hodgson combined political success with personal success in his mission.

As for the first, it is sufficient to say that between 1743 and 1786 eight attacks on Spanish settlements were carried out by the Miskitos, on their own or together with British troops, and 400 Miskitos participated in the British expedition of 1780 to the San Juan River. In addition, contraband

trade with Spanish settlements expanded throughout Hodgson's administration. As for his personal success, the young officer married the

daughter of William Pitt, the largest British planter and merchant and possibly the real local power behind the formal authorities. In 1787, by virtue of the Convention of London between Great Britain

and Spain, the British evacuated the Mosquito Coast and went to Belize, where they received lumbering rights. At this time 2,214 people left the Coast, of whom 537 were free and the rest slaves. It is estimated that of these Slaves, 1,200 belonged to the 40 richest colonists. But many blacks refused to go with the British. Together with their compatriots on Providence, San Andrés, and Corn Island, they formed new communities in Bluefields, Pearl

Lagoon, and, farther north, on the Black River. With the arrival of freed Slaves from other areas, the populations of these communities increased rapidly.

A small group of Britons chose to stay on the Coast, accepting Spanish authority. Among these was Robert Hodgson, Jr., who was Superintendent on the Black River between 1768 and 1776. He was allowed to remain upon Swearing loyalty to Spain, and became the Spanish crown's main agent on

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 21

the Coast. His mission was to use the prestige he had earlier acquired among the Miskitos as British superintendent in order to create sympathy for Spain. However, he was not successful in this and later was forced to abandon the Coast in order to save his life. The British for their part, conserved their ties with the Miskito king on the Cape and with the Miskito governor farther south, in the Tuapi Lagoon area, but the departure of most of the British for Belize decreased the intensity

of institutional relations with them, and this in turn affected the Miskito monarchy, diminishing the importance of the king with respect to other Indian chiefs.

Hodgson came to be one of the richest men in the Mosquitia, owner of more than 200 slaves; according to Salvatierra (1958:10), two-thirds of the Bluefields area, where he lived, was his property, and he shipped the products of his plantations in two large brigs, also belonging to him, to the British port of Bristol. When Hodgson fled to San Andrés in 1790 after the failure of his attempts to mediate between the Miskitos and the Spanish (Pérez Valle 1978:58—60), many of his slaves remained on the Coast.

The departure of the British did not improve Spain's chances to gain effective control over the Mosquitia. The attempts at colonization with people brought over from the Peninsula or from other Spanish colonies failed because of the colonists’ lack of experience and material support. Spain could not give to its relations with the Miskitos the commercial foundation and the mutual support that had provided the basis for the good relations between the Indians and the British. Besides, the merchants and woodcutters were opposed

to Spain for economic and commercial reasons. In consequence, Spanish attempts at control were centered on San Juan del Norte, Cape Gracias a Dios, and the Black River. In the Black River area the Spanish managed to establish a brief alliance with the Garffunas, whom the British had just deported to Roatan. Garffuna combatants joined the Spanish troops who attacked the British settlement on

the Black River in 1799 and fought against the Miskitos allied with the British. However, by 1802 the Garffunas who had settled in the Trujillo region close to the Black River began to travel to Belize to hunt, fish, and cut wood for the British colonists just as their Miskito neighbors had been accustomed to doing (Gonzdlez 1983).

In spite of the departure of most of the British residents, Jamaican merchants remained involved in contraband on the Coast, and during the first decades of the nineteenth century British woodcutters from Belize joined with them.> Renewed British involvement on the Mosquito Coast at the beginning

of the nineteenth century, particularly in the Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon area, was a result of the expansion of British residents' commercial interests:

both the traditional mahogany trade and the contraband trade with the settlements of the Pacific and central regions of Nicaragua.

22 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

The Mosquito Kingdom went into a decline with the departure of the British. The Miskitos' relations with British authorities slackened, and their main contacts began to be a small number of Jamaican merchants. Trade became the most important form of communication between the Indians and British subjects in the area (Zavala 1804). Some ties with San Andrés and Com Island were maintained.

In 1804, however, a British officer traveled to Caratasca Lagoon on behalf of the Belize Assembly carrying gifts to King George and General

Lowry Robinson. Until that time, gifts to the king and other Indian authorities had been rather a private matter between merchants and local British authorities, subject to the ups and downs of events. For the Indian chiefs, gifts were the equivalent of the tribute they received from their own subjects: material tokens of recognition of their authority by their British allies. For the British, such gifts were a way of keeping up an alliance that had been extremely profitable to them. From 1804 on, gifts to Miskito chiefs became an established custom, to the point that in 1830 a delegation from the king arrived in Belize to complain that for some years he had received no gifts. In 1838 the British crown assumed these expenses, which up to that time had been paid by the residents of Belize. Naylor (1960) has pointed out that for a number of reasons (the growth of the Belizean mahogany trade after 1800, the scarcity of saleable mahogany

within the limits of the settlement, and the change in the Board of Trade's policy in favor of free trade after 1836) Belizean woodcutters were forced to look for richer and more accessible locations in other places. To compete with the regions that had previously suffered from the preferential treatment

given to mahogany coming into the British market from Belize by protectionist policies, now abolished, they moved first into the Aguan River area on the northern coast of Honduras and later went farther south. According

to Naylor, the Belizean lumber companies revived the institution of the Miskito king, which had fallen into decline after the conflicts of the late eighteenth century, in order to validate the expansion of their activities into the Agudan area with permits and titles granted by a legitimate authority—yjust as had been the practice of British traders and woodcutters of the preceding

century. They were doubtless successful, judging by the numerous large concessions granted by George Frederick (1816-1824) and by his successor Robert Charles Frederick (1824—1842).®

At the same time, the renewed interest in the Mosquito Kingdom seems

to have been the result of the need to secure San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, as a means of access to Lake Nicaragua and to neighboring towns, with which an active contraband trade was being developed. The independence

of Central America from Spain in 1821 created a kind of vacuum that Jamaican, Belizean, and British traders wanted to fill. With independence, Spain was out of the game, and the Central American Federation lacked an

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 23

effective institutional presence in the area. The dismemberment of the Federation and the emergence of the Nicaraguan Republic in 1838 did not

immediately alter the situation. The revival of the Indian monarchy represented for British commercial interests the possibility of obtaining a certain legitimacy for their intentions of gaining control over a strategic port and of expanding inland. In August 1841 British Superintendent Alexander MacDonald enforced

the abolition of slavery on the Mosquito Coast on behalf of the British crown. On Com Island, where since the end.of the eighteenth century a certain number of cotton plantations had been exporting their product to Jamaica, abolition eliminated the labor force for this crop, which soon disappeared from the island. The freed slaves became independent producers,

especially of coconuts—an activity that would predominate on the island until the mid-twentieth century. After declaring the abolition of slavery, Superintendent MacDonald continued on south and, accompanied by King Robert Charles Frederick and supported by a British frigate, seized San Juan

del Norte and imprisoned the Nicaraguan commander. In the face of Nicaraguan protests, the British authorities answered that the city did not

belong to Nicaraguan territory but to the Mosquitia. Soon afterward, however, Nicaragua regained its positions.

In 1842 King Robert Charles Frederick died, leaving three minor children. In his will, the king established a regency of British citizens living in Belize with economic interests in the Coast, to be presided over by Superintendent MacDonald. Between 1837 and 1841, Robert Charles Frederick had conferred a great number of property titles, often conflicting with one another, for wide extensions of land and forests. The large concessionaries, among them the Shepherd brothers, tried to influence

the princes. Prince George Augustus Frederick was in the charge of Mrs. Mary Sheperd in Bluefields, but in 1842 another large concessionary,

Mr. Bell, took charge of the official concessions register and of the prince himself. The British crown would eventually invalidate all these

concessions, but the incidents demonstrate the passion with which merchants, planters, businessmen, and speculators manipulated the institutions of the Mosquitia.

In 1844 Patrick Walker, the British consul and former secretary to Superindent MacDonald, was installed in Bluefields. Walker's designation may be interpreted as the combined result of many different considerations, mainly British government support for the revival of the monarchy in the Mosquitia and, directly related to that, official validation of British subjects’ commercial interests in the area. In addition was the decision to put an end to the legal confusion surrounding the land concessions granted by the two

preceding kings and possibly also to find an acceptable way out of the impasse of Robert Charles Frederick's succession. At the same time,

24 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

Walker's presence would limit the political powers of the merchants and woodcutters forming the regency council, which had taken charge of local affairs until the coming of age of the king's successor, the identity of whom

was not entirely clear. Finally, the designation of the consul may have possibly also been an attempt by Great Britain to maintain its predominance in the area and give continuity to the activities begun by MacDonald a few years before in the face of the growing advances in the area by the United States, which had announced the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.

The consul formally established a British protectorate over the Mosquitia, making explicit Great Britain interest in consolidating its position in the region. Walker also carried out important reforms in the

political and social organization of the Coast—and particularly of Bluefields—and consolidated his own authority relative to the superintendent in Belize. In fact, as soon as Walker arrived in Bluefields, he began a fierce

competition with Superintendent MacDonald for political control of the kingdom, in which the consul came out on top. In May 1845 King George Augustus Frederick, Walker's candidate, was crowned instead of MacDonald's choice (William Clarence, the youngest prince). The king, a thirteen-year-old

boy, went to live in Walker's house, and in order to better confront MacDonald, Walker made an alliance with Bell and the magistrature, which at

that point was very receptive to the consul's initiatives. Bluefields was declared the official capital of the Mosquito Kingdom, thus making it possible to keep the young king away from the superintendent and, at the same time, moving the capital closer to San Juan del Norte. In accord with instructions from the British crown, on October 8 of the

same year the Council of State in Bluefields declared null and void all property titles granted by Robert Charles Frederick before October 8, 1841,

as the latter had not been in his right mind and as the beneficiaries were interested not in colonizing but in speculating. A few years before some colonization projects had begun in the Bluefields area with Prussian subjects, but these failed.’ However, an event tangentially related to these frustrated

attempts was to become crucial in the later history of the people of the Atlantic Coast: the arrival of the first mission of the Moravian Church in 1847, at the request of the British consul.® At Walker's behest several measures were adopted to discipline the labor force and create more favorable conditions for the development of economic

activity. There was an attempt to control the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages and to regulate labor relations in a small way; for the first time a fiscal budget was estimated on the basis of export income and import expenses. The Mosquitia was given a flag, and the name "Mosquitia" was made official for the region.

The strengthening of the most visible symbols of the Mosquito Kingdom—the creation of a flag, renovations in institutions, consolidation

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 25

of the king relative to other traditional leaders—went hand in hand with a growing separation of the monarchy from the Indian villages. Starting in the 1840s, in fact, the king became a docile tool in the hands of the British consul, the capital of the kingdom was established in an area which had

nothing to do with the original territory of the Miskito people, and the Creole population increased their social and economic predominance on the

Coast and consolidated their position as the preferred intermediaries in

relations with Great Britain and, later, with the United States. The development of new and more complex political institutions of a primarily urban nature, the demand for certain occupational and technical skills (for example, knowledge of English and basic arithmetic), which could be found only in Bluefields, created the conditions for the political and social rise of the Creoles and undermined the position of the Indians. THE ADVANCE OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE NICARAGUAN STATE

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 increased the importance of the Central American isthmus as a region for interoceanic travel. U.S. discontent over British influence in the area grew, and from this time forth political relations between the two countries would openly center on

the issue of transisthmic trade. In June 1847 Great Britain officially announced that the boundaries of the Mosquitia—over which it had just renewed its protectorate—extended from Cape Honduras in the north to San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, in the south. This irritated the United States as much as it did Nicaragua, but U.S. reactions did not intimidate the British.

On January 1, 1848, imitating his former superior MacDonald, Patrick Walker took over San Juan del Norte in the name of the Mosquito king under the protection of a British battleship. However, he was not as fortunate as his

predecessor: the operation was hardly over when he fell overboard and drowned.

The importance of San Juan del Norte was directly tied to British trade— legal and illegal—with inland Nicaragua and to the town's strategic position on the transisthmic route. San Juan del Norte could never compete with the route via Panama, which had a better infrastructure. In the twenty-two years

of existence of the San Juan del Norte route (1848-1869), some 125,000 people passed through the port from New York to San Francisco and back, while something more than 606,000 people did so via Panama. At any rate, the impact of that number of people, and of travel-related activities—such as

infrastructure, local trade, lodging—on the economy of the southern Mosquitia was enormous, and explains the interest Britain and the United States, as well as Nicaragua, took in the city. However, the boom was shortlived; when the transisthmic railroad across Panama was inaugurated, the route through Nicaragua lost its attractiveness and finally closed in 1868

26 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

when the construction of the U.S. transcontinental railroad was completed (Lanuza 1983:44). The United States viewed British occupation of San Juan del Norte as an

affront to the Monroe Doctrine but appealed to diplomacy and not direct action. The tensions and conflicts between the United States and Great Britain for control of the region ended with the signing of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty

in 1850. The treaty referred to the "Mosquito Shore" as a political entity independent of Nicaragua and established that neither the United States nor

Great Britain were to exercise their influence over the governments of “Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Shore or any other in Central America” for the construction of an interoceanic canal or equivalent means of communication, nor should they build military constructions in order to gain such control, nor in any other way attempt directly or in alliance with other governments to obtain control over the interoceanic route or to exercise any kind of domination over any point in the region. As Great Britain was still,

in practice, the main foreign power in the region at this time, the treaty is generally interpreted as a first diplomatic advance by the United States in Central America. In 1852 the Webster-Crampton agreement between the United States and

Great Britain was signed. The accord defined the Nicaraguan border with Costa Rica as the southern edge of the Great Lake of Nicaragua. At the same,

it established that "the Miskito Indians can reserve for themselves the territory which at other times they have claimed or occupied on the Eastern Coast of Central America." The southern boundary of this area was set at the Rama River, and the northern boundary was the Segovia, or Coco, River—in other words, no longer the Black, or Tinto, River in the north. The rest of

the territory formerly occupied by the Indians would come under the jurisdiction of Nicaragua, including the city of Greytown or San Juan del Norte (Article 1). The agreement recognized that Nicaragua and the "Mosquito

Indians" could sign a treaty by which the Indians "can be definitively incorporated and united with the State of Nicaragua, it being stipulated that in this case the Mosquito Indians will enjoy the same rights and will be subject to the same duties as the other citizens of the aforenamed State of Nicaragua" (Article 2). The city of San Juan del Norte (Greytown) would come under the jurisdiction of Nicaragua, but only as a free port for merchandise in transit across the isthmus (id.). The accord mentioned for the first time the Mosquito reserve as a legal entity and considerably reduced the territory that would remain under the

authority of the Indians (and Creoles). But the Nicaraguan government considered these to be internal issues and, therefore, its exclusive province. As a result, the Nicaraguan Congress did not accept the Crampton-Webster accord and protested "solemnly against all foreign interventions in the affairs of the government” (Gaceta de Nicaragua, September 11, 1852).

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 27

This accord was the first of two convergent diplomatic arrangements between the United States and Great Britain on this issue. In 1856 they signed the Dallas-Clarendon Treaty (named for the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom and the British secretary for foreign affairs, respectively), in which they agreed to withdraw the British protectorate from the Mosquitia,

and defined the boundaries of a Mosquito reserve, under Nicaraguan sovereignty but with self-government for the Indians. Greytown was declared

a free port, the treaty between Great Britain and Honduras giving the Bay Islands status as a free state under Honduran sovereignty was confirmed, and the boundaries of Belize were defined. Costa Rica was recognized as having the right to use the port of Greytown and the San Juan River, and Anglo-

U.S. arbitration for Costa Rican boundary disputes with Nicaragua was established. The treaty was not ratified, but many of its clauses anticipated, like those of the Crampton-Webster Treaty, the 1860 Treaty of Managua between Great Britain and Nicaragua: British renunciation of the protectorate and a kind of semiautonomy for the Bay Islands, which resembles the system that would be adopted for the Mosquito Reserve, among others. At the same time that the United States and Great Britain were trying to arrive at an agreement, the government of Nicaragua took some steps on its own account designed to assert its claims to sovereignty over the Coast.

When British Consul Frederick Chatfield reported on the coronation of George Augustus Frederick in Belize in 1845, Nicaragua sent a diplomatic

note of protest. In 1847 the Nicaraguan government sent a mission to convince Princess Agnes Ana Frederick, the older sister of King George Augustus, to repudiate British claims to San Juan del Norte. The princess accepted and signed an "agreement of friendship and alliance and mutual protection” with the Nicaraguan delegation, but, as we have already seen, this

agreement neither affected British plans nor stopped the occupation of the port city several months later.? In 1849 Nicaragua sent a delegation to London to make a definitive settlement of the Mosquitia question, but it failed.

Nicaragua would have better luck later on, as the result of direct negotiations with the British government leading to the signing of the Treaty of Managua on January 28, 1860. This treaty ended the British protectorate over the Coast and assigned to "the Mosquito Indians within the territory of

the Republic of Nicaragua a district . . . which will remain under the sovereignty of the Republic of Nicaragua” (Article 2). The district had as boundaries the Rama River in the south and the Hueso River in the north, leaving out the Cape Gracias a Dios area, the original territory of the Miskito people. Within this district the "Mosquito Indians" would enjoy the "right to govern themselves and to govern all other persons residing in said District, according to their own customs, and in conformance with the regulations

which from time to time may be adopted by them which are not

28 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

incompatible with the sovereign nights of the Republic of Nicaragua’ (Article 3). However, the Miskitos could "at any future time" decide "their absolute

reincorporation into the Republic of Nicaragua,” at such a time coming "to be governed by the general laws and regulations of the Republic instead of by their own customs and regulations” (Article 4). At the same time, Nicaragua agreed to pay 5,000 pesos annually for ten years in order to "promote the social betterment of the Mosquito Indians" and "provide for the maintenance of the authorities who are established" in the district (Article 5). And given that the Costefios—Indians and Creoles—had had no part in the treaty, "His British Majesty agrees to use his good offices with the Chief of the Mosquito

Indians, so that they will accept the stipulations contained in this Convention” (Article 6). Finally, the treaty declared San Juan del Norte/Greytown a free port under the sovereignty of Nicaragua, and took on the question of the ownership of the lands that were now outside the territory of the district and that had been Subject to cessions and transfers. The 1860 treaty included provisions that had figured in previous accords signed between the United States and Great Britain. It left out the opinion of those directly involved, but it is clear that Great Britain had no problem in Carrying out what it agreed to do in Article 6. Nicaragua obtained recognition of its sovereignty over the region, the delimitation of which left out the area of Cape Gracias a Dios, thus tacitly recognizing the Nicaraguan state's direct

authority over a territory traditionally identified with the historical development of the Miskito people—in fact, the original seat of the Mosquito Kingdom. The motives for this exclusion are not clear, and the historians who have

written about this treaty have not dealt with this point. It may be pointed out, however, that in spite of repeated references to the "Mosquito Indians" in

the treaty, the name seems to have a geographic rather than an ethnic reference. In fact, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Creoles were

the majority in the Bluefields—Corn Island area and represented a high percentage of the population of the southern part of the Pearl Lagoon basin. The government of the kingdom was clearly in the hands of the Creoles, and

the region's economy mainly passed through Creole commercial establishments: small banana plantations, trade, and service activities. The boom of San Juan del Norte and of the mahogany industry reinforced the social and economic weight of the Creoles, who rapidly linked themselves to the most dynamic economic and commercial enterprises. In a word, the

Creoles were the dominant social group in the Mosquitia. The territory defined by the Treaty of Managua was not exclusively Creole, but all Creoles, their economic base, and the geographical and ecological site of their ethnic identity were included in this territory, including the area most closely

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 29

tied to their historical origin as a distinct ethnic group. It is clear that there were also important Miskito (and Sumu) groups living there, but the Indians living in the area that was the traditional seat of the Miskito people were left out of the treaty, without autonomy rights and subject to the direct and unmediated authority of the Nicaraguan state. The 1860 treaty accelerated the social differentiation of the Costefio population and the social decline of the Indians. In 1862 George Augustus Frederick, chief of the reserve, died. Nicaragua decided to suspend payments to his successor, alleging that the latter did not represent Miskito interests. According to Nicaragua, the new chief had been elected by the Creoles ("Jamaicans" and "Negros") without the recognition of the government of Nicaragua. Supported by Great Britain, the government of the reserve took the issue to international arbitration. In 1881, the arbitration

of the emperor of Austria determined that the government of Nicaragua should make the required payments and further established that the Nicaraguan

sovereignty recognized in the 1860 treaty "is not full and unlimited with respect to the territory assigned to the Mosquito Indians . . . but rather limited by the self-government recognized for the Mosquito Indians in

Article III of the aforementioned Treaty" (Article 1 of the imperial arbitration).

The arbitration also established that Nicaragua could not grant concessions to exploit "the natural products of the territory assigned to the Mosquito Indians," a right that corresponded to the "Government of the Mosquitia” (Article 5); nor was it empowered to regulate the commerce of the Miskito Indians, nor to charge duties on imported merchandise in the territory

reserved to the Miskito Indians (Article 6). The Nicaraguan government's desire to exercise its authority in specific aspects of the economic activity of the Coast was thus limited by the emperor's decision. At the same time that diplomatic relations between Nicaragua and the Mosquito Reserve were becoming tenser, the Atlantic Coast economy went

through some important transformations. Between 1860 and 1880, mahogany, gold, rubber, and bananas became the main items of production. In 1891 the reserve exported 1,155,000 bunches of bananas; the gold deposits produced 5,000 ounces of gold; and the rubber plantations exported 600,000 pounds of rubber. In 1894 investments in the banana industry were almost $3.75 million (Teplitz 1974:358). The development of banana plantations on the Escondido River opened the way to rapid U.S. economic penetration—

which was not to be limited to this activity. The plantations needed additional labor; this demand was supplied in great measure by black workers

from the southern United States and from Jamaica. In the 1880s, 90—95 percent of trade in the area was controlled by U.S. citizens (Laird 1972). In the 1890s, U.S. investments in the Bluefields area were almost $1.5 million, or around 90 percent of the foreign investment in the city. U.S. citizens also

30 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

controlled the larger part of international trade in the city, having replaced the British as the economically dominant foreigners.!° But the economic boom also included some groups of Nicaraguans. In the late 1880s capitalists from Granada and Managua began to arrive in Bluefields looking for land on which to plant bananas. A few years earlier, the town of Rama had been founded at

the head of the Escondido River as part of the general movement of Nicaraguan interests and population toward the Atlantic. The Creoles (the “mixed population," in the legal language of the period)

benefited from this boom. They became increasingly urbanized; Creole

English replaced Miskito as the lingua franca of the Coast. Having previously achieved political control of the court and of the king himself,

they had little difficulty in maintaining and even consolidating their dominance in the legal and political context of the reserve. The fact that they

were primarily city dwellers made it easier for them to enter into cash transactions and to have access to property qualifications. According to Laird (1972), in 1890 the government of the Mosquito Reserve was in the hands of

Jamaican blacks; this was also the impression of contemporary British observers: “They [the Miskitos] simply furnish a name under which foreigners set up a government of their own to the usages of civilized nations, and by means of which they carry on a prosperous business" (Teplitz 1974:350). Indian leaders maintained their authority on the lower levels of Costefio society and particularly in the immense rural areas: villages, forests, lagoons.

The centralization of Creole dominance in Bluefields allowed for the maintenance of Indian customs and institutions. However, when the political and economic forces that had maintained Miskito preeminence disappeared,

the unity of the group was weakened. With the boom of new extractive activities, the Indians began to leave their villages; they accepted contracts as

salaried workers and descended in the Coast hierarchy. Their growing dependence on wages income opened the way to a flow of money and manufactured goods into Indian villages and to the progressive introduction of

new necessities of consumption as well as to a certain degree of monetarization in economic relationships.

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE MOSQUITO RESERVE

The image of the government of the Mosquito Reserve prevailing in Nicaraguan historiography is that of a kind of fiction, docile to the dictates of

foreign economic and political interests. This image directly reflects the thinking and interpretation of the Zelaya government, which prepared the way and justified the military operation of the Reincorporation. However, a less passionate and partial analysis gives us a much less simplistic view. In 1861 a meeting of fifty-one local chiefs (wihta, in Miskito; headmen,

in English) approved a Municipal Constitution for the government of the

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 31

reserve, proposed by the British consul. This constitution established a bicameral legislature, composed of a General Council and an Executive Council. The General Council was made up of the chief of the reserve and forty-three representatives elected by local chiefs. Its function was to make most laws and name most Officials. It elected the members of the Executive

Council, which dealt with fiscal and judicial issues (see Mosquito Reservation 1884). The judicial branch included a Supreme Court and a Magistrates Court

for civil and criminal cases, which also administered the police. A special

court was in charge of trade arbitration, and a jury court dealt with issues involving government officials and embezzlement. The municipal laws and the administration of justice were basically modeled on the British system. The right of habeas corpus was established (thirty-two years before

it was instituted in the rest of Nicaragua by the 1893 constitution). Search warrants were required, and the accused was guaranteed the right to a defense.

In addition to the Anglo-Saxon judicial inheritance, there were AfroIndian dispositions for the protection of the villages. For example, a law

dated October 1863 created a land commission to control the use and assignation of land and forests. The commission was authorized to award and

rent public lands but not to sell them. The law stipulated that rents and profits from the sale of the produce of the land should be used in the interests of the village (Mosquito Reservation 1884:21—23). The legislation passed by the General Council covered a wide range of issues: control of liquor sales; prohibitions on the opening of shops, playing

of cards, and unloading of boats on Sundays; boats were prohibited from

going upriver to unload liquor. It also legislated the entry and exit of foreigners, as well as quarantines. In 1861 the General Council declared that the ports of the Mosquito Reserve were free, and in 1890 the free zones were broadened to include Bluefields. This move antagonized Nicaraguan fiscal

interests, but in a sense it reflected both British and U.S. commercial interests and traditional African and Indian practices. The government of the reserve also printed its own money, at a time when Nicaragua still lacked a national currency, and currencies from several different countries were in circulation. In 1875 a law established obligatory primary education for all children of school age. The government of the reserve also passed its own extradition law, decreed taxes on goods imported from Nicaragua, refused to recognize navigation permits for riverboats issued by Nicaragua, and denied Nicaragua's right to send troops to Bluefields—a decision that would act to detonate the military occupation of 1894.

Much of this legislative activity was favorable to the prevailing economic interests, a point that has been emphasized by Laird (1972). But other authors, such as Teplitz, point out cases in which, on the contrary, the

32. A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

government of the reserve acted counter to foreign interests. For example, many Creoles and Indians frequently fell behind in the payment of their debts to U.S. and European merchants and businessmen. In 1883 a reserve law canceled all debts not paid by March 1884 and abolished the debtors’ prison, thirty years before it was abolished in Nicaragua. Debtors were put on the

government payroll at fifty cents a day; half of this wage went to their creditors until the debt was paid. The maximum interest rate was fixed at 6 percent annually, and basic household goods were declared not seizable. The foreigners criticized this as "a fiasco" because judgments against the natives were not followed by financial execution; they complained that debtors could

act freely, whereas creditors were left without protection (Teplitz 1974:352).!3

By integrating the village chiefs and naming them as officials of the new

institutions, the government mixed traditional and modern elements. This reduced the distance between modern institutions, whose province was the Creole-dominated urban Bluefields area, and the rural sphere of the Indian villages. The wihta of the coastal towns were set up as regular government authorities; many of them became arbiters for local disputes (rural judges in accordance with the 1863 civil and penal laws of the reserve).

But the wihta were marginal figures on the councils established in Bluefields, where Creole predominance was decisive. In the convention of fifty-one chiefs that approved the 1861 Constitution, thirty-three delegates came from Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, and Corn Island; these same thirty-three delegates became three-quarters of the General Council and two-thirds of the Executive Council. In addition, the debates in these bodies were carried out in English, which many Indian delegates from the north did not know or could not speak fluently.

This weak political representation of Indians contrasts with their demographic predominance. At the beginning of the 1860s, the indigenous population of the Atlantic Coast was estimated at 10,000-15,000, of which the Miskitos numbered nearly half (Bell 1862:250). By that time, the entire population of Bluefields was, it was estimated, no more than 1,000 (Pérez Valle 1978:121, 130); including Corn Island and Pearl Lagoon, total Creole population could hardly have exceeded 2,000.

This situation may explain in part the Indian villages’ passivity in the face of the Reincorporation in 1894. Because it represented economically and politically subordinate groups, the removal of the government of the reserve did not confront strong interests such as those of the Creoles of Bluefields,

Pearl Lagoon, and Corn Island. On the other hand, there were conflicts between the laws of the Miskito Reserve and traditional village norms (and, thus, the authority of the wihta). For example, when the government of the

reserve made school attendance obligatory in 1875, the wihta, who were responsible for carrying out the law, completely paralyzed the system after a

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 33

short while (Rossbach 1986: 95), apparently as a reaction to the use of English, and not Miskito, in classrooms.

THE MORAVIAN CHURCH In 1847 two Moravian missionaries arrived from Jamaica on an exploratory trip in response to a request from Patrick Walker, the British consul. This visit marked the beginning of the Moravian presence on the Atlantic Coast, a presence of an intensity and breadth unequalled by other institutions of any

kind. In the course of less than two generations, the Moravian Church became the main form of expression of the ethnic identity of the Coast's people, both Indians and Creoles. The Moravian mission was formally established in 1849 in Bluefields.

Until 1855, it worked primarily among the Creoles of the city, and only after that year did it begin to work with Indians and in rural areas. It gave priority to education and, especially in the beginning, to literacy, in order to

make the Bible accessible. The schools founded by the church were practically the only educational institutions in most Indian villages until well into the twentieth century. But even where there later were schools set up by

the Nicaraguan government, the Moravian Church's schools always had

higher prestige.

Missionary work with the Indians led the church first to learn the

Miskito language, later to use it systematically, and finally to make church work a vital factor in the development and maintenance of the language. The Bible, psalms, and hymns were translated into Miskito; dictionaries and grammars were written in order to teach the language.

In spite of the church's declared noninvolvement in political issues, Moravian missionaries participated from early on in governmental bodies— first, in the Mosquito Kingdom and, later, in the Mosquito Reserve. Pastor Pfeiffer, one of the first three missionaries to arrive on the Coast in 1849,

was quickly incorporated into the Council of State created by the British consul. The Moravian Superintendent Reurig, who arrived in 1859, was appointed adviser to the king. Four out of the eight missionaries on the Coast were called to form part of the first General Council created by the Municipal Constitution of 1861; from that time on the church maintained its

representation intact. In addition, one of the missionaries (Feuring) was named the financial administrator of the government of the reserve, and, until

1894, all the superintendents who followed him held the same office. As Rossbach (1986: 77) comments, this meant that all the income and outlays of the public exchequer passed through the office of the superintendent of the Moravian Church. This involvement by missionaries and church authorities in the political institutions of the Bluefields government went hand in hand with similar movements to involve the most prominent government officials in the affairs

34 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

of the congregation, whether or not they belonged to the mission. Thus,

J. W. Cuthbert, who was the government's attorney general, and C. Patterson, who in 1861 was named vice president of the reserve, soon belonged to the select group of notables of the congregation. In the course of only a few years the main political leaders of the Mosquito Reserve became, in most cases, church members or at least felt themselves to be spiritually linked to it (Rossbach, 1986:79). The missionaries entered into positions in the government, and they put government officials into the most prestigious positions in the mission.

Moravian missionaries became the exclusive translators for the government of the reserve. The sessions of the General Council were conducted in English, which they translated into Miskito for the Indian

delegates. This doubtless helped to increase the ascendance of the missionaries over the Indians. The missionaries were the "objective administrators of the Indian language" (Rossbach, 1986:79) thanks to their

school activities; their production of dictionaries, grammars, and Bible translations; and their interpretive functions in legislative debates. The missionaries preached the necessity of abandoning "laziness" and

adopting good work habits; they emphasized the virtues of agriculture, against the traditional inclination of the Costefios—above all, the Indians—

for hunting and fishing, which the missionaries considered to be rather uncivilized activities. A puritanical sexual morality, abstinence from alcoholic beverages, moderation in daily life, monogamy, sober dress, family life, and hard work became the central themes of Moravian pastoral work; these made a deep impression on the Indian villagers. The Protestant labor ethic became the central theme of religious belief, reinforcing the coincidence of the religious image of the good Christian with the capitalist paradigm of

the good worker. The missionaries became so important in the Indian villages that they became the true secular authority; the Moravian ethic attained the status of a legal imperative. In this sense, one of the most remarkable aspects of Moravian activity on the Atlantic Coast is the great importance the missionaries and their native assistants ("helpers")—and later

on, the lay pastors—acquired in the secular affairs of the villages. The religious authorities rapidly became the administrative and political authorities of the villages. !2 On some occasions, however, the institution of native helpers introduced

contradictions into the missions. The helpers opened the way into the villages for the missionaries and were an extremely important contact for the

first establishment of the mission and its later organization and operation, especially when the mission covered several villages. But, at the same time, many of these helpers still believed in their traditional religion and kept on practicing it, sometimes in secret, at other times more openly, combined with and influenced by Christian symbolism. The tensions arising from this

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 35

situation occasionally had tragic consequences, as in the case of Pastor Karl Bregenzer in Musawas.!3

The traditionally widely dispersed villages began to regroup around the missions; the missionaries preached the advantages of a sedentary life and adopted certain measures designed to achieve it. They sponsored the

relocation of people living in small villages to larger ones, in order to facilitate the missionaries’ work and to maintain the Indians under a Strict supervision that would prevent them from falling back into vice and sin. They also favored cattle raising to encourage the sedentarization of the people, as a cow is more difficult to transport in a canoe than a few chickens or even pigs.!4 The changes in people's habits also included consumption, reinforcing

what was already a long-term tendency in the relationship between Coast Indians and Europeans. In May 1855 the church established several shops for the sale of consumer items ("mission stores"); at the end of the nineteenth century there were six stores in a total of fourteen mission stations, the main ones being in Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, Tuapi, and Wounta-Haulover. They offered merchandise imported from Great Britain, Germany, and, later, the United States. The explicit goal of these stores was to contribute to the

financing of the mission, but they quickly gained commercial fame, becoming a commercial department. In 1914, when Nicaragua entered the war against Germany, this department, which up to this time had been operating

under the name German House, changed its name to Commercial House, doubtless to avoid problems (Pérez Valle 1978:313). When the department

was definitively closed down in June 1922, after sixty-eight years in operation, it was possibly one of the oldest commercial establishments on the Coast.!> The Moravian Church adopted an anti-Nicaraguan position. It is possible

that the issue had a religious content rather than a political one, in the sense that the Nicaraguan state had a clearly Catholic and even Jesuit bent.!© But the political repercussions of this religious confrontation are obvious. It is

clear that the Moravian Church had no desire to have the reserve's (or, previously, the kingdom's) relative autonomy come to an end, which would pave the way for full sovereignty by a state that professed a faith traditionally

antagonistic to that of the Moravians. The fear that the Nicaraguan government would interfere with their educative and pastoral work was understandable. In turn, this position on the part of the church reinforced the aspirations of Costefios for autonomy, adding a spiritual argument to other, more secular ones. The Moravian Church, like any church, always viewed secular political

affairs from the specific perspective of its pastoral interest or mission. What, in the point of view of some currents of historical and political interpretation, has been seen as the result of the church's commitment

36 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

to foreign political and economic interests—U.S. interests in particular—

was, more than anything, the result of a decision taken with respect to a Nicaraguan state in which the church perceived an element of hostility, derived from its anticlericalism (in the case of Zelaya) and later from its firm commitment to the Catholic Church. The fears of the Moravian Church were confirmed when, in 1913, the Conservative government issued

permission to the Capuchin order to take charge of evangelization on the Coast.!’ The convergence of the pastoral practice of the church with the economic interests of foreign companies originated primarily in the functionality of the Moravian concept of the good Christian for the kind of labor force demanded by the enclave economy. There was an objective coincidence between the Protestant ethic and the practice of capitalism, which was strengthened by these political factors. The Moravian Church saw the growing presence of

U.S. interests, merchants, officials, and companies as a guarantee that the Nicaraguan government would not dare to reincorporate the territory and eventually prohibit the Moravian mission. In addition, several aspects of

Moravian doctrine coincided with some of the laws of the reserve government, which redounded to the benefit of Moravians and capitalists alike: for example, the outlawing of obeahs (shamans) and black magic, restrictions on the sale and consumption of liquor. This coincidence should not, however, be exaggerated. It is true that the emphasis on sedentarization, in order to make the missionaries’ work easier,

contributed to the domestication of the labor force that the new foreign companies were beginning to demand at the time. Likewise, the insistence on

the Protestant ethic was, in a way, an insistence on the virtues of the good worker. But there were also cases of conflicts between missionary doctrine

and the practice of capitalism, when the appearance of new centers of economic activity encouraged the Indians to move to areas where there was

no church work as yet and eventually to fall prey to the temptations of alcohol, sex, animistic cults, and forgetting the true faith.

In all, the Moravian Church had an ambivalent attitude toward the foreign companies that exploited natural resources and toward the enclave economy as a whole. The church enthusiastically greeted the arrival of new

investments and companies, in which it saw the solution to the serious problems of unemployment, bad habits, and low incomes for the natives. It also recognized the support that missionary work generally received from the administrators of these firms and emphasized the negative effect the closing

down of some of these companies had on the living conditions of the natives.'® But the church also saw the development of these new economic activities, the migration of the men to camps far away from mission activity,

and the diffusion of new forms of behavior resulting from economic expansion as threats to its missionary work.?9

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY © 37

REINCORPORATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The 1880s saw the beginnings of certain capitalist transformations in the Nicaraguan economy and political system, in the context of a Conservative government. A slow but progressive mercantilization began to filter into the primitive economy of the country via international trade, particularly that related to the production and export of coffee to Europe. This would introduce what was, at first, a timid sort of socioeconomic and political differentiation into the dominant local groups and families. The arrival of some European

investors—German, British, and Italian—helped advance the process of product diversification. Economic integration into the world market as well as different legal dispositions opened lands to coffee growing, especially at the expense of Indian communities. At the same time, there were initiatives to improve the transportation and communications infrastructure that would tie the new planting areas to the centers of political decision making and improve the integration of Nicaragua with its foreign markets. Nicaragua's interest in a settlement of the Mosquitia question thus took

place in the context of the beginning of economic and institutional modernization. The political integration of this vast region undoubtedly had to do with the desire of all states to control their own territory. Although the

point to which the Atlantic Coast formed part of the territory of the Nicaraguan state (or earlier that of the Spanish colony) is debatable, the fact

is that the dominant groups and families of Nicaragua inherited the unsatisfied aspirations of the Spanish and insisted on the incorporation of the region. In turn, this project was based on two main elements: the interest of the merchants of Granada—who formed the nucleus of the group in power in Nicaragua in that period—in consolidating and widening their participation in trade and in the economy of the Atlantic in general, including the banana

plantations; and the attraction that the customs duties of the port of Bluefields held for the exhausted finances of the new state. In spite of the signing of the Treaty of Managua in 1860, the creation of

the Mosquito Reserve, with its semisovereignty, was never Satisfactory to the dominant groups of Nicaragua. In his study on the area of Cape Gracias a Dios, Alegret (1985) describes several attempts by authorities in Managua to pass over the articles of the treaty and exercise acts of sovereignty in the

territory of the reserve. Later, the suit decided by the arbitration of the emperor of Austria showed once again the desire of the Nicaraguan government to change an institutional situation it felt to be unsatisfactory. Moreover, only in 1887 did the Nicaraguan government send representatives

to the government of the Mosquito Reserve: a commissioner and his secretary, who carried out apparently symbolic and protocol functions—such as raising the flag and dealing with Nicaraguan citizens.

In 1892 Bluefields, the capital of the Mosquito Reserve, had a population of around 3,500 people, whereas Managua, the capital of

38 A CONBLICTIVE HISTORY

Nicaragua, had some 30,000 inhabitants. In that year, the Liberal party came to power by means of a brief revolution that brought José Santos Zelaya into the government. Imbued with a modernizing but autocratic mentality and

linked to the group supported by the coffee interests, the Zelaya regime (1893-1909) carried out a series of reforms designed to accelerate the integration of Nicaragua into the international economy and expand capitalist forms of production.2° On February 11, 1894, by means of a small military operation, an expeditionary force of the Nicaraguan government occupied the city and port of Bluefields, removed the authorities of the Mosquito Reserve,

declared the sovereignty of Nicaragua over the region, and raised the Nicaraguan flag. The immediate motive wielded by the Nicaraguan government was the state of war with Honduras and the refusal of reserve authorities to permit the temporary stationing of Nicaraguan troops on their way north. But it is clear that this move was more a matter of putting an end to a particularly irritating question for the dominant groups of the Pacific region, both Conservatives and Liberals. In fact, the military operation did not come out of the blue and had been

preceded by other initiatives aimed at the same objective. Thus, before deciding in favor of an armed intervention, the Zelaya government's commissioner, Carlos Alberto Lacayo, had fruitlessly tried to bribe the government of the Mosquitia to accept its subordination to Nicaragua. Clarence, the chief of the Mosquito Reserve, declined the offer to name him general for life of the Nicaraguan army and retain his salary as chief of the

reserve; the vice president of the reserve, C. Patterson, and the attorney general, J. W. Cuthbert, refused offers of pensions and other benefits. Other attempts to bribe members of the General Council, thirty-six village chiefs, and other officials also failed (Teplitz 1974:356; Rossbach and Wuenderich 1985).

The arguments advanced by the Nicaraguan government to explain and legitimate its action were weak and contradictory and showed elements of racism. The government stressed the offense to national sovereignty implied by the chief of the reserve's behavior in times of war. A note from the special

envoy of the Nicaraguan government to Nicaragua's ambassador in Washington, states that, "We cannot allow that, in moments of conflict for our country, the Chief of an Indian tribe should favor, even indirectly, the hostilities of the enemy and favor his plans" (April 1, 1894, in Pérez Valle

1978:175—180). An attempt was also made to justify the operation by alleging the inadmissibility of a situation in which half-savage tribes pretended to govern educated foreigners. According to the same official: It was a real insult to common sense to put under the dependence of a

tribe, which has no consciousness of its rights and which lacks all notion of government, a community of foreigners, composed of men of superior ability, accustomed to living in their country protected

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 39

from a system of speculation. [March 30, 1894, in Pérez Valle 1978: 168-171]?!

At the same time, there was an appeal to another type of argument, which had already been raised in the conflict over the suspension of payments

in the 1860s: the usurpation of the government of the reserve, which belonged to the Indians, by

a foreign oligarchy which truly made a laughingstock of the accords

between Nicaragua and Great Britain... a group of Jamaicans... Jamaican government . . . the Indians neither govern nor have any influence on the Reserve. Their name has served only as a pretext to maintain in that territory the exclusive influence of foreign interests . . . extravagant customs of the Indians, accepting polygamy, .. . not

having for persons and property the guarantees assured by the educated nations of the world . . . exotic laws imported by Jamaican

colonists. [Report by the special envoy of the Nicaraguan government to the government ministry, April 30, 1894, in Pérez Valle 1978:183-—209]

Since the Treaty of Managua to the present, the Mosquito Indians, victims of the mistreatment and slavery to which a tyrannical power has subjected them, nearly exterminated, lost in the depths of the

jungles, and with one or two villages still remaining, give us no reason to consider the former tribes as still alive. Time itself has made radical changes in these things, which must be honored over and above the international agreements which were contracted because

of them. What existed until yesterday ... is a black oligarchy, whose political and administrative immorality and the corruption of

their origins would justify, if there were no other causes, the destitution which their members have been caused to suffer. [Carlos Alberto Lacayo, the Nicaraguan government's commissioner to the Mosquito Reserve, in Cuadra Chamorro 1944:13-14]

On the one hand, the claim is that a system in which savage Indians govern educated foreigners is irrational; on the other, it is claimed that the Indians have been marginalized by a small group of Jamaican blacks of corrupt origins. The argument that the Indians had been displaced by the Creoles was not totally fanciful, as we have seen and as has been evidenced by several studies

(see Laird 1972; Dozier 1985:150). This was also the opinion of U.S. government officials: "An alien administration, in other interests than those

of the Indians, notoriously exists, especially at Bluefields. Nobody is deceived by calling this authority a Mosquito Indian government” (in Dozier 1985; Teplitz 1974:350).

It is possible that by repeating these arguments the Nicaraguan government was attempting to concur with the view of the U.S. government.

40 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

However, it seems that the opinion of U.S. merchants and businessmen living in the reserve was different, possibly because they saw the local government as easily influenced, whereas officials of the U.S. government

were more preoccupied with the pro-British loyalties of the reserve government. In any case, the position and the explanations of the Nicaraguan government seem to be tinged by strong elements of racism, or at

least of disdain for the population whose government they had just overthrown: "Bluefields is composed of two elements: blacks and smugglers:

this should be sufficient to understand the atmosphere in which we live’ (Rigoberto Cabezas to President Zelaya, March 16, 1894, in Pérez Valle 1978:159).

The military operative established martial law, and Spanish was made the obligatory official language in all transactions and in education. Official Spanish meant, in fact, the closure of the schools to Costefio children, who with few exceptions did not speak Spanish. The Moravian Church could not immediately carry out this decree and was forced to close a large number of

its schools for more than a decade. The schools connected with other religious missions also had to close their doors.2* The General Council was eliminated and replaced by an Executive Council of fifteen members, but only three of them were citizens of the Mosquitia. Mestizo civil servants sent from the Pacific were substituted for Creole civil servants; for several years the Miskitos and Creoles complained of the maltreatment to which they were subjected by the new officials. In view of the kind of opinions expressed by mestizo leaders as to the Costefios, it is not difficult to imagine the kind of treatment dispensed by low-level officials. After the intervention, on October 5, 1899, President Zelaya decreed a

provisional system for the government of the Mosquitia. The Indian population of the Mosquitia would be ruled by mayors elected by their respective villages, and the central government would name a governor intendent.

In order to reinforce the intervention's claims to legality and to carry out the stipulation of the Treaty of Managua that the consent of the inhabitants of the Mosquitia needed to be obtained for its incorporation into Nicaragua to be valid, a meeting of the representatives of the populations of Bluefields and the villages was called. This meeting, known as the Mosquito Convention, decided that the Costefios would be subject to the Nicaraguan constitution and government. According to the text of the agreement, all income generated by the "Mosquito Coast" would be invested for its own benefit, and in this way

the Coast would retain "economic autonomy," although this income would

be collected and administered by the "fiscal employees of the Supreme Government" (Article 2). "Indians shall be exempted in peace and war from all military service" (Article 3); there would be no personal taxation of the Indians (Article 4). Suffrage was extended to men and women over the age of

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 41

eighteen (Article 5), but only "Mosquito Indians" would be able to hold

office (Article 7). The villages would pass their local regulations in assemblies presided over by the chief inspector of each, and these would be submitted to approval by the national government (Article 11). Finally, as testimony of the Costefios' gratitude to President Zelaya, who had carried out the reincorporation, it was decided to give the name, "Department of Zelaya" to the territory that had belonged to the reserve. The Convention has been dealt with acridly by historians. They mention

the manipulation of the Costefio population, the lack of real freedom of opinion, discrimination against the black population, the Convention's true

goal of veiling the actual situation with a mantle of legality (Teplitz 1974:377ff.; Rossbach and Wuenderich 1985). Finally, in 1905, a new treaty between Great Britain and Nicaragua put an end to the legal questions concerning the reincorporation. With this treaty,

the 1860 treaty was declared abrogated, and Great Britain acknowledged Nicaragua's sovereignty over the territory of "the former Mosquitia Reserve"

(Article 2). The Nicaraguan government would propose to the National Congress a law that would exempt for fifty years "all Mosquito Indians and the Creoles born before 1894" from military service and from direct taxes "on the persons, goods, possessions, animals, and means of livelihood"; it would permit the Indians to live in their villages according to their own customs; property titles for communal lands would be legalized, and where there was no title every family of four would be assigned 8 manzanas (14 acres) with 2 manzanas (3.5 acres) more for every additional person (Article 3).2? The treaty also authorized former chief of the reserve, Henry Clarence, who had left for Jamaica after the events of February—March 1894, to retum to the region. The population of Bluefields responded with different manifestations of

Opposition to the occupation and the elimination of the government of the reserve. On March 8, 1894, a month after the military occupation, 1,800

residents sent a petition to Queen Victoria, through the British consul, repudiating the annexation by virtue of which "We shall have been left in the hands of a government and a people which have not the slightest interest, sympathy or affection for the inhabitants of the Mosquito Reserve; and as our usages, customs, religion, laws, and language do not correspond, there never could be unity" (in Rossbach and Wuenderich 1985:39). They therefore asked the queen not to allow the forcible reincorporation and once again to take the region under her protection. Great Britain did not respond to the petition, but it is interesting to see how the signers founded their rejection of the annexation on a relatively complete expression of the material and symbolic elements of their ethnic identity and the preservation of that identity on British protection.

In the following months there were mobilizations and armed confrontations. In order to maintain control, Nicaraguan troops had to call for

42 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

the support of U.S. forces, a number of whom were at that point aboard a battleship anchored in the port. On occasion, British troops also helped the Nicaraguans regain control of the city. In some cases, as in July 1894, the

protests and disturbances went beyond the city limits and reached communities such as Tasbapauni, Pearl Lagoon, Rfo Grande, Prinzapolka, and even Corn Island. The Mosquitia was once regained for almost an entire month by the insurgents. However, the expressions of protest were limited

mainly to the Creole population, and to the unhappiness of foreign merchants with the new taxes. The Indian villages, whose integration into the government of the reserve had been relatively weak, looked on passively and with disinterest at the destitution of a government that they had possibly never felt to be particularly their own. This seems to have been especially true with respect to Clarence, the last chief of the reserve. Many Miskito communities showed their unhappiness with his investiture because his mother was Rama. The Miskitos' opposition went as far as to name another

chief in Krukira in the spring of 1892 and to stop paying taxes to the government of the reserve.

The legal dispositions that, in principle, announced equal rights for the Costefios were not carried out, and this was an additional cause for grievance.

In 1899 the uprising of General Juan Pablo Reyes found wide support. Reyes, appointed governor intendent by President Zelaya, had carried out a number of local development projects, especially in Bluefields, which people in the Coast still remember with approbation: municipal improvements, the construction of the largest high school and of a hospital. Reyes objected to the high national taxes levied on the Coast economy and fruitlessly opposed the reelection of Zelaya. In February 1899 he attempted a coup d'état in Bluefields against the central government; in spite of local support, which united Liberals and Conservatives, the movement was defeated. But in a

document that Costefio citizens sent in 1934 to the National Congress, Reyes's name comes up once again as the only official appointed by the national government whom they had found acceptable.

As late as 1924, thirty years after the military operation, several letters from Costefios, particularly Creoles, sent to the U.S. and British consuls emphasized the injuries annexation had caused to the region's population. In 1928 a Miskito Patriotic League sent a letter to the U.S. secretary of state asking him to intervene with the Nicaraguan government to reestablish their

1894 status. In 1934 a petition presented by Indians and Creoles to the National Congress questioned the legitimacy of the 1894 convention and enumerated a long series of grievances. According to the signers of the document, $40 million "have been taken from the income of this Department without even a small part being used for betterment." They denounced the

“destructive exploitation of the natural resources of this Department by foreign concessionaries . . . and astute [Nicaraguan] speculators"; the

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 43

generalized deterioration of the educational system; the invasion of unscrupulous Civil servants; and the massive immigration of the Chinese, who came to control local trade.24

Zelaya sought British financing for the construction of a railroad to the

Coast and approached Japanese interests for the construction of an interoceanic canal; both actions irritated the United States. On the other hand, he practiced a policy of granting ample concessions to foreign firms for the exploitation of the natural resources of the region; this practice was clearly a

continuation of that of the Conservative governments and the Mosquito Kingdom. Emery Company of Massachusetts obtained a monopoly on the felling and exportation of precious tropical woods in an area equivalent to almost 10 percent of the department of Zelaya. In 1903 the concession to the Dietrick Company gave it a strip of land almost 70 miles wide from north to south on the Coco River and inland, including Jinotega and Nueva Segovia, equivalent to a quarter of the territory of Nicaragua. The explicit goal of the

concession was to develop the infrastructure of the area (railroads, steamboats, telegraphs) and implied a monopoly on the felling of trees, mining, and the establishment of plantations. The concession was later annulled by the Conservative government, which considered it fraudulent. Liberal government officials embarked on heavy land speculation in the area where the railroad to the Pacific was to be built. In 1909 the governor intendent, General Juan José Estrada, who had been

appointed by President Zelaya, rose up against him at the head of a revolutionary movement that would lead to Zelaya's resignation and the return of the Conservatives to the government, thus creating the conditions for U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua. Like Reyes ten years earlier,

Estrada had the unified support of the Liberals of Bluefields and the Conservatives. The support of the latter is easy to understand, as it was a Liberal government that would be ended. But the participation of Bluefields

Liberals indicates the presence of a regional element that had already manifested itself in General Reyes' failed uprising. Opposition to the central

government motivated regional adherence to the cause over and above traditional national party allegiances. However, the mestizos of the region were the most enthusiastic supporters of the movement. The attitude of the Creole population seems to have been ambivalent: They were in sympathy with the opposition to the central government, but they do not seem to have

shown much eagerness to assume a greater commitment to the revolutionaries (see Pérez Valle 1978:296—299). After the fall of Zelaya, and

under the protection of the provisional constitution dictated by Estrada to replace the one of 1893, the Moravian mission reopened its schools, closed for more than a decade, in Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon. The granting of land titles to communal village lands, guaranteed by the 1905 treaty, awakened little interest in the Indian population. The amount of

44 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

land in question—an average of 2 manzanas per person—was too small for acceptable cultivation in the ecological conditions of the Coast and were, in any case, less than the amount of land already available. Furthermore, the concept of “title” was of little use in Indian culture, in which the basic issue is the real possession of land and its use in communal projects. Also, the government officials in charge of making out the titles were mestizos from the Pacific regions in whom the Indians had little confidence. Some villages began to respond as late as 1915, when the government demanded that they deal with the question. In this way, between 1915 and 1920 some forty-five Miskito and Sumu villages obtained titles for a combined total of more than 121,079 acres (Jenkins 1986:221-—222). Each village was to name a sindico (the equivalent of mayor), who was empowered to deal with affairs related to

the titles and the effective handing over or confirmation of the lands. According to some observers of the period, very few sindicos took their work seriously; the majority paid little attention to the matter, and many internal legal suits arose (Grossmann 1930:104).

THE ENCLAVE ECONOMY The Coast economy reached its highest levels of activity between 1880 and 1930. During this half-century what is known as the enclave economy was in force. Enclaves are generally defined as areas whose economic activity is controlled by foreign companies with an absolute power over the productive resources, including the labor force. Reality is rather more complex. The concept of economic enclave is defined first as the presence of monopoly capital in a much less developed economic and social environment—in

general, a petty commodity economy or a capitalist one still in its competitive stage. As a description, the concept of enclave points up the existence of an inequality or disproportion between the economic potential of

the monopoly enterprises and the rest of the economy—regional or national—in which they operate; it is an image of contrast, of a marked inequality between one and the other type of economic organization.

The unequal and combined nature of capitalist development at the international level explains why the majority of enclaves in the Third World

are foreign. The higher degree of capitalist development in the "core" economies allows capital to be exported in order to continue the process of accumulation on the periphery.”> But the determining factor of the set of relationships typical of an enclave economy is the presence of monopoly capital, and that fact explains why enclaves are foreign in the majority of cases.76

In the second place, an enclave economy is one whose relations with the

metropolis are stronger and more meaningful than those with domestic society. Enclave enterprises have a very high reliance on imports and orient their production toward exports. Machinery, spare parts, and Supplies for

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 45

operations come from abroad; the same is true of management staff, technicians, and skilled personnel. Only the field personnel is local: sugarcane cutters, pit workers in the mines, field workers in woodcutting or rubber collection—unskilled labor. But in some cases, when the local labor supply increases more slowly than the companies' productive activity—and their demand for workers—they even import labor. There is no diffusion of technology or training of the native labor force. The commissary system concentrates within the company the spending of salaries on consumer goods. Nor is there any integration with complementary local activities. Enclaves are extractive in more than one sense: When for some reason the companies depart—exhaustion of the resource, unacceptable production costs, changes in the political environment, etc.—they literally leave an empty hole. The economic power of enclave economies causes the firms operating in them to have great political power as well. This is made possible by the weakness of the local dominant groups. Lacking a relevant productive base of their own and without importance in the international market, these groups'

ability to establish a stable system of domination generally depends on political and institutional factors more than on economic ones. Gaining direct control of the government gives these groups the means to make themselves

a "national" political class over competing groups, families, regions, or Cities. State power gives them the means to convert political dominance into

economic dominance. The need of these social groups to attain political power in order to gain ascendance in the economy—the opposite of the historical development of the European bourgeoisie—explains the intense and violent nature of their struggles for direct and exclusive control of the state apparatus and the traditional political instability of their societies. Thus, there is fierce competition among these groups to grant advantages and privileges to foreign investors and companies. This competition includes

all the political forces through which these groups express themselves, regardless of their political confrontations—or, rather, because of their competition for access to power. Bids for power have been frequently expressed as a race to see which of the competitors could offer greater concessions and wider privileges to the enclave—a competition naturally encouraged by the potential investors.

Lumber, banana plantations, and mining were the three economic activities in which the enclave system developed most clearly. The lumber

boom, fostered by the growth of the construction industry in the United States, arrived in 1892 on the Wawa River. Some companies cutting pine on the southern plain set up a sawmill there. In 1893 as many as four steamboat loads of wood a month were exported from the Wawa area (Rossbach, n.d.)

This allows us to conclude that this industry was no longer made up of individual small companies but rather of large capitalist exporters. In 1921

Bragman's Bluff Lumber Company, a subsidiary of the Standard Fruit

46 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

Company, began large-scale extraction of pine in the area around what is now

Puerto Cabezas, with a concession of 50,000 acres. The city of Puerto Cabezas, which rapidly became the administrative and commercial center for the northern Atlantic Coast, was created by Bragman's around the alreadyexisting Indian village of Bilwi, giving rise to complex litigation about the lands of the villages affected by the growth of the city (see Ruiz y Ruiz

1927). The improvements included the construction of a port, a pier, a railway line extending for 100 miles along the Wawa River, and several bridges; a sawmill that in its day was one of the largest of Central America; an electric plant; an ice factory, and other facilities. Lumber companies paid insignificant taxes; Bragman's did not keep inventory or account books. The government had no capacity to supervise extractive activities and exports, acording to the report of a special government commissioner, the companies

bribed the inspectors (Ruiz y Ruiz 1927:144—-145;11). At its height Bragman's came to produce 55,000 board feet of wood a day (CIERA 1981:49). Another important lumber company was Nolan, which operated in

the area of the Prinzapolka River and the Rfo Grande de Matagalpa. The company's base of operations was in the Sumu village of Karawala, at the mouth of the Rfo Grande de Matagalpa, where it set up a sawmill with a capacity of 45,000 board feet a day.?’

Banana production started on a small scale at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and part of the land speculation mentioned earlier had to do with this. Large-scale production began around 1880 in the Bluefields area. In 1893 the Bluefields-Rama Banana Company of New Orleans began to export bananas to the East Coast of the United States. This company, which was later seized by the United Fruit Company, came to have almost twenty

plantations of its own and also bought bananas from more than 500 independent producers. In 1904 it was granted the exclusive concession for

navigation of the Escondido River for its subsidiary, the Bluefields Steamship Company, which also took charge of passenger transportation and the mail service. In 1909 this monopoly provoked a strike by the independent producers because of the low prices it paid them for their product.

The 1920s saw the greatest amount of activity in banana plantations, with two main enterprises, both with U.S. capital. In the north, Standard Fruit Company, based in Puerto Cabezas, operated its own plantations and also bought from independent producers. In 1929 Standard Fruit attained its highest production record, with 4 million bunches of bananas and exports equivalent to 27 percent of total Nicaraguan exports (Yih 1987a). At the beginning of the following decade, production began to decline as a result of

progressive exhaustion of the soils, the instability of the political and military situation (the guerrilla activity of General Sandino), and plant diseases—in 1935, because of "Panama disease,” Standard moved its operations to the Coco River, but the following year the sigatoka disease

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 47

affected the crops; in 1936 the company closed down its operations on the Coast. The other company was Cuyamel, a United Fruit Company subsidiary. It operated almost 200,000 acres of banana plantations in the area of the Rfo

Grande de Matagalpa and the Escondido River in the 1930s. It came to employ 3,000 salaried workers on the plantations and about 1,000 permanent employees in its commercial operations. The banana companies were the targets, and the cause, of intense labor protest, fostered by the heavy concentration of workers and by the dependency of hundreds of small producers. In 1921 Cuyamel workers on the Escondido

River went out on strike for higher wages, as did the workers on the Rfo Grande de Matagalpa in 1925; company guards supressed the Rfo Grande Strike severely in what is known as the "El Gallo massacre." Between 1922 and 1926 the independent producers north of Bluefields went on strike against the trading firm Cukra Development Company, demanding better prices for

their bananas. There were strikes in 1928 on Standard Fruit plantations in response to low wages and in 1932 in the area of the Coco River, where Indian workers were protesting the importation of Jamaican workers, a company practice that lowered wages even more and displaced local labor.”°

Mining began to develop toward the turn of the century, particularly in three places in the northwest area of the region: Siuna, Bonanza, and Rosita.

Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, mining had become industrialized; a large part of its success was a result of the low wages paid to the mainly Indian workers and the irrational nature of exploitation. In 1921 some 2,500 people were directly or indirectly employed by the companies.

The mining companies were U.S. and Canadian; they enjoyed free importation of their machinery and free exportation of their product and were exempt from government and municipal taxes. The exportation of metals was completely uncontrolled by the government; there never was a laboratory to

verify the percentages of minerals in the concentrates that were exported, allegedly because of the high cost of such analysis. At the end of the 1940s the mining companies paid Anastasio Somoza Garcia $3,000 a month for his authorization to export precious metals. In addition, the dictator received 15 percent of the total production of the Las Segovias gold mine, estimated at $10 million a year (Gondi 1948). The mining companies’ control over the area became almost complete. For example, the entire city of Siuna was on company lands. The owners of buildings, even the churches, had to pay rent to the company for use of the land. Starting in the 1930s, air transportation encouraged foreign mining interests in the region. Equipment, materials, and food were flown in on cargo planes, with more than 2,500 flights a year. The high operating costs were compensated by low labor costs. During the 1950s, daily wages were not more than $1.50 for the 2,500 workers (Miskitos, mestizos, and Sumus).

48 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

Gold was the main export item during the 1940s, and Nicaragua came to be

one of the three largest producers of gold in Latin America. The rise of Puerto Cabezas in these years is tied to mining. It was the main port of entry for cargo for the mines, from heavy machinery to food. But part of the food for the mines, and for Puerto Cabezas, also came from the Indian villages of

the Coco River, which transformed Waspam into an important trade and transportation center. Waspam was also an important center for labor recruitment in the Coco River area; workers were sent to the mines and the lumber camps.

Regardless of the type of activity, the companies operating in the enclave gained relatively wide control over the labor force. Bragman’'s was the

first company to abolish contracting by means of prepaid wages, which in practice put the workers into a debt that could only be worked off through a true system of peonage. But it was also the first company to introduce the

system of commissaries, or company stores, with outlets in Logtown, Puerto Cabezas, and San Carlos on the Coco River. The stores were well supplied with products imported from the United States, including liquor. The workers spent their wages at the company stores, which dealt a cruel blow to Chinese retail trade. The stores also served to attract Indian workers, who had for some time been accustomed to consume certain imported goods;

buying in the commissanies was a kind of privilege reserved for company workers. The biggest Bragman's commissary was in San Carlos; its sales at the end of the 1920s reached $40,000 a year. In this way, a good part of the workers wages went back into the coffers of the company, and everybody was happy——except for the Chinese shopkeepers.

Later on, other companies imitated Bragman's example. In the 1940s the Rubber Reserve Corporation set up more than forty commissaries to supply more than 5,000 Indian and Creole rubber workers and the almost 200 plant workers. In Siuna the mine commissary was the most important commercial

establishment; up to 1970 it enjoyed exemptions from taxes on the importation of unlimited quantities of goods. The system of pay vouchers fit in with the network of commissaries. At Standard Fruit, for example, the workers were paid with checks that could be

cashed in exchange for merchandise in the commissary. At ATCHEMCO (Atlantic Chemical Corporation), a resin-extracting company, workers were paid week to week and could get their supplies once a week with vouchers that were deducted from their wages. On occasion, coupons were used as prepayment of wages, redeemable exclusively in the company store. Because of the low wages, workers often ran out of money before the end of the pay period; in these cases, it was common for the company to pay them advances with vouchers exchangeable in the commissary.29

The companies had their own police forces and also took charge of maintaining the security forces of the state. Bragman's, for example, paid the

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 49

salaries of the police of Puerto Cabezas and the lumber camps (Ruiz y Ruiz 1927:57). The mining companies continued to do this until 1979. When the revolutionary government decided to nationalize these companies and took over their mining camps and accounting, it found fat books of check stubs for payments to National Guard commanders and lower-level officers. In

some cases, these payments were simply bribery, but in others they represented additional salaries, sometimes greater than the official ones.*°

The growth of the enclave economy made the ethnic and demographic profile of the region much more complex. Attracted by the economic boom,

Chinese immigrants began to arrive on the Coast in the mid-1880s and rapidly gained control of local retail trade. There are no figures as to the real

magnitude of Chinese immigration, but as early as July 1895 President Zelaya's government issued a decree—which was completely ineffectual—

prohibiting it. At the same time, the growth of extractive operations motivated the importation of black workers from Jamaica and, to a lesser extent, from other islands of the Caribbean and from the southern United States. This practice made Nicaraguan workers and government authorities unhappy, although for different reasons. In 1925 the workers' society El Avance, of Puerto Cabezas, submitted a petition demanding that black workers be prohibited from entering the country and complaining that blacks had more chances to obtain employment and lodging and received higher wages. In the same year, the special commissioner for the government was worried that the importation of black wage laborers could eventually create "an African people who feel not one bit of sympathy for Nicaragua" (Ruiz y Ruiz 1927:38). In 1931 more than 85 percent of U.S. investments in Nicaragua were on

the Atlantic Coast, almost 90 percent in bananas and lumber (Dozier 1985:210). According to some observers, and the annual reports of the Moravian missionaries, in this period the Coast became an authentic frontier

territory, with a wide diffusion of gambling, speculation, adventurers of various kinds, prostitution, and delinquency—"an ever increasing desire for pleasure, amusements and an unrestrained life"—1n contrast to what seems to

have been the situation before 1893. Particularly in Puerto Cabezas, "spiritual work is a difficult task. ... The moral conditions here are fearful" (Grossman 1930:81-82). This prosperity for the Coast economy lasted half a century, between 1880 and 1930. After this date, the worldwide Depression, impoverishment of the soils, plant diseases, and exhaustion of natural resources led to an abrupt decline in activity and to the closure of many companies; the political situation, resulting from the outbreak of the Liberal revolution in 1926 and, later, the guerrilla campaign of General Sandino, made the situation of the regional economy even more difficult. Low yields on the lands around the Wawa River, the 1935 hurricane, and

50 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

diseases on the plantations eliminated the possibility of a sustained growth in

banana cultivation on the Coast. Banana exports from El Bluff port diminished from an annual average of 2,305,207 bunches in 1927-1929 to only 637 bunches in 1940; exports from Puerto Cabezas fell from 528,895

bunches on an annual average in 1927-1929 to 380 bunches in 1940 (Williamson 1979:53). The Indians went back to their villages, but many Creoles, who had no economic base with which to weather the recession or else were small producers ruined by the crisis in bananas, for example, found no alternative but to emigrate to the Pacific region, the Caribbean islands, or the United States. In 1926 a revolutionary Liberal movement arose in Bluefields, directed against the Conservative central government. It was actively supported by the Creoles, who once again rose up against the central government as part of a national confrontation. The military operations and the general tension of

local life changed the economic situation. Although the reports of the Moravian missionaries are perhaps not the best source for following these

events, lacking a better perspective, they at least offer a first approximation.?! The missionaries report the general deterioration in Costefios’ living conditions, the lack of work, money, food, and good clothing. These conditions had a direct effect on the church's ability to collect contributions in the villages, and in the late 1920s the missionaries decided to encourage rice cultivation in the Pearl Lagoon basin in order to replenish the mission's diminished finances (Wolff 1927). General Sandino's struggle against the U.S. military invasion made the Coast economy even more vulnerable. Enclave companies became targets for

the military activities of the Ejército Defensor de la Soberanfa Nacional. Thus, in April 1928 Sandinista troops proceeded to blow up the installations of the La Luz Mine in Siuna, and in 1931 Sandinista General Pedro Bland6n attacked and destroyed Bragman’s installations in Logtown. In addition to its obvious direct impact, the war caused a deterioration in the economic activity

of the cities and villages that in one way or another were tied to the companies—for example, Prinzapolka, Puerto Cabezas, and Cape Gracias a Dios. Moreover, village Indians took an ambivalent attitude toward General

Sandino's army. An apparently important number of Miskito and Sumu Indians actively collaborated with it, as did certain sectors of the Creole population.*? Others opted to try not to be caught by the U.S. Marines or their agents, in order not to be sent to fight against Sandino; thus, moving between villages became difficult (Grossmann 1926:115). Finally, after the obscure incident of the death of the Moravian missionary Karl Bregenzer in Musawis, a great majority of Miskito and Sumu aligned themselves with the

official position of the church, which was the same as that of the U:S. Marines and General Somoza: Sandino and the Sandinistas were nothing more than a handful of bandits and plotters.*3

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 51

World War II fostered a resurgence in rubber and gold production which

reactivated the Coast economy exclusively in the areas that were directly involved. Between 1939 and 1945, gold exports represented an average of 53 percent of the total exports of Nicaragua, 61 percent in 1940/41. But this was a brief boom that lasted as long as its cause—once again, a foreign one. With the end of the war, the Southeast Asian rubber plantations once again took over from the Central American ones, and gold production fell. Only in the 1960s did the general level of activity improve, basically related to capital

investment in fishing and lumber. However, this boom was mainly concentrated along the coast and in the south of Zelaya, leaving out the mining district and the Coco River.

There is no doubt that the enormous profits formerly obtained by the companies and exported out of Nicaragua were based primarily on the intense exploitation of the labor force and on the depredation of natural resources. Iniquitous working conditions, high incidence of workplace accidents, contamination of the rivers, and poisoning of the Indian population

were the keys to success, more than technological superiority or advanced methods of business administration.*+ The effects are still being felt in the 1980s; the investments necessary to replace the exhausted resources are enormous and far exceed the financial and operational capacity of the country.

The completely external orientation of the enclave, and particularly

its high import coefficient, conspired against a greater integration of the regional economy with that of the rest of the country. There was no diffusion of technology and no training of the local labor force. For this reason, when the revolutionary government nationalized the mines in 1979, there were practically no Nicaraguan technicians to take over operations. Other companies, such as ATCHEMCO or Wrigley's, were similarly abandoned by their foreign owners and technicians. At the same time, the commissary system and the extensive imports of consumer

goods slowed down the integration of a national system of circulation of goods and money and reinforced the Costefio population's propensity toward imports. It is no coincidence that the taste for imported goods, generally a characteristic of the wealthier classes of Third World societies, is

also a feature of lower-income classes where there has been an enclave economy.

Many Costefios still feel nostalgia for the enclave period. As always,

this is a matter of selective recollection: People wish for the good job prospects, the consumption of imported goods, the free-flowing dollars, and the economic and commercial connections with Jamaica, San Andrés, Gran Cayman, and New Orleans. Few will spontaneously bring up the silicosis, the disappearance of fish from the rivers, illiteracy, gringo arrogance, or the

corruption of the National Guard.

52 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

THE LEGACY OF A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY There is nothing deterministic in history, but neither is it the domain of free

will. As Marx pointed out, men make their history, but they do it in predetermined circumstances, not according to their will. The freedom of past generations limits and defies the creativity of the present one.

The discussion in this chapter is hardly exhaustive. I have omitted important aspects of the historical formation of Atlantic Coast reality in order not to outgrow the bounds of this book or because the necessary documentation is still lacking. However, by way of summary, I will present a few brief conclusions in order to explain my own perspective on the legacy of Coast history in the capitalist modemization of the 1960s and 1970s, and, more important, in the Sandinista revolutionary process.

1. The Coast's history created a strong regional identity including all Indian groups as well as Creoles, in opposition to the mestizos, both those in the Pacific region and those living in the Atlantic region. The intensity and complexity of this regional identity are not the same in all Costefio groups, but it nevertheless exists as the result of a long historical process. The open confrontation between Costefios and the "Spanish," or between Indians and Creoles on the one hand, and mestizos on the other, or between the Atlantic and the Pacific, are different ways of expressing this identity in opposition to the non-Costefio identity. Costefio identity is expressed in linguistic, religious, and behavioral differences, which in turn are based on

differences in the kinds of social organization, productive practices, technologies, and ways of relating to natural resources and state institutions,

among others. In turn, these differences are the result of the different historical and demographic origins of the different groups and in the different ecologies of the regions in which they lived.

2. The affirmation of this Costefio identity is also expressed in its differences with and, occasionally, opposition to the political structures of

the Nicaraguan state, which is seen as the prolongation of Spanish domination, something alien and potentially hostile. As a consequence, Costefio aspirations to preserve their ethnic identities and to exercise some form of self-government have been tied to the felt need to seek the protection of a foreign power from the denial of these rights and these identities, first by the Spanish crown and later by the Nicaraguan state. In a way, this involves a survival strategy in which the group's ability to achieve its goals is tied, in

a clearly subordinated manner, to the dynamic defined by more powerful actors on the regional, national, or international scene.

3. A corollary is that the nationalist and anti-imperialist elements that make up a part of the political identity of the mestizos of the Pacific, and that are essential ingredients of General Sandino's Struggle and, later, that of the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberacién Nacional, Sandinista National

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 53

Liberation Front) are absent from the Costefio identity. The highest moments of Costefio society are tied, in its people's collective memory, to different kinds of colonial and neocolonial expansion on the part of Great Britain and the United States. This positive attitude toward foreign domination created an ambivalent relationship between the Costefios and the ruling groups of the Pacific and the Nicaraguan state. This attitude coincided with the acceptance

and promotion of foreign domination that was a constant of these ruling

groups’ political identities. But, to the extent that it was part of the Costefios’ aspirations for territorial autonomy, this positive attitude toward the United States and Great Britain conflicted with the aspirations of the

Nicaraguan state, and the Pacific mestizo ruling groups, to exclusive

institutional control of the Atlantic region. With such control, the Nicaraguan state could even legally conduct economic dealings conceming the

Coast with foreign powers. However, sympathies toward colonial and neocolonial powers were to cause deep cleavages between the Costefios and the subordinated social classes and groups in the rest of Nicaragua—peasants, workers, the impoverished petty bourgeoisie, the semiproletariat, the student movement. The material side of Costefio ethnic 1dentity—socioeconomic exploitation, political oppression—was similar to that of these classes and

groups throughout the country. But the symbolic dimension of Costefio identity, which included positive attitudes toward Great Britain and the United

States and negative attitudes toward General Sandino, and would come to include anticommunism, separated on an ideological level what economic exploitation and political oppression otherwise would have united.

4. Within this regional identity, there was a marked differentiation between Indians and Creoles and among Miskito, Sumu, and Rama Indians. This differentiation also involved a process of internal hierarchization, which

was also tied to the Coast's integration into colonial and neocolonial expansion and to the presence of the Nicaraguan state apparatus in the region.

Many of the conflicts between state political action and the people of the Atlantic Coast are related to the Nicaraguan state's lack of understanding of the ethnic heterogeneity that exists within this regional unity. 5. Capitalism generated a much slower and more undeveloped kind of

class differentiation on the Coast than in the rest of Nicaragua. Social differentiation within each group was an extremely slow process, started relatively recently, and is mixed with other kinds of differentiation based on kinship and ethnic identity. Even today hierarchization tends to be greater across ethnic groups than within each group. 6. The extremely strong political and cultural influence of the Moravian Church, which is usually presented as one of the most outstanding elements

in Costefios' ethnic identity, is similar to the influence of the Catholic Church in mestizo society in other regions of the country. Membership in

the Moravian Church is part of Costefio identity, in the same way that

54 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

speaking Spanish and fitting into the cultural sphere of the Catholic Church are among the defining aspects of mestizo identity.

NOTES

1. See, among the more recent studies, Dozier (1985). For an introductory overview, see Pérez Valle (1978).

2.A recent anecdote may illustrate this point. In early September 1984

Ray Hooker, a well known Creole leader and, from the November 1984 elections, a member of Nicaragua's National Assembly, was kidnapped by members of Miskitos, Sumus, Ramas, and Sandinistas Working Together (MISURASATA)—the Indian organization which took up arms against the Nicaraguan government—in the Pearl Lagoon area while he was campaigning for the national elections of November 1984. Ray Hooker recalls that every night of the almost two months he was held prisoner the Indian combatants would get together around a campfire to listen to the harangues of the elders of the organization. Their main and almost exclusive theme was an extremely impassioned narrative of the affronts, the contempt, the ills and grievances the Indians had always suffered at the hands of the "Spanish"—this name including the Spaniards of the colony as well as present-day Nicaraguans from the Pacific region.

3. From the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century the slave trade was possibly the primary economic specialization by the Miskitos in relation to the British. Miskito raids victimized other Indian groups in the eastern part of what today are Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. According

to Helms (1982), the increase in frequency and intensity of Miskito slaving raids coincides with the formative years of the British colony in Jamaica and particularly with the period of economic difficulties, between the decline of privateering and the emergence of the sugar plantations. The half-century between 1685, when privateering was prohibited, and 1740, when the sugar plantation economy based on slave labor brought from Africa was solidly established, corresponds to the period of increased slave-hunting by the Miskitos. A considerable number of Indians from Central America were sent to Jamaica, presumably to work on the holdings that were in the process of being

converted into sugar plantations but were still small in size and did not produce enough to buy slaves from Africa. These years also coincide with the end of the flow of white indentured servants to Jamaica and the West Indies in general and with a scarcity of labor. 4. Governor Clementi was also a big cattle raiser, although not so big as Robinson. 5. A detailed description of these illicit operations in the area between Cape Gracias a Dios and Bocas del Toro, including contraband traded with the Spanish via the San Juan River, is found in O. W. Roberts (1827). The author was a merchant in Jamaica, personally involved in these activities between 1816 and 1822. 6. For example, in January 1839 King Robert Charles Frederick made over to Samuel and Peter Shepherd and Stanislaus Kaly the entire territory

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 55

located between the southern bank of Rio Grande de Matagalpa (the Great River) and the northern bank of Rio Grande de Bluefields (now the Escondido

River, then the Bluefields Main River), up to the limits of the "Spanish" towns in the west and the seacoast in the east, as well as the land between Rio Grande de Bluefields on the north and the northern bank of San Juan River on the south, with the aforementioned eastern and western boundaries. On the same occasion he also made over to the same beneficiaries the land between the southern bank of Rio San Juan in the north and Bocas del Toro and the Chiriqui Lagoon in the south. In June of the same year the king ceded Corn

Island to the same merchants. See Pérez Valle (1978:76—78). Other concessionaries affected by these cancellations, and who later contested them, include Passenger (2 million acres); Hedgcock, Rennick, Haly, and Brown (1.3

million acres in all); Willock and Alexander (2 million acres); and G. R. Brown (800,000 acres).

7. According to Nicaraguan historian José Dolores Gamez, the annulment of the titles had to do with the Prussian colony and the rights its members could claim on lands granted them by the king. The annulment of all concessions made it possible to "cancel out the dispossession of Prussian subjects with an equal dispossession of English landholders and still save the lands acquired after that date by sale or royal concession, which were a matter of personal interest to Mr. Walker." See Pérez Valle 1978:92-93.

8. The invitation to a church with no relationship whatever to the British Empire seems to have been because an earlier request to the Church of

England aroused no interest. 9. The complete text of the treaty has been published in the Memoria de Relaciones Exteriores 1920, vol. 2, 396:402. 10. Intense exploitation caused the rapid disappearance of mahogany and rubber. According to Laird (1972), Nicaragua's limited sovereignty, on the one hand and the reserve's semi-sovereignty, on the other, created a situation in which no one tried to ensure a rational use and conservation of resources. It is possible that the legal ambiguity of the situation created a climate of greater permissiveness for investors; but history after 1894, when the Nicaraguan government found its own solution to the problem, shows similarly predatory

behavior. Moreover, what could concepts such as "rational use" and "conservation of resources" have possibly meant in the 1880s, according to the development then attained by the natural sciences? 11. It was a generalized practice for merchants to grant credits to Indians

and poor blacks, intentionally putting them into debt and keeping them dependent in this way. Some companies used a similar system, contracting workers by prepaying part of their wages. Most workers could not pay back their debt by the end of the first contract and found themselves involved in a peonage system that lasted for years. Speaking of the Reserve government's measures, Teplitz (1974:352) comments: "The system may have disadvantaged alien creditors, but foreigners’ complaints about Mosquito statutes and court actions showed that the legislature and judiciary acted to protect the masses, a situation unique in nineteenth-century Nicaragua."

12. Cf., for example, a report by the Moravian Church's correspondent

56 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

for 1926: "The leader of the Sumu people is now a helper and was also Magistrate of the community. He punished both women and men, who lived immoral lives. He believes in giving the transgressors “bush medicines’, that is, corporal punishment. The guilty person's hands are tied to a beam above the head, then the policeman gives a certain number of lashes with sticks, or with strips of leather made out of tapir hide. I have counted 17 lashes applied to the back of a woman. One man was found guilty of incest with his daughter for many years, while he had his wife." Final comment of the minister: “In Musaw4s one gets an insight into the immoral conditions of heathenism both among the old and the young. It is horrible!" See Schramm (1927:107-111). In other cases, the village sfndico, converted to Christianity, prohibited the sale of alcohol in the villages; see Grossmann (1930). 13. A typical case is that of Musawds. According to a Moravian report, a Sumu leader named Nelson Matthew had a dream in which he was ordered to bring together his people and build a church in which to pray and give praise

to God. The Indians worked hard on the church in what would later be Musawas, and when they finished they went to see the missionary Schramm in the village of Sangsangta to ask him to go there to preach the Gospel. Nelson became the first native helper of the Moravian mission and later became the sindico of the village (see Schramm 1927:107-111). Nelson was in reality a

sukia—that is, a priest and celebrant of the animistic traditional religion of

the Sumus. Many sukias were concerned about the appearance of the missionaries and, in a kind of survival strategy, chose to join the new religion instead of opposing it or openly competing with it. By becoming "helpers" they kept their positions in the community. This phenomenon has also been noted in other Indian societies in similar circumstances. Missionary Schramm's

narration, moreover, offers an excellent description of what in Marxian political economy is called a petty commodity economy. For the story of Karl Bregenzer, see Note 33.

14. One of the clearest cases of this resettlement policy is Musawas, which was to become the center of the Sumu population. The Sumus in the region originally lived dispersed in small hamlets along the Waspuk River, one of the tributaries of the Coco River. Around 1920, in what was to become Musawas, there were only eight houses, but as a result of the activity of the missionaries there were already more than forty in 1928, as well as fields of food crops. The people who resettled there came from different points along the river through the jungle: "Of course it has cost some work to bring the Sumu Indians so far, but the Lord has blessed our labors" (Schramm 1927:109).

15. Not all the Moravian missionaries were convinced that going into trade was a good decision. According to Guido Grossmann, superintendent of the church when the Commercial House closed, "I am convinced that the time and energy of our missionaries could have been better devoted to the actual spiritual work in the congregations, than that they should have stood behind the counter." Grossmann (1930:85). 16. Anti-Jesuit sentiment was not specific to the mission on the Atlantic Coast but seems to have been generalized throughout the Moravian Church: see Allen (1967).

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 57

17. For example, the church's initial attitude toward the government that came to power after the Liberal Revolution of 1926 was opposition, in spite of the fact that the revolution had been actively supported by the Creole

population of Bluefields—mainly Moravians—and that Creole leaders developed particularly important roles in it. The position of the Moravian Church was a result of the marriage law passed by the new Liberal government: According to the legal text, a marriage celebrated by a Catholic priest would

have full value before the civil authorities, but marriages celebrated by ministers of other denominations would not. In these cases, the union was made legal by means of a subsequent civil marriage. Celebrated by an official

of the civil registry, this ceremony cost $20, too much for most of the Costefio population. As a consequence, many members of Protestant churches chose a Catholic marriage, cheaper and legally valid; see Grossmann (1926).

Later, the church's attitude changed, and in his annual report in 1930 Superintendent Grossmann declared that although the Conservative government

merely tolerated the presence of the missionaries, the Liberal goverment "favored" it (Grossmann 1930:103).

18. Superintendent Grossmann enthusiastically greeted the founding of the Bragman's Bluff Lumber Company in Puerto Cabezas as a blessing for the "laboring classes," who would find employment and money. He particularly praised the fact that the company had eliminated the system of contracting by

means of prepayment of wages; see Grossmann (1925). Because of the importance Puerto Cabezas was acquiring as a result of its economic activity, the Moravian Church decided to move the seat of the mission there, which up

to that point had been in Tuapi, slightly to the north. In May 1927 the superintendent's office, originally in Bluefields, was also moved to Puerto Cabezas.

19. Jobs in the lumber camps and the mines caused the majority of those who attended church in the decades of 1910 and 1920 to be female. The young Miskito and Creole generations were very receptive to the new worldly fashions: "They go too far in imitating foreigners in everything— food, style, pleasures which sap their vitality as much as their purse, causing not a few to become careless and indifferent." In Bluefields, the traditional Moravian prohibition against dancing created problems with the young

people, and the congregation had to discipline eighteen members for violations of this rule. The missionaries noted that work in the Sumu villages was less complicated, because they had remained "pretty free" of the influence of the "new life" that came to the Coast along with the companies (Grossmann 1929).

20. See, for example, Teplitz (1974) and Vargas (1982), although the

latter, in my opinion, exaggerates the capitalist nature of the Zelaya government and its socioeconomic impact.

21. It is interesting to note the pompous way in which Nicaraguan government officials referred to the foreign (white) residents of Bluefields, many of whom were vulgar adventurers and soldiers of fortune.

22.See Yih and Slate (1985). The authors point out that elderly Bluefields Creoles still remember this period in which they could understand

58 A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

nothing in the classroom and the children and young people looked for ways to escape and hide from the truant officers charged with returning them to class. Clandestine classes in English were held in private houses. 23. The measure pertaining to land modified a law passed September 24, 1903, which assigned to each Indian family living within the limits of what had been the reserve ownership of 4 manzanas if there were not more than four persons in the family, and 1 manzana more per additional person; see Diario Oficial 2054, October 11, 1903. 24. See the text of this document in Encuentro 24-25 (April—September 1985):168-—170.

25. An example of a nonforeign enclave is that of mining in Bolivia before its nationalization; a large proportion of mining capital was the property of a few Bolivian families. 26. See a detailed presentation in Vilas (1987a); also Yih (1987a). 27. The companies mentioned were not the only lumber companies, but they were the most important. To them may be added Mengol, which operated between 1908 and 1935 in the Escondido River basin; Waddell’s Prinzapolka, on the banks of the Escondido; and the previously mentioned Dietrick on the Coco River, among others. 28. The sources consulted—newspapers, in particular—do not give any idea as to the number of workers or producers involved in these movements.

29. A device by the companies to lower labor costs was to maintain a certain percentage of the workers on temporary contracts; this allowed them to pay only the basic wage. At other times, workers were fired at the end of the

temporary contract and given a new contract in a lower category or as an apprentice. In general, recently contracted workers were paid less than the minimum wage, as the companies claimed that they had come to learn the job. 30. Information gathered in interviews with officials of the Nicaraguan Ministry of Justice. 31. Because of the negative attitude toward politics and the emphasis on

the necessity for people to keep out of political conflicts. See, for example, Wilson 1927:96-98.

32. The best study on this topic is Wuenderich (1986a); see also Macaulay (1967).

33.On March 31, 1931, Sandinista General Pedro Blandén's troops arrived at the Sumu village of Musawds and put to death the Moravian missionary Karl Bregenzer. The Moravian Church's version is simple: "Bregenzer was murdered in 1931 by a group of followers of the rebel Sandino. The village and the church were burned down" (Schnattschneider 1961:77).

Beyond the argument that Bregenzer was killed because the Sandinistas mistook him for a spy for the U.S. Marines, no one seems to have asked why Bregenzer was killed, or at least why there was a confusion, althought the question is senseless if one assumes that the Sandinistas were simply bandits. According to internal reports of the Moravian Church, things seem to have been less simple. Bregenzer had been having a number of problems in the

village of Musawas, and part of the village was strongly opposed to the missionary (Grossmann 1930:85), apparently because of his immoderate nature

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY 59

and a certain favoritism for some villagers over others. According to an obituary published by the Moravian Church, "Our brother was outspoken and fearless in his denunciation of sin. There have been those who have disagreed with him, but we have yet to hear from one person who did not admire him for his absolute sincerity. Even some of those who felt the sting of his reproof later became his friends, for they realized the utter devotion and honesty of purpose of him who had perhaps offended them." (Proceedings of the Society for Propagating the Gospel [1931:107—109]). Bregenzer's lack of moderation must have been caused by his personal history. Born in Germany in 1894, originally a Catholic, he emigrated to the United States in 1911. For seven years he wandered from one job to another, from keeping sheep in Texas to working on a banana boat that traveled back and forth to Central America. According to the biography published at his death (ibid.), it was in this period that Bregenzer lost his faith and forgot about religion, until in 1918 he joined the Moravian Church in the state of Wisconsin through the woman who was to become his wife. He became a Moravian and, after four years, entered the Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from which he

graduated as a pastor in December 1922, at twenty-eight years of age. Bregenzer's faith was, therefore, a convert's faith, and an adult convert who well understood the execrable condition of the sinner, having felt it in his own flesh. If we add to this the brutal secular manifestations that the punishment for sin assumed in Musawas (see Note 12 above), it is not too farfetched to suppose that Bregenzer could have been accused by members of the village, who had suffered from or were opposed to the missionary's inflexible zeal. The

accusation of being an agent for the U.S. Marine Corps or the U.S. government could have been simply a way of giving credibility to the accusation. It is hard to believe that the Sandinistas would have been willing to help a group of Indians get rid of a troublesome pastor, but they doubtless would have been eager to eliminate an enemy. The subsequent burning of the village—including the Moravian church—seems rather to be an example of the kind of hurricanes reaped by those who enjoy sowing the wind. According to Wuenderich (1986), a conflict broke out between Nelson, the Sumu leader who had been one of the founders of the village of Musawds, and Pastor Bregenzer on the subject of Nelson's animistic practices: the pastor expelled Nelson and his followers from the village, who later made the accusation to Blandén's troops. In this sense, Bregenzer's death was the result of an internal village conflict completely removed from politics, but the conflict became involved in the anti-imperialist war that was ongoing in the region at the time. 34. For example, according to technical reports made after the triumph of

the revolution, the Bonanza mine dumped more than 500 tons a day of chemical wastes (cyanide, quartz, lead, zinc) for more than forty years into the

river that is rightly called Sucio ("Dirty"), a tributary of the Bambana. The same reports recommended, therefore, that the waters of these rivers should not be used for human consumption by the Indian villages, mainly Sumu, located on their banks: See IRENA 1980a and b. On the catastrophic impact of this contamination on these villages, see Dolores (1985).

The Atlantic Coast and Capitalist Modernization

A DEVELOPMENTALIST APPROACH TO THE ATLANTIC COAST The economic boom during World War II revived the interest of the Somoza

government in the Atlantic Coast. After the war, a growing number of references to the Atlantic Coast and its economic potential appeared in government pronouncements, indicating an approach quite different from the one that had prevailed up to that time: a modernizing approach, which had as its goal the capitalist development of productive forces on the Coast and their integration into a more dynamic overall economic plan. The leaders of the Nicaraguan government—the Somoza dictatorship— repeatedly defined two fundamental tasks on the Atlantic Coast in this period:

the geographical integration of the Coast with the Pacific region and the integration of Costefios into national culture (the "Hispanization" of the Coast). Later, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, government agencies would

develop an approach converting wide areas of the Coast's territory to agricultural production for the domestic market and for export.

The message sent by the dictator Anastasio Somoza to the National Congress in 1942 shows one of the first signs of this new approach:

Basic education is showing visible progress, and I have tried to Strengthen it on the Atlantic Coast where there are twelve new

schools . . . the Government will open new schools and will reinforce the educational centers in the principal towns of the Atlantic Coast, in order to conclude the campaign of spiritual and real nationalization which will definitively incorporate into the heart of the nation our Nicaraguan brothers in that great and fruitful area. It is

not necessary to deliberate over the supremely important consequences for Nicaraguan economic life which the highway to the

Coast will bring. In addition to coming into contact with those unexploited regions and hard-working peoples, this highway will Strengthen the spiritual, social and commercial bonds between the Pacific and those wild and rich regions, bringing us into contact with the civilization of the Atlantic and its markets, which will consume more products on a greater scale. There were problems with linguistic

nationalization ... the wall of passive resistance by Protestant 60

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 61

schools and a strong nucleus of the Creole element insisted on paralyzing this work. But [their] selfish maneuvres and racially-based excuses were Of no use. These were met with an effective reaffirmation

of the plan, and at the same time, with no eye to the cost, the Government supported and accepted any means proposed to reach its goal. Special Spanish-language instructors, paid by the state, were named, and in this way the teachers who did not speak Spanish were eliminated. [Somoza Garcia 1942; emphasis added].

Somoza's piece is particularly explicit. The Nicaraguan state's twopronged approach to this part of its territory and population can be clearly seen. In both cases, the viewpoint is integrationist: "spiritual" integration or nationalization "from above," imposing the dominant language through the school system; and geographical integration of the Coast with the Pacific. Both these approaches had the same goal: to increase the circulation and marketing of products from the Pacific. The approach to the Coast as a potential market for products from the Pacific is related to certain measures dear to the heart of the dictatorship— and, in fact, to measures taken during this period throughout the continent— aimed at increasing domestic demand for capitalist production by expanding the domestic market (see Gutiérrez 1978). The dictator's message coincided with certain measures taken in the same year to make use of the productive potential of the Coast. In 1942 experimental agriculture stations were created in Kukra Hill and El Recreo, both in the department of Zelaya, in order to experiment with humid tropic-type crops. This project was carried out in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which apparently kept the most important research findings. Governmental interest in geographical and cultural integration was to remain explicit, however, although the economic goal of expanding the domestic market would be dropped in favor of modernizing the system of agricultural export production. Domestic and regional-level factors influenced this redirection of the economic function of capital assigned to the Atlantic Coast. The domestic factors were the cotton boom that took place in the

early 1950s and the general recession on the Coast in the 1960s. The regional-level factors were efforts toward Central American economic integration and modernization strategies sponsored by international financial institutions and, in particular, by the Alliance for Progress. Stimulated by the rise in world prices, cotton growing developed rapidly in the Pacific regions and this development introduced profound modifications in the country's economy and its class structure. The best lands for this crop were to be found in the northwest (the departments of Leén and Chinandega).

The cotton boom led to the forced displacement of farmers who had previously settled in this region, and who were growing food crops. Because the volume of production increased in the amount of land under cultivation

62 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

rather than through higher yields per acre, a prolonged and massive movement of people were pushed off their land toward the agricultural frontier (the department of Nueva Segovia in the north, as well as the Atlantic Coast) and the cities. This migration would last two decades and would later be further aggravated by the growth of export cattle raising and irrigated rice production (Vilas 1986, Chapter 2).

The migration toward the Atlantic that began in the 1950s was qualitatively different from that of the preceding period. In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, employment opportunities in the fastest-growing sectors of the Coast econom y——mining, the rubber industry, and transportation and storage for the banana companies—were a strong attraction for labor. Only after these activities declined did workers take up farming. By contrast, the immigration

Starting in the 1950s consisted primarily of small farmers who had been pushed off their land by the rise of export-oriented agriculture and commercial capital.!

From a political point of view, this new approach to the Atlantic Coast formed part of the process of modernizing export agriculture that had been recommended by the World Bank at the beginning of the 1950s. A World Bank delegation that visited the country in 1952 recognized that Nicaragua would continue to have a predominantly agrarian economy in the foreseeable future and that industrial development would necessarily be subordinated to agricultural development. It consequently recommended promoting export agriculture and cattle raising, increasing foreign investment, free importation

of capital goods, tax exemptions, equal rights for foreign and domestic capital, and guaranteeing total convertibility of profits IBRD 1953).

At the same time, this change in orientation coincided with the modernizing and developmentalist approach of certain UN agencies. It was

also to have much in common with the kind of anticipatory reformism postulated a decade later by the Alliance for Progress, which saw social polarization and lack of development in the countryside as the breeding ground for revolution. It was also related to the general modernization of

export policies motivated by the integrative approach of the Central American Common Market and set the stage for linking this with the expansion into Central America of small U.S. multinational companies.

In more specific terms, the new approach sought an answer to the recession on the Atlantic Coast, which had begun to be felt particularly strongly in the early 1960s. Identifying new areas of economic activity and directing domestic and foreign capital to them was supposed to reinject economic growth into the region. Finally, the developmentalist approach reflected certain initiatives by the more modemizing sectors of the dominant classes, who saw the Coast as a territory open to the introduction of capital and labor from inside and outside the country. The government's goal was to

create the most propitious conditions for using this space for capital

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 63

accumulation by building an infrastructure, settling and concentrating the labor force, and homogenizing the population. In brief, the government was to transform the land into capital and the population into a labor force and put these elements to use in the service of export capitalism. In its effort to carry out these tasks, the state itself underwent changes

and modernizations as profound as those made in the territory and its resources. The patrimonial state of the 1930s and 1940s, which was simple

to the point of primitivism, had to give way to a modernization and differentiation of its structures. It was aided in this, as were other countries in the region, by programs of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Just as U.S. capital and the way it expanded into foreign markets

modernized the Central American economy, U.S. governmental structures modemized their counterparts on the periphery. This was a prolongation of a historical constant, although through different means: What had been done at the beginning of the century by the U.S. Marines was now being done by USAID technocrats. In a certain way, modernization also affected U.S. state apparatus and style.

INFONAC, Forest Policy, and the Development of Cattle Raising The first institution designed to carry out this modemizing approach was the

Instituto de Fomento Nacional (Institute for National Development, INFONAC). Created in 1953 on the recommendation of the World Bank delegation, INFONAC was not specifically conceived for the development of the Atlantic Coast, but many of its more ambitious projects were carried out there.

Possibly the most important of all was the Proyecto Forestal del Norte (Northern Forest Project). Its goals were reforestation and fire fighting and prevention in the pine forests that were growing back naturally,

the development of experimental and research plantations, and the establishment of a wood-pulp and paper-processing complex after the pine forests had been reestablished. In 1959 INFONAC took on 24,710 acres of pine savanna between the Coco and Wawa Rivers that had been severely affected by overcutting and fires; in 1964 the project area had reached 321,230 acres, with an investment of $370,000. According to

estimates by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAQ), which collaborated with the project, natural pine reforestation should allow for the production of wood for pulp within eighteen years (FAO-INFONAC 1966). The project focused on a real problem but did so in a wrong way. Instead

of calling for the help of the Miskito population living in the area, it opted

for technocratic measures supported by sophisticated and expensive equipment, which generated hostility toward the project among the Miskitos.

64 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

According to Jenkins (1986:149), the Indians intentionally burned down the pine forests in retaliation against the arrogant attitudes of the technicians, as well as to get a better salary on the fire-fighting teams.

INFONAC was also active in creating forest reserves. It aimed at conserving resources on the brink of extinction as a result of the predatory practices of foreign companies; however, it did not take into account the Indians living in affected areas. Several reserves were created:

1. Decree 569 of February 28, 1961 established the Proyecto Forestal

del Norte, covering the area between the Coco River in the north, the Caribbean Sea in the east, and the Wawa River in the south and west—in other words, the entire Cape Gracias a Dios region. The Somoza government hoped, after a certain period of recuperation for the forests, to be able to give out concessions in the area once again. This area consisted of 1,561,672 acres, of

which something more than 8 percent (130,963 acres) were communal lands. Decree 106 of February 1969 declared the project

area to be a Permanent Forest Reserve to be administered by INFONAC. 2. Later, Decrees 156 (April 1971) and 147 (November 1976) declared

the area between the Rfo Grande de Matagalpa and the Wawa (2,152,859 acres) and the area between the Wawa and the Kukalaya (251,053 acres) each to be a Permanent Forest Reserve, and to be administered by INFONAC.

In all, 3,953,100 acres of forestland were affected, of which something more than 494,200 acres belonged to Indian villages. This created tensions and conflicts with the Indians, which some governmental agencies fruitlessly

attempted to overcome. In 1974 the Instituto Agrario Nicaragiiense (Nicaraguan Agrarian Institute) gave land titles for almost 74,130 acres to

sixteen villages on the Coco River (among which were Waspam, Bilwaskarma, Saklin, Wasla, Kum, Bismuna, and Kisalaya) that had been dispossessed by INFONAC's Proyecto Forestal del Norte. In 1976, 21,498 acres more were given to the group of ten villages around Puerto Cabezas, which already owned 24,710 acres by virtue of the Harrison-Altamirano Treaty (Jenkins, 1986; 222~224). But these measures were not enough to calm the Indians. The lands they had been given were only a small part of those occupied by INFONAC. In addition, the Sumu villages were not taken into account in these compensatory measures. Litigation among the villages conceming their lands and boundaries further confused the situation. As village population grew, the villages demanded more and more land, and frequently the lands belonging to one village were superimposed on lands belonging to another. Furthermore, the FAO-INFONAC study cited earlier recommended a

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 65

program to promote the industrialization of all the natural resources of the Coast and to stimulate export agriculture, particularly cattle raising:

e Establish a general program for the entire Coast region in order to

make use of all its resources and to systematize their commercialization in a rational manner; e Make use of existing resources, give special credits for a period of

10 years to private capital which wishes to establish large cattle ranches on the Atlantic Coast;

« Authorize the regulated exportation of cattle on the hoof on the Atlantic Coast in order not to affect the market for chilled meats from the Pacific;

« Intensify cattle raising in other areas of the country in order to increase the exportation of cows to the Atlantic Coast.

IAN and Agrarian Colonization Instituto Agrario Nicaragiiense (Nicaraguan Agrarian Institute, [AN) was the first government agency to take on the development project on the Coast in the context of the agrarian reform law (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, April 19, 1963). This agrarian reform, like other similarly inspired laws passed in other

countries of the region in the same period, had as its political goal the integration of lands considered marginal into a strategy of colonization. The law, in effect, aimed at the "incorporation of new lands," the "diversification of production," the "industrialization of the countryside," and "fostering small rural businesses," as well as creating rural schools, providing farmers with modern technology, improving housing in the countryside, organizing the market for farm products, and giving credit assistance; in general terms, what would later be known as the “integrated strategy for rural development." The

law also postulated the organization of farm cooperatives and the "transformation of Indian communities into production cooperatives." The following types of land were affected for the purposes of this law: (1) national lands "which are suitable [for cultivation]"; (2) community lands

and lands that were the private property of municipalities and autonomous institutions; (3) lands to be acquired by the IAN; (4) privately held lands that do not fulfill the social function of property (Article 18), defined as those lands that were left fallow, uncultivated, insufficiently cultivated, or not exploited by their proprietor over a period of two years (Article 19). Later in this chapter, I will explain how the points emphasized here conflicted with the kind of agricultural land use practiced by Indian villages and previously established mestizo farmers and would ultimately lead to many of these groups losing their land.

The most important project carried out through the IAN was the Proyecto Rigoberto Cabezas (PRICA), which would come to include more

than 988,400 acres in the municipalities of Rama (in the department of

66 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

Zelaya), Villa Sandino (then Villa Somoza, in the department of Chontales),

and Morrito (in the department of Rfo San Juan). The project, begun in 1963, aimed at settling 4,000 farm families, who would go into export cattle production (approximately two-thirds of the land in this project was for this purpose) and the production of vegetables and grains.

PRICA had a fair amount of foreign financing; the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), for example, loaned the project $8.3 million. But from the beginning the impact of the project on the people involved in it was very slight. The underlying idea of the project was that it would be carried out in unpopulated territory, but this was not the case. During the 1950s and

1960s, major changes in land tenure had taken place that the project's planners either were not aware of or did not take into account. A large number of farmers in the departments of Boaco and Chontales had been gradually moving east, attracted by the availability of land, employment on U.S. banana plantations and in rubber camps, and cultivation of the perennial herb raicilla. Moreover, 400 farm families affected by volcanic eruptions in other regions of the country had moved into the area of Nueva Guinea. Thus, when the PRICA began, a large part of the region had already been put to use.

In practice, the major effect of the project was to create an important labor and land reserve for export agriculture. PRICA made small producers dependent on the large cattle raisers of Boaco and Chontales. The small farmers were incorporated into cattle production through a system of land rental to raise beef cattle or to produce milk and milk products. In the first

case, the farmers had to run all the risks of cattle production in its more labor-intensive phases; but after the calves attained a certain size, these were "finished" on large cattle ranches close to the export slaughterhouses, or else

sold to exporters of live cattle. In the second case, small farmers were subordinated to the buyers who took the milk to processing plants; or, in the case of farmers living far from the market, the milk was processed as cheese on the farm. In every case, this arrangement also allowed small farmers to produce basic grains and contributed to the clearing and preparation of new pastureland. As new land began to be used for market production, the small farmers were once again pushed off to lands even farther away. In this sense, the real

role of the families participating in PRICA was to open up agricultural territory for later appropriation by large landowners. The policies carried out

by IAN in this part of the Coast thus reinforced the natural tendencies of agrarian capitalism. Another IAN project in the same period was Tasba Raya (New Land, in Miskito). The project was located west of La Tronquera, in a wide-leaf forest area. IAN, with the collaboration of the Moravian and Catholic churches and the Partido Liberal Nacionalista (Somoza's Liberal Nationalist party), founded

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 67

a farm colony composed of four settlements that together covered over 741,300 acres. The goal of the project was to solve the problem of the lack of agricultural land for the Miskito villages located downriver on the Coco River; these villages had been forced to move off the northern bank of the river when a 1960 International Court of Justice ruling assigned that area to Honduras. The project was also used to relocate some of the villages on forestlands where INFONAC was trying to develop its forest preservation programs. Finally, some families affected by the periodic flooding of the lower Coco River were also relocated.

The Indian farmers who had been relocated adapted well to the surroundings. Land clearing was done collectively, as were the first rice planting and the planting of fruit trees, and steps were taken to collectivize the production process. However, at a certain point the Somoza government decided that the project was excessive, because of the possibility of conflicts

between the people in the setthements and the government. The French technicians who were working on the project were expelled from the country, accused of subversion; later the cooperative model was abandoned, and the families were given individual parcels of 123.5 acres each. A third IAN farm colonization project was the Proyecto Siuna, covering 86,485 acres and involving 800 families. The project's boundaries were the highway to Puerto Cabezas and the Silby, Kipo, and Prinzapolka rivers. The project created conflicts with the mestizo farmers who had earlier moved into the area and with some Sumu villages. The IAN plan was to give parcels of 50 manzanas (87.5 acres) each to the colonists; the farmers who were already working part of this land were relocated or had their lands parceled up into lots of 86 acres each and given to the new colonists.

Between 1964 and 1973, IAN gave land titles for 2,594,550 acres to 16,000 families. All the titled land was on the agricultural frontier; the fertile western regions, with a high concentration of farmers, were not affected. The Programa Nacional de Titulacién (National Title Program) operated only in the departments of Nueva Segovia, Jinotega, Matagalpa, Chontales, Rio San

Juan, and Zelaya; more than half the titled land was in Zelaya. The geographical distribution of this land makes it clear that the program's essential goal was to lessen the pressure of small farmers on the land in the west, where cotton growing was taking land away from farmers who were growing basic grains, and to move these farmers to the agricultural frontier. CODECA

Although neither the agrarian reform nor the agency that carried it out— IAN—had the Atlantic Coast as their explicit sphere of operations, land affected by the reform was that of the Eastern region. In 1965 a government

agency was created that was specifically charged with dealing with the Atlantic Coast: the Comisién para el Desarrollo de la Costa Atlantica

68 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

(Commission for the Development of the Atlantic Coast, CODECA), an agency of the Ministry of the Economy. Little documentation was left by this agency. According to the decree that created it, its goal was to "increase cultural, agricultural, cattle-raising, industrial, commercial, road-building, and

health activities on the Atlantic Coast." To do this, it was charged with diversifying the crops raised in the region and increasing the export production of cattle and other livestock, as well as setting up industries to process the region's raw materials.

CODECA initially planned an ambitious set of infrastructure and production projects (see CODECA 1966). However, it does not seem to have been very functional; according to the vice president of the Republic and, at the same time, minister of the economy (and therefore the highest authority

of the commission), CODECA was "only decorative" (Argtiello Cardenal 1966:2~—3). In any case, it does not seem to have had a role comparable in importance to those of INFONAC and IAN during the 1960s and 1970s.

Modernizing the Legislation on Natural Resources In contrast to the total permissiveness characterizing the government's initial attitude to foreign companies and its tolerance of the predatory exploitation of natural resources, in the 1950s the government began to take legal measures to regulate extractive activities, guarantee a minimum of rationality in the use of natural resources, and generate a higher local added value for these products. There is clearly a great distance between the letter of these laws and what the Somoza regime actually did, and in the meantime a large part of the

wealth produced by the country's natural resources ended up in the bank accounts of the foreign companies and of the Somozas and their associates.

But it must be noted that this reorientation at least implied a change of emphasis; moreover, it points up the contradiction between a state conceived of as the patrimony of the ruling family and a state that could actually defend the interests of capitalists as a class. The principal legal measures were the following:

1. The General Law on the Exploitation of Natural Wealth (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, April 17, 1958) declared that the state was the legal owner of

those natural resources that "have no other owners" and set conditions guaranteeing their rational exploitation through a system of licenses and concessions for exploration and exploitation. The law applied generally, with the exception of lands and waters that would be regulated by special laws, and set up the framework within which specific laws would be written for each type of resource. 2. The Special Law on Fishing (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, February 7, 1961) regulated the different types of fishing; established closed seasons for

turtles and established a system of licenses and rights according to boat

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 69

capacity. It prohibited transferring fish from one boat to another on the high seas without prior authorization and made the installation of a processing plant in the country a prerequisite for the granting of a commercial fishing license.

3. The Special Law on the Exploration and Exploitation of Mines and Quarries (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, March 24, 27, and 30, 1965) abolished the Mining Code of 1906. It created the Comision Nacional de Mineria (National Mining Commission), charged with regulating the exploration and exploitation of these resources. Such activities would be carried out under concessions; the exploration period could not exceed five years, and the concession area could not be greater than 193 square

miles; the exploitation period of a given concession could not exceed fifteen years, and the maximum area was 7.7 square miles; but in both cases, the time periods could be extended. The law imposed different kinds

of taxes and set the terms for government participation at up to 30% of the profits from production and capital in the company receiving the

concession. |

4. The Law for the Conservation, Protection, and Development of the Forest Resources of the Country (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, October 21, 1967). This law, at least in the letter, demonstrates a change in concessions policy and official concern with the level of degradation of forest resources. It declared the conservation, protection, and development of the country's forest

resources to be of "national interest" and established direct government participation in their exploitation by means of the creation of reserves. It made, for the first time, a classification of lands that could be exploited; reduced the maximum land area of the concessions; made the installation of processing plants for cut wood a prerequisite for the granting of licenses, as a

way of adding value to the exported product; imposed taxes; and set maximum periods for exploitation licenses.

Development Projects What follows is a rapid review of the relatively wide range of projects designed or developed by the government in this period. This listing may help give a better understanding of the government's viewpoint in its approach to the Atlantic Coast in the 1960s and 1970s.

1. Infrastructure projects, including building a port for foreign trade; constructing the Rfo Blanco—Siuna and Puerto Cabezas—Rosita highways; improving secondary roads; constructing the Rama—Pearl Lagoon port complex; constructing the Bluefields—Puerto Cabezas intercoastal canal; and providing rural electrification,

2. Communications projects, such as extending the national telephone network to the Coast; 3. Agriculture and agroindustry projects: the building of grain storage

70 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

houses in Waspam and Bluefields; the Tierra Dorada (Kukra Hill) sugar plantation and banana and pineapple plantations; a model slaughterhouse for the Coast; the construction of shrimp-drying plants for export; banana plantations on the banks of the Coco and Escondido rivers.

Few of these projects were ever fully executed; most of them never got

beyond the planning stage. But even as bureaucratic fantasies, they give

evidence of a modernizing, dynamic conception of the role of the government, which contrasts with the passive permissiveness of the preceding decades. Furthermore, after the revolutionary triumph of 1979, many of these shelved projects served as the basis for the Sandinista approach to the Atlantic Coast.

Cooperative Organization and Community Development During the 1960s, the government and several nongovernmental agencies, Nicaraguan and foreign, introduced programs for cooperative organization and

community development. These strategies were similar to those recommended in the same period in Latin America and the Caribbean by agencies and programs of the U.S. government—USAID, American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the Alliance for Progress, and others. The main ventures of this sort were the following (in addition to others, like Tasba Raya, which have already been mentioned):? 1. ACARIC, Asociacién de Clubes Agricolas del Rio Coco (Association of Farm Clubs on the Coco River), was created in 1967 by Capuchin priests and Moravian pastors. Its goal was to organize several dozen Miskito farm

clubs on the river so farmers could protect themselves against the abusive practices of the Chinese and mestizo merchants in the area and improve living conditions in the villages through the development of environmental hygiene, preventive health measures, and so forth. ACARIC brought together

almost fifty villages on the Coco River, but it failed in 1974 because of a heavy dependence on tied credit, poor administration, and corruption in some of its leadership. 2. CASIM, Comité de Accién Social de la Iglesia Morava (Committee for Social Action of the Moravian Church), was created in the late 1960s. It

organized some cooperatives in the northern part of Zelaya: one to grow

cashew nuts in Wasla, others for running rice threshers in Sisin and Musawas. In the latter two cases, the villages had problems with the administration and maintenance of the equipment; in Sisfn the thresher was never installed.

3. FUNDE, the Fundacién Nicaragtiense de Desarrollo (Nicaraguan Development Foundation), supported the creation of several production and

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 71

consumption cooperatives in the early 1970s in the Pearl Lagoon area: Tasbapauni (copra), Orinoco and Marshall Point (fishing), and Karaté (copra and fishing). 4. IAN promoted such endeavors as production cooperatives in Nueva Guinea, commercialization cooperatives in the Tasba Raya project, trading cooperatives on the Plata River.

5. The Ministry of Agriculture and Cattle Raising also promoted the creation of farm clubs in different parts of Zelaya.

Cooperative projects were generally accompanied by programs to train local leaders in education, health, and other fields and to improve living conditions in the area. In this respect, there was a fair amount of activity around the training of midwives, cooperative organizers, housewives, local judges, teachers.

However, various factors prevented a consolidation of a strong cooperative movement. One of these was the incorporation into a single organization of groups with very different and even opposing interests; this, for example, is what happened in the San Isidro cooperative in Siuna, which

put small and middle-level producers together with merchants and transportation owners. Another factor was the introduction of large amounts

of money into communities with little cash flow, which led to internal conflicts and occasionally gave rise to corruption. At other times, the administration of equipment was used as a power base by which to strengthen

some individual's political position within the community. In some Cases,

the equipment was too sophisticated or complex for the people in the community to handle. In general, cooperative relationships were strengthened more through events taking place inside the community than through the incorporation of experiences from outside. Moreover, the ambivalence with which the Somoza regime (particularly its local agents, the National Guard and the rural justices) viewed these projects is one of the reasons they failed to produce results. The regime, in fact, vacillated between accepting these experiments as part of a strategy of anticipated reform that would forestall greater conflicts and seeing them as a breeding ground for "subversion."

In spite of specific failures in the development of cooperative organizations themselves, these experiments did not take place in a vacuum, nor were their effects confined to the short term. In a sense, these attempts put together certain real, if unformulated, concerns of the people involved, above all in the Indian villages hard hit by the recession, the relocation from Honduras, and natural disasters (floods, hurricanes, and the like). At the same

time, they introduced new ideas and concepts into the region, and their successes and failures helped pave the way for the more permanent kinds of organization that would arise in the 1970s.

72. THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

CHANGES IN THE POPULATION AND THE ECONOMY Between 1963 and 1971, the total population of the department of Zelaya grew from 88,963 to 145,508, an increase of 63 percent, while the total population of Nicaragua increased 22 percent. As a result, the participation of the Costefio population in the national total grew from less than 6 percent to almost 8 percent between the two censuses. Even more spectacular was the growth of the economically active population, which increased by 6.4 percent for the entire country, while in Zelaya it grew more than 37 percent, and the economically active agricultural population there increased by 51 percent.

A comparison of the 1963 and 1971 censuses shows that during the period between these Zelaya was the only department with an absolute increase in the number of rural salaried workers (from 5,279 to 7,442), whereas the number of employers remained the same; the number of workers

per employer increased from 11:1 to 17:1. The same results obtain with respect to the economically active agricultural population: Between the two censuses, the number of workers per employer grew 50 percent, from 8:1 to

12:1. It may be assumed that the relatively rapid expansion of the large landowning sector involved an absolute increase in the need for wage labor.

The number of self-employed agricultural workers grew 40 percent between 1963 and 1971, and the number of unpaid family members grew 38 percent; the two occupational categories, which together in 1963 constituted 66 percent of the economically active agricultural population in Zelaya, grew

to 90 percent in 1971, possibly as a result of the expansion of the agricultural frontier through immigration, both spontaneous and planned. Comparing the two censuses, a CSUCA (Confederacion Universitania de

Centro America) research project found that in Zelaya the increase in the amount of land actually dedicated to production was quite low in comparison

with the amount of land held by landowners; this further supports the conclusion that there was heavy monopolization of land. According to the

same CSUCA study, only 30 percent of the increase in land used for agriculture could be attributed to the increase in the number of small and middle-level producers, whereas the other 70 percent (976,260 acres) had fallen into the hands of large landowners after small farmers had cleared and prepared the land for agriculture (CSUCA 1978:253-254). Tables 3.1 and 3.2 offer a general perspective on the transformations that took place in Coast agriculture during the 1960s. These changes cannot be explained solely as the effect of policy measures adopted in the 1950s and 1960s; natural disasters (the hurricanes and floods that affected wide areas of

the Coco River) also had their effect. But a significant number of these changes can undoubtedly be attributed to the government's new policy approach.

In the first place, there was an appreciable increase in the number of holdings (54 percent) and, above all, in the amount of land under cultivation

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 73

Table 3.1 Department of Zelaya: Changes in Agricultural Structure in the 1960s Area of Farm Units

Farm Units (thousands Cattle Municipality (number) of acres) (head)

1963 1971 1963 1971 1963 1971

Bluefields 978 1,043 68.6 88.4 Corn Island 67 131 1.0 7,086 1.4 57,740 95 La Cruz del Rio Grande 997 1,857 115.3 281.3 9,515 13,259

Prinzapolka 1,331 2,692 41.5 246.2 7,633 21,270

Puerto Cabezas TT 790 9.3 96.0 2,424 2,140 Rama 1,995 5,840 214.8 48.8 12,335 66,426 Cape Gracias a Dios 1,498 78 5.9 1.2 4,514 2,473 Waspam 733 483 11.8 11.2 4,416 3,997 Zelaya, TOTAL 7,676 12,914 468.2 774.5 47,928 117,000 Source: Republic of Nicaragua, Secretary of Agriculture, agricultural censuses, 1963 and 1971.

Table 3.2 Department of Zelaya: Changes in the Average Distribution of Land Area and Cattle in the 1960s

Average Area Average Herd Average Herd

Municipality per Farm? per Farm? per Manzanab> 1963 1971 1963 1971 1963 1971

Bluefields 70.15 84.41 7.2 — 7.4— 0.10 0.08 Com Island 15.35 10.00 — — La Cruz del Rio Grande 115.72 151.47 9.5 71 0.08 0.04 Prinzapolka 31.20 91.47 5.7 79 0.18 0.08 Puerto Cabezas 12.06 121.56 3.1 2.7 0.26 0.02

Rama 107.70 93.98 6.2 11.4 0.05 0.12 Cape Gracias a Dios 3.94 15.71 3.0 31.7 0.76 2.0 Waspam 16.20 23.31 6.0 7.4 0.37 0.30 Zelaya, TOTAL 55.97 98.72 5.0 9.0 0.09 0.09 Source: Republic of Nicaragua, Secretary of Agriculture, agricultural censuses, 1963 and 1971.

4In manzanas (1.75 acres) bNumber of head of cattle

(172 percent) and of cattle (166 percent). The average area per farm and average number of cattle per owner also grew, but the relatively small average number of cattle per ranch remained the same. In other words, cattle raising in this region remained relatively extensive. Large-scale cattle raising

was basically concentrated in the neighboring departments of Boaco and

Chontales; these herds moved each year in the dry season toward the municipality of El Rama in the department of Zelaya in search of natural pastures.

The average area per farm tended to become more homogeneous: the dispersion coefficient fell by almost 28 percent between the two censuses,?

74. THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

but this coefficient increased more when related to the number of cattle per unit of surface area (the dispersion coefficient grew 77 percent) than when related to the average herd per ranch (an increase of 72 percent). Insofar as it is possible to reach some conclusion from these figures, they could suggest a strong differentiation with respect to the intensive or extensive nature of Coast cattle raising. We may also distinguish between the changes that took place in the Coco River area (the municipalities of Puerto Cabezas, Waspam, and Cape Gracias a Dios) and those on the agricultural frontier (the municipalities of El Rama, Prinzapolka, and La Cruz del Rio Grande). The census figures for the

first area show an agricultural crisis during the 1960s: a decline in the number of farms, in their surface area, and in the number of cattle. This was

clearly a result of floods, hurricanes, and the relocation of part of the population outside of the area. In contrast, on the agricultural frontier the amount of farmland grew, as did the average size of farms and cattle herds, in absolute figures as well as in comparison to the rest of the department. The situation in the municipality of El Rama is interesting: The increase in the number of farms and cattle herds was greater than increases in the surface area

under cultivation. There was, therefore, a decrease in the average area per farm, but the average herd size grew, per farm and per land unit. Cattle raising remained extensive in nature, but the number of cattle per manzana went from 1:20 to 1:8. The slight reduction in the average amount of land per farm in El Rama and the relative concentration of cattle per farm suggest that most of the best land had been occupied early on.

The pressure from the modernization of agrarian capitalism created contradictions on three levels: 1. A contradiction emerged between this modemizing capitalist project as a whole and the kinds of land and natural resource use that had been developed

by mestizo farmers who had already settled on this land and by Indian villagers. In the first case, IAN’s colonization and titling programs came into conflict with the land rights these farmers claimed on the basis of the work

they had put into their land. This situation arises frequently on the agricultural frontier. The farmers who begin to work these lands on their own

initiative—in the sense that they are not part of a government program—

have to clear previously virgin lands and make different kinds of improvements; from their point of view, they have a right to this land because of the labor they have invested in it. IAN's colonizing programs generally paid no attention to these farmers’ rights and forced them to move farther east or, when this was not possible, took away some or all of the land they were working. In the second case, the forestry programs took over Indian communal lands, did not recognize preexisting land rights, and exerted a negative pressure on the kind of use made of natural resources.

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION = 75

This contradiction is expressed in regional terms as a confrontation between the Pacific and the Atlantic, and in ethnic terms as a conflict between the mestizo, or "Spanish," ethnic group and the Indians. In fact, this

conflict is not new; what is new is the modernization of the regional and ethnic contradictions that have been present throughout Nicaraguan history as far back as the colonial period.

2. No less important is the fact that the expansion of this type of Capitalism transfers to the Atlantic Coast the conflict between agrarian Capitalists and small farmers and farm workers that had already arisen in western Nicaragua. What from a regional perspective appears to be one single problem of territorial usurpation shows up on this level as a complex set of class contradictions, which results in the subordinate players in the conflict

being dispossessed of their land in the same way and through the same mechanisms as those used to dispossess small farmers in the Pacific. 3. The arrival of small farmers who had been pushed off their lands in

the Pacific region further displaced certain Indian villages, which were pressured into abandoning their lands, thus heightening interethnic conflicts between Indians and mestizos. These conflicts were particularly acute in the mining region and, to a lesser extent, on the Coco River—in the latter case, through the expansion of cattle raising by mestizo landowners. In the south, the low population density and the large amount of available land did not generate the same kind of conflicts, or at least not with the same violence as in other places. The expansion of the agricultural frontier as a result of this process had a Serious impact on the tropical forest, similar to that in other countries in the region (see, for example, Williams 1986). In 1963 the departments of Zelaya and Rfo San Juan together had 6 percent of the total number of cattle in the country; in 1972 this figure had reached 12 percent. In 1965 Zelaya had 7

percent of the land used for growing corn and in 1977 almost 20 percent (Slutzky 1981). According to some estimates, the eastward advance of the agricultural frontier caused the destruction of approximately 296,520 acres of tropical forest per year (Jenkins 1980), further aggravated by the fact that the high ecological cost was never translated into an appreciable improvement in living and working conditions for the farmers brought in from the Pacific.*

An analysis of the census data shows that economic growth on the agricultural frontier contrasts with recession on the river. This was caused by several factors, some of which have already been mentioned: the vulnerability of regional production to the erratic fluctuations in international prices; the resulting closures of the main foreign companies, also caused by negative ecological conditions; a reduction in salaried employment; the impact of the 1960 relocations and increased demographic pressure on scarce resources; the destruction caused by the 1971 hurricane; and others.

76 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

The developmentalist initiatives of the state may be viewed in this light;

they were attempts to reintroduce growth into an economy that was in a recessive phase. The general success of these attempts was slight: There was

little development, and concessions continued to be granted on strictly neocolonialist principles. But the growth of certain new industries, such as

large-scale fishing, dynamized the economic life of southern Zelaya, especially in the area of Bluefields, Corn Island, and Pearl Lagoon, and further differentiated this area from the mines and river areas.

Fishing: Large-scale fishing began in 1953 when Alberti Seafoods, a U.S. company, obtained a contract to fish for shrimp and other shellfish off the Atlantic Coast. In the 1960s and 1970s, large-scale fishing grew rapidly; several companies were established, especially with U.S. and Somoza capital. Production was primarily for export, and the main market was the United States. Despite some protective legislation, there was great deterioration in the

fish population, particularly shrimp and lobster, because of the lack of effective state controls; there were no closed seasons. Fishing required little

investment and provided high profits. Between 1958 and 1978, eighteen commercial fishing licenses were granted in the Atlantic, but as of the last year of this period there were only six processing plants in the country. A comparison of these figures shows the irrational way this resource was managed: "Floating" licenses, for firms without their own processing plants

on land, were granted, in spite of a law that explicitly prohibited this practice. This led to the existence of a fishing fleet far greater than the availability of the resource it was exploiting (see Urroz Escobar 1980).

Wood. The closure of NIPCO (the Nicaraguan Long Leaf Pine Lumber Company) in 1963 left hundreds of Miskitos, Sumus, and mestizos without jobs. The company had been founded in 1945 in Puerto Cabezas, and in less

than two decades its predatory practices had exhausted 741,300 acres of Savanna pine forests. In the 1950s it had come to produce half of all the lumber exported by Nicaragua. Exploitation was so intense that in 1963 Nicaragua became a net importer of wood products for the first time in its history.

In 1969 ATCHEMCO was established in La Tronquera, close to Waspam. The new enterprise was involved in the extraction of resins and oils from the pine forests felled by NIPCO. In the same year /ndustrias Forestales

de Centroamérica Sociedad Anénima (INFOCASA) was established with Spanish capital and began to produce industrial-quality wood. The firm took over 1,737 square miles belonging to the area of Krukira, violating Indian communal lands. There were many other similar cases, but in brief, according

to the Nicaraguan Central Bank, in 1975 concessions granted to lumber

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 77

companies in Zelaya covered 27,000 square kilometers (10,426 square

miles}—something over 40 percent of the total surface area of the department.

Tuno. In 1955 the U.S.-owned firm Wrigley's set up a tuno processing plant in Waspam. Tuno, the raw material for the production of chewing gum, was collected by teams of Miskito and Sumu workers who turned it over to the company to be processed. No measures were taken to replace this resource; for this reason, workers had to go farther and farther away to get to resinable trees as the productive capacity of those trees closest to the villages decreased.

In 1979 the plant decided to close down because of the triumph of the revolution.

Mines. Activity in the three large mines on the Coast was unequal but generally declined. The Rosita Mine (copper), property of the U.S. firm

Venture Limited, was bought in 1962 by the Canadian company Falconbridge, which had large investments in ferronickel mining in Central America and the Caribbean. In turn, in 1973 Falconbridge sold Rosita to

the U.S. company Rosario Mining Resources, which was also active in Honduras and the Dominican Republic. In 1975 the mine closed because of insufficient copper production, but it reopened in 1977 when sufficient reserves of gold and silver were found. La Luz Mine in Siuna (gold) was acquired by Falconbridge in 1960. Activities were interrupted in

1968 when the company's dam collapsed, partly flooding the mine. Approximately 3,000 people were put out of work by the closure, most

of them Indians. In 1973 the mine was acquired by Rosario and in 1978 returned to operation. Finally, the Bonanza Mine (gold, lead, zinc), property of Neptune Mining of the United States, continued operations unchanged.

During the 1960s and 1970s the government, through the Nicaraguan Central Bank and private consulting firms, studied the existence of new deposits of gold and other metals (copper, lead, zinc, iron) and stones (quartz, neumatite, limestone, and lutite).

The decline in mining production is reflected in the sharp fall in employment, provoked mainly by the closure of the Siuna mine. Between

1963 and 1971 almost 60 percent of mining jobs in Zelaya were lost (approximately 1,800 workers).

Oil Concessions. In the last ten years of the dictatorship, the state granted thirty-four exploration concessions for almost 14,826,000 acres. Of these,

thirty-two (94 percent, for 13,343,400 acres—91 percent of the total concession area) were on the Atlantic Coast. Table 3.3 shows the heavy concentration of these concessions in the hands of a few large companies.

78 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

Table 3.3 Main Petroleum Exploration Concessions on the Atlantic Coast in the 1970s

Number of Percent of

Concessionary Concessions Area Totalb

Franks Petroleum 43213 130423.9 9.7 Texaco Caribbean 5 Western Caribbean 5 936 7.0

ESSO 3 2177 16.2 Chevron/Phiips 2 1719 12.8 Union Oil 3 1453 10.8 TOTAL 22 10,802 80.4

Source: La Gaceta, Diario Oficial. 4In thousands of acres bTotal area of the Atlantic Coast

CONTRADICTIONS AND LIMITATIONS OF THE DEVELOPMENTALIST APPROACH

Starting in the 1950s and particularly in the 1960s, the Nicaraguan government played an active role on the Atlantic Coast. By building infrastructure, directing and financing development projects, and using economic, fiscal, and financial measures in general, the government worked

for the geographical and ideological integration of the Atlantic with the Pacific regions, attempting to create a market involving the Atlantic Coast's land, labor, and capital and, at the same time, generating external economies for the capital invested on the Coast. During this period, the Coast continued to be, for the Somoza regime, the same vast reserve of exploitable wealth that it had been during the enclave period. In 1974, at the height of the developmentalist approach, Anastasio Somoza Debayle (the son of the first Somoza) said of the Atlantic Coast: There is an abundance of work and subsistence for all Nicaraguans who love peace and work. Once again I repeat to the young people of the countryside who are suffering because all the land is occupied, that here are the Atlantic Coast and the Coast people waiting for them to come to make it part of our country and to make the most

progressive and the greatest agrarian reform in Latin America. [Somoza Debayle 1974:11]

But even so, the productive capacity of this treasure trove was seen as a patrimony to be administered, protected, and eventually renovated by the government; the government was even given a role in the exploitation of its resources. In other words, the Nicaraguan government was taking on, at least partially, the role of a properly capitalist government. This developmentalist

approach had, however, clear limitations, even in comparison with other developmentalist strategies in Central America. The first limitation was the relatively weak participation by Nicaragua in

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 79

the Central American Common Market and in the competition for foreign investment. Nicaragua's economic structure was relatively undeveloped and offered a weaker and more primitive investment platform than, for example, Costa Rica or Guatemala.° The control exercised by Somoza and his clique over the most growth-oriented sectors of the Nicaraguan economy further limited the range and effectiveness of the developmentalist approach.

A second limitation on this approach was the voracious acquisitiveness of the old landowning class and the new Somocista bourgeoisie (civilian and military). The developmentalist concept was that a kind of rural middle class would be created on marginal lands through capitalist "democratization" of

the access to private ownership of land; plus, efficient conditions for production would be created through colonization, cooperativization, and, in general, the provision of enough resources. This idea ran into conflict with the unchecked lust for land of both the old and the new landowning classes, who rapidly took over the lands prepared by farmers who had migrated to the area or had been relocated through colonization projects.

Third were the limitations of government institutions, which were basically part of the booty passed around among the ruling clique. To the extent that capitalist modernization necessitates increasing the government's regulatory capacity, government institutions must become more differentiated and rationalized so that they can function more effectively and efficiently. But

the Nicaraguan government of the 1960s and 1970s was still too much a captive of the Somozas and their associates; it was more the property of a small group of capitalists than the representative of the capitalist class in general. Thus it happened that despite legislative concern for regulating the exploitation of resources, the ruling clique maintained its policy of making extensive self-concessions. Out of sixty-five decrees and resolutions dealing

with natural resources on the Atlantic Coast promulgated during the last thirty years of the Somoza regime (1950-1979), forty-seven, or 72 percent, consisted of concessions granted to the Somoza family, close family friends, and high officials of the National Guard. This last point shows up the contradiction between the two conceptions of the state that coexisted in Nicaragua in this period. On the one hand, there was a class state, the modern capitalist state, and on the other, a patrimonial State, the direct and unmediated property of the holders of political power— the Somoza dictatorship's state. This contradiction is the basic cause of the tensions arising around the efforts of the modemizing bureaucracy and the international development agencies—including those of the U.S. government—to bring about a more rational exploitation of natural resources, a diversification of the productive system, and expanded access to land, in order to reduce the level of social antagonisms. These initiatives were generally limited by the rapacity of the Somoza dictatorship and by its use of political power to make money, increase the family fortune, and do favors for cronies.

80 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

The developmentalist approach also contributed to the aggravation of a number of ethnic and regional contradictions and increased the number of areas in which these were felt. This became especially the case in the forestry projects, which took over some Indian communal lands. The approach to land

adopted by IAN was the result of experiences with the capitalist type of agriculture that predominated in the Pacific but which had little to do with the conception of land held by Costefio Indian villagers and mestizo frontier

farmers. What to IAN were national lands—"fallow," “empty,” or "insufficiently cultivated"-——were, in fact, to the Indian villagers and even to a

large number of mestizo farmers who had migrated to the region in the 1950s, lands being cultivated in the most efficient way given the prevailing ecological, cultural, and financial conditions.

IAN's concept of "national lands" had a very precise meaning that reinforced the developmentalist, modernizing approach promoted by the government in that period. IAN's perspective on intensive agriculture came into conflict with the existence of an itinerant frontier agriculture. In frontier agriculture, farmers cultivate only a small part of their land in any given period, depending on the amount of resources they have or, more concretely, on the number of workers they can mobilize. The rest of the land, which to IAN might appear to be unused or empty, is really reserve land that will later be put into production, while the land under cultivation up to that point will be left fallow to allow it to recuperate naturally. Therefore, an important part of the land considered by IAN to be unused or insufficiently exploited was affected by the agrarian reform and was taken away from farmers—TIndians or mestizos—who were actually cultivating it in the correct manner. This contradiction aroused many complaints and protests to IAN by those affected, especially in the mining area. Moreover, the projects sponsored by IAN were explicitly oriented toward the organization of colonies and cooperatives and to the transformation of the Indian villages into cooperatives (Article 89 of the agricultural reform law). Although both villages and cooperatives are associative modes of production,

they are organized on different principles. The village is structured on the

basis of kinship; one belongs to it or not depending on one's family relations. The cooperative is structured upon a rational and contractual basis,

and one participates in it voluntarily through an agreement. The forced introduction of cooperative organization came into conflict with deeply rooted

cultural elements and added to conflicts in land use already mentioned. Although the successes of the cooperative movement were few, because of

the overall political limitations of the project and the fact that it was controlled by the landowning class and the Somocistas, ignorance of the modes of productive organization characteristic of the Indian groups created additional obstacles that were difficult to overcome. The experience left a residue of antagonism, or at least a lack of confidence, which would affect the

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 81

initial stages of the Sandinista agrarian reform. These attitudes were most widespread among those sectors of the Costefio population that in principle stood to benefit most from the revolutionary project.

In addition to these economic and developmental contradictions there

remained the historic contradictions between the ethnocentrism of the Nicaraguan state—the mestizo culture of the dominant class projected as the national culture—and the ethnic and cultural multiplicity of the Coast. Many government officials felt their particular culture was superior to that of the

Coast's people. The inhabitants of the Coast continued to be seen as nomadic, wild tribes. This disdain and stereotyping were a continuation of the ethnocentrism of the Nicaraguan state that had lasted more than a century. In 1961, one of the intellectual representatives of the modernizing tendencies of the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie recommended: “It is time for the state to start a plan to integrate these rich lands, whose inhabitants have lived in total abandonment and in moral and material poverty, without any concept of family, religion or faith, in complete ignorance of the world and its civilization."® In 1970 the (Somocista) newspaper Novedades (April 23, 1970) described the inhabitants of northern Zelaya as "migratory" and "savage." As a result of this combination of ethnocentric ignorance, prejudice, and arrogance, there was also a general disdain for the languages of the Costefio

people and communities; these were viewed not as languages but as dialects—and, therefore, as second-class languages that ought to be eradicated.

As a document put out by the Comisién para el Desarollo de la Costa Atlantica maintained, "The Rama Key dialect is very mixed with English, the use of this dialect is exclusively oral and essentially guttural. ...The dialect of these [Miskitos] contains many Spanish and English terms . . . the Sumu

group .. . has maintained the purity of their dialects and customs" (CODECA 1966: emphasis added).

Faithful to this conception of reality, the government continued its policy of nationalization by means of language and schools. The most Systematic action in this sense was the Proyecto Piloto de Educaci6én Fundamental del Rfo Coco (Pilot Project for Basic Education on the Coco River). Promoted by the Ministry of Public Education with technical assistance from UNESCO and external financing, the project combined literacy and basic education with community development (MEP 1960).

Before the 1950s, only the Moravian Church had shown concern for

education in the Coco River villages, basically in connection with its

pastoral work. Public education began to be systematized in the municipalities of Waspam and Cape Gracias a Dios during the pilot project; from 1955 to 1967, twenty-four public schools were established in different

villages. From an anthropological perspective, the project's primary goal may be seen as the gradual deculturalization of the Miskito villages and their

integration into mestizo social life; from an economic point of view, the

82 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

goal may have been related to the government's interest in giving a basic education to lumber company workers. Finally, community development activities do not seem to have been very effective in overcoming some of the most serious hygiene problems of the villages (see Moreira 1958). But, on the other hand, a relatively large number of Indians from the Rfo Coco who became leaders after 1979—revolutionaries and oppositionists—went through this project in one way or another. Creole English was the language that could best resist this "civilizing”

onslaught for forced acculturation by means of obligatory education in Spanish. It was Creole, but it was also English and thus a strategic language

for communicating with the growth centers of economic activity on the Coast: the mining and fishing companies and their managers. This may be one of the reasons for the higher position of the Creoles in the Costefio occupational hierarchy in comparison with the Miskitos and the Sumus. It must be said, however, that the Somozas' political discourse was less

wounding to Coast sensibilities than that of the government bureaucracy. They not only recognized that at least there was a civilization on the Coast, as well as potential markets, but also used a tone, sometimes paternalistic, sometimes picturesque, that contrasted with the language and attitudes of the bureaucrats, the bourgeoisie, and their political and literary representatives: “The riches of the sea, the fertility of its lands, its navigable rivers and its

open, hospitable, and loving people, are the virtues which adom your Atlantic shore (Somoza Debayle 1974:11; emphasis added). In fact, both Somozas (father and son) had an ambivalent attitude toward

the Atlantic Coast. They supported government Hispanization projects publicly in Managua, but whenever they traveled to the Coast, especially to Bluefields, they spoke to people in English and made a great show of their excellent relations with foreign companies and the U.S. government. It is possible that this ambivalence made many Costefios distinguish between the government bureaucracy and the Somozas. In any case, the paternalistic tone and the developmentalist-cum-folkloric approach of the Somozas contrasted

with the arrogant behavior of the mestizo civil servants with whom the people had to deal every day. The overwhelming effect of the capitalist state on the Coast—its people and their cultures—reinforced the historic ethnic and regional conflict between

the Pacific and the Atlantic, "Spaniards" and Costefios, and caused the Costefios to see mestizos as a homogeneous bloc. Positing the conflict in regional terms and giving priority to its ethnic and cultural dimensions made

it very difficult for Costefios to see the underlying class nature of the conflict—that is, that the workers (salaried workers, farmers, and fishermen) of the different ethnic groups reinforced, through their exploitation and their mutual confrontations, the reproduction of capitalist domination. This is a relatively common occurrence in frontier regions in general (see for example,

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 83

Ifiigo Carrera 1983). This contradiction served to reinforce the domination of the Pacific bourgeoisie and the foreign companies, but the situation exploded only after the triumph of the revolution.

THE 1960s RECESSION AND THE ACTIVATION OF THE COSTENO POPULATION

Crisis and Differentiation Since the early 1960s, on economic crisis has been felt in the northern areas

of the Atlantic Coast, caused by the exhaustion of forest and mining resources. The closure of NIPCO in 1963 and the Siuna mine in 1968, as well as the continuing exportation of all the profits to Managua and out of the country, aggravated the situation. The economic crisis began well before the fall of the Somoza regime.’ In

1966 the Atlantic Coast accounted for 9 percent of the total exports of Nicaragua; in 1975, for 5 percent. Decreases in the exportation of copper, wood, and cattle were the main reason for this reduction, which could not be compensated by new export items (shellfish, resins, lead, and zinc). Copper, which in 1966 accounted for 59 percent of the Coast's exports, fell to 2 percent of Coast exports in 1975; in this period, shrimp and lobster grew from 19 percent to 53 percent of all the Coast's exports. In 1975 shellfish and resins accounted for 75 percent of the exports of the region. The United States was almost the only market for these items. Many different factors combined in the 1960s and 1970s to create the

conditions for a change in the perceptions and attitudes of the Coast population. First was the economic crisis itself. The closure of the companies and resulting unemployment forced the Indian workers to go back to their villages, or else to look for other activities in the areas where they

had been working for a salary. Their return to the villages increased demographic pressures on local resources; this pressure was already high because of the relocation of the villages of the northern banks of the Coco River, which had been adjudicated to Honduras by the International Court of Justice in 1960. Traditionally, in the river villages the more fertile lands on what was now the Honduran side had been under cultivation, whereas the lands on the southern banks were used as pasture for small-scale cattle raising. In turn, these small-scale cattle raisers were being displaced by mestizo cattle ranchers who were advancing on communal lands, encouraged by government policies promoting the development of commercial cattle raising for the domestic market and for export. Both factors combined to lower yields for village crops and to increase the villagers’ dependence on the

merchants and on transport owners on the river. Many Sumu and Miskito miners turned to farming in the mines area but ran into land tenure problems with farmers who had previously been working in the area or who had arrived

84. THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

with IAN's colonization programs and had to adapt to a kind of agriculture quite different from that they had done in their villages. In every case the

income they could generate from these activities was low, even in comparison with the salaries they had eamed in the mines.

In addition, the economic transformations and, particularly, new Capitalist activities changed the way of life of many villages. The best-known

case may be that of the seacoast villages that fished for turtle. During the

1970s, U.S. companies began to supply credit in advance to Miskito fishermen so they could catch turtles all year long and not only on a seasonal basis, as they had traditionally done. The result was that people got

into debt and had to catch even more turtles to make their payments. In addition, the villagers became dependent on the cash income from the sale of turtles to buy food and other goods, having ceased other activities in order

to spend more time fishing. Thus, even as the turtle population dropped rapidly, it was necessary to do more fishing in order to maintain the flow of money income into the villages. This also generated tensions and conflicts within the villages, because now turtle meat was sold instead of being given away or exchanged for other goods, as had been the practice in the villages

(see Nietschmann 1973 for Tasbapauni, and Cattle 1979 for Sandy Bay Sirpi).

The situation had worsened for many fishermen; their debts mounted

rapidly, and it was difficult to repay these. But for others, possibly a minority, the new situation made it possible to make money and eventually to save. The fact that at first the difference between rich and poor was slight is irrelevant. In a relatively homogeneous social situation, as seems to have been the case in the villages up to the 1950s, small material differences— having two canoes instead of one, for example, and being able to lend the second one out in exchange for part of the catch—may have had a strong

social impact. But in some cases, economic differentiation within the villages became relatively marked, as in the villages in Pearl Lagoon and on the mouth of the Rfo Grande de Matagalpa. Research conducted in the early 1970s by Cattle in Sandy Bay Sirpi (near the mouth of Rfo Grande de Matagalpa) provides elements to appreciate the development of socioeconomic differentiation among villagers. For example, the average ownership of cattle was 1.4 head per family, but 55 families of the 67 living in the village had

no cattle, and there were families owning more than 15 head. The same differences were recorded for pig ownership (an average of 2.5 per family, with one-third of the families owning none and some owning up to 10 pigs) and chickens (Cattle 1979:42). The progress of the Coast economy in these years accelerated the process

of internal differentiation within the villages. Just as the expansion of turtle fishing eroded traditions and generated differences in the villages involved in this type of fishing, on the Coco River the sale of surplus

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 85

rice allowed some Miskitos to start small stores in their own villages, both in combination and in competition with the Chinese shopkeepers. According

to a CIERA research project, by the end of the 1970s most of the shopkeepers in the Coco River villages were of Miskito descent. It is not known whether the behavior of these Indian shopkeepers was different from that of the Chinese and mestizo merchants, but, as is indicated by the research project, in general the Indian shopkeepers were strongly rejected

by the other members of the villages, to the extent that they lost, from the villages' perspective, their ethnic identity (CIERA 1981:123). In some Miskito villages on the coast south of Puerto Cabezas (for example, Wawa Bar), a marked differentiation appeared—in some cases to the point of being expressed in overt conflict—between the men who had been able to obtain jobs with the foreign companies and those who had remained

subsistence farmers or fishermen. On the basis of this differentiation, the beginnings of social stratification within the ethnic group could be noted.

Therefore, in the course of a decade, changes occurred in all spheres of the lives of these people: in their place of residence, their economic situation, and relations among villages; between the villages and government agencies; and within the communities themselves. These changes affected the entire Costefio population, but in different ways and to different degrees.

The crisis affected the Indian villages in the north more than it did Indians and Creoles in the south. Although on the Coco River and in the mining district Sumus and Miskitos lost their jobs because of the exhaustion of resources and the closure of the companies, the expansion of industrial and export fishing in the Bluefields—Pearl Lagoon—Corn Island area opened up new possibilities of employment and income and made for new growth in the local economy.

During the 1960s, U.S., Somocista, and Cuban capitalists—the latter having left Cuba because of the triumph of the revolution there—began to settle in the Bluefields area, basically because of fishing activities. In the latter part of the 1970s small businesspeople from Jamaica, frightened by the nationalist policies of the Manley government, established themselves

in the Coast communities of Pearl Lagoon and the mouth of the Rfo Grande de Matagalpa, some only temporarily, others in a more or less permanent manner. Fishing, by its very nature, is an activity with strong multiplier effects. Its growth helped raise activity levels in a wide variety

of sectors: construction and repair of boats and fishing implements; unloading, processing, and storage; maintenance of equipment; transporting and supplying fuel. In addition, some sand companies were established, and the Kukra Hill sugar mill started operations. Trade between Bluefields, Corn Island, Pearl Lagoon, and Barra del Rfo Grande on the Atlantic Coast and Jamaica, Gran Cayman, and the east coast of the United States grew

86 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

rapidly. Money, and in particular dollars, began to circulate again, reactivating local commerce. In the early 1970s many Bluefields families had

at least one member living in the United States or in English-speaking countries in the Caribbean Basin who generated hard currency (Gordon 1985).

In the north, in contrast, and particularly in the mines and on the river, the climate was rather one of generalized depression. In this context, the community promotion campaigns sponsored by the Catholic and Moravian churches and by governmental and nongovernmental agencies constituted a space within which the expectations and frustrations of the people could be expressed, regardless of their immediate results. These programs contributed in activating the forces and the preoccupations that were beginning to arise in the villages; they emphasized the effectiveness of combined action by the

people involved and in some way helped to train some local people. Moreover, the activities of these institutions and the development of their programs brought some of the more energetic local people into contact with the outside world, allowing them to incorporate new experiences and new demands into their work. Costefio students began arriving at the universities of the Pacific (Managua and Leon).

But, at the same time, the development of these community programs and the administration of study grants, among other things, caused many

young people to prefer Spanish to their native language, because Opportunities to study, to improve oneself, and to leave the area for other places were greater for Spanish speakers. In addition, the young people lost interest in agriculture and viewed activities in the service sector as more attractive. This led them to undervalue their native language and caused some conflicts to arise with members of the older generations.

Transformations in the Moravian Church The Moravian Church was also undergoing a process of profound change in this period. The broad and decisive influence of the church in all aspects of Coast culture caused these changes to affect the way in which people began

to think of their way of life. The process of "nativization" of the church, which was to culminate in 1974, raised expectations on the part of the Miskito inhabitants of northern Zelaya, combining with and reinforcing the general dynamic of the region. The “nativization" of the Moravian Church was the set of steps taken to put Nicaraguan leadership in charge of the church and lessen its subordinate relationship to the U.S. church. The process began in 1949, a hundred years after the arrival of the first German missionaries; in 1962 the first Nicaraguan

bishop (of Creole origin) was elected, and the the Moravian Mission in Nicaragua became the Moravian Church in Nicaragua, at the level of a "province." In 1968 the first national treasurer was named, and the seat of the

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treasury was relocated from Bluefields to Puerto Cabezas. In 1969 the Biblical Institute of Bilwaskarma got its first Nicaraguan director (also a Creole). In 1971 four Nicaraguans formed part of the Directive Board elected by the Provincial Synod of Puerto Cabezas, and in 1973 Joseph Kelly, from Pearl Lagoon, became the superintendent of the church. In the same year, the directorship of the important Moravian School of Bluefields was assumed by a Nicaraguan. In 1974, upon celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Moravian Church work in Nicaragua, the Provincial Synod of Bluefields

elected for the first time a Directive Board composed exclusively of

Nicaraguans (Wilson 1975). |

The emancipation of the Nicaraguan church from U.S. leadership meant

that it became necessary for it to rely on its own financial resources to compensate for the reduction of funding from the United States. Therefore,

the church viewed with interest programs for the social and economic strengthening of the Indian villages and of the Coast as a whole, because this

would lead to greater financial contributions by the villages. As already mentioned, the church openly supported the formation of ACARIC, and Moravian pastors took positions in it. Nativization also raised expectations among pastors of Miskito origin that they would have a greater say in the affairs of the church. But, in fact, nativization led to a greater institutional influence of Creole officials. At the end of the 1970s, for example, the vast majority of Moravian pastors were of

Miskito origin, but all the bishops save two were Creoles or "mixed." Furthermore, the Miskito pastors went only as far in their studies as the

Biblical Institute of Bilwaskarma (the equivalent of a high-school education), whereas the Creoles could continue studying in the seminary in Costa Rica (the equivalent of college). In spite of this, the Miskito villages

of the Coco River were still one of the main financial stays of this "Creolized" church.

At the end of the 1960s the Comité de Accidn Social de la Iglesia Morava (CASIM) was established to develop social action programs on the Coast, although it only commenced operations a decade later. The main

approach of CASIM's programs was similar to that promoted by governmental and private agencies in the region during the same period: community development, leadership training, environmental hygiene, etc.

CASIM's reach was relatively limited, but the creation within the church of an agency specifically dedicated to these questions points up a change in the relationship between the church and the society and a new approach to temporal matters. It would not be correct to say that the Moravian Church first began to concern itself with the affairs of "this world" in this period. Every church is concerned with these matters, and in the preceding chapter I described the church's intense involvement in worldly affairs. What was new

88 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

was, rather, the appeal to a more active approach to pastoral work and the

development of a reformist conception of society, in the sense that a reformist approach implies the possibility of changing worldly things for people to live better and dedicate themselves more fully to religious matters. It might be thought that an earlier involvement of the Catholic Church in these programs encouraged the Moravian Church to take the same path—as seems to have been the case with Moravian support of ACARIC. But it is important to emphasize the change implied in this new attitude in relation to

the church's previous position, whereby the things of "this world" were formally renounced.

Finally must be mentioned, if only briefly, the influence of the personality and the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., and black nationalism in general. Both these elements doubtless had more influence on the Creole population than on the Indian groups, but I would like to point out here the role of the Moravian Church in creating the conditions, or at least the occasion, for the encounter of some sectors of Costefio youth with this half-lay, half-religious ideology.

The circulation of Creoles between southern Zelaya, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, and the eastern United States set the stage for the church's pastoral work to open up in this direction. The basic aspects of

black nationalist thinking and its forms of political action—in all their many variants——were already familiar to many Creoles, because of the goings

and comings of workers (sailors, fishermen, professionals, and students) between the Coast and the United States and because of the English-language media.

Some workshops and seminars held by the church in the mid-1970s in the Bluefields—Pearl Lagoon area, and the possibility for some Creole pastors

to continue their theological studies in Costa Rica, put some energetic members of the Creole community into contact with this manifestation of the U.S. black movement. This contact would later allow the younger generation to strengthen its ethnic identity, create a basis for communication with older Creoles who had experienced the presence of Garveyist ideology on the Coast,® and reactivate the memory of the decisive participation of the Creoles in the Liberal Revolution of 1926. It may be supposed that, in turn, this reencounter with the historical memory of the community, and with the

new waves of Creole thinking and acting (especially in the younger generation), reinforced by black nationalist ideology, consolidated the "social" Orientation of the church. There were, therefore, changes in the leadership of the Moravian Church, changes in its sources of funding, and changes in its way of relating to “this

world." These changes, at the same time, generated expectations and frustrations in the northern areas, especially among the Miskitos, reinforcing their feelings of isolation, now also within the Moravian Church. The church

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intervened in the new aspects of the social dynamic on the Coast, supported

them, and partially influenced the direction they were to take. But the differentiation at the macro-social level—the unequal impact of the crisis, recession in One area and boom in another—was reproduced within the church. In particular, the subordination of Miskitos in the Coast ethnic hierarchy was reflected in church structures.

The Beginning of Ethnic Mobilization This broad and unequal set of transformations in the social life of the Atlantic

Coast during the 1960s and 1970s formed the setting for the first manifestations of the ethnic movement in the region. In the four years between 1974 and 1978, the three main Costefio ethnic groups created their Own organizations to promote their specific demands.

ALPROMISU. The Alianza para el Progreso de Miskitos y Sumus (Alliance

for Progress of Miskitos and Sumus) was created in 1974, based on ACARIC's experiences on the Coco River. The organization arose as the result of the combined action of Capuchin priests, Moravian pastors, and some officials of the U.S. Peace Corps to curb INFONAC's takeovers of Indian communal lands, confront the merchants to get better prices for agricultural products, find solutions to the problems of transportation on the river and lodging in Waspam (which affected those who arrived on business from the villages), improve the organization of tuno collection and obtain

better prices by getting rid of the middlemen. It was also intended to participate in government programs in the region to make them more effective.

From the beginning, many Moravian pastors took part; a great number of ALPROMISU activists in the Coco River villages, and a large percentage

of its directorate, were pastors, mainly Miskitos. However, as the organization grew and began to establish relations with the newly formed international indigenist movement, its center of activities was transferred from the river to Puerto Cabezas and the northern savanna, with the increased

influence of a group of young Miskito professionals mainly living in the towns—most of them in Puerto Cabezas. This displacement also implied a change in ALPROMISU's issues and approaches. The growth of the participation of young professionals living in the city coincided with and encouraged a gradual increase in more explicitly

indigenist demands, or demands that could be more easily related to the

indigenist movement than the socioeconomic demands posited at the beginning. The integration of these young professionals into the organization also coincided with increasing demands that local administrative positions be

held by Miskitos, given their greater familiarity with the region and the problems of the people. These professionals, moreover, were part of the

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sector of technically and professionally trained Miskitos who had the capacity to take on these positions. ALPROMISU's relations with the Somoza government were ambiguous and would later cause internal criticism within its leadership and, after the

triumph of the Sandinistas, a questioning of the legitimacy of the organization and its eventual breakup. ALPROMISU's president, Hertha Masanto de Downs, was at the same time the president of the Ala Liberal Femenina (Women's Liberal Wing), a women's group of the Somozas' Liberal party. Also, the Somoza regime tried to coopt ALPROMISU's leaders and accepted their demands of a greater role in local government, they were offered a seat in the national congress and the position of treasurer in the

municipality of Waspam and given some funding to support some of the

organization's projects. But ALPROMISU could never obtain legai recognition from the Somoza government, and its activities were always kept under the vigilant observation of the local National Guard.

ALPROMISU's relations with the Somoza regime were bitterly criticized by some young members of the Movimiento Estudiantil Costefio

(Costefio Student Movement, MEC), an emerging group of Costefio university students at the National University in Managua. MEC students denounced the leadership's corruption, its lack of combativeness against the

government, and its low profile on ethnic demands as evidence of the leadership's cooptation by the government (See for example, Rivera 1981). This position was later to be shared by observers with ties to the Sandinista Revolution. According to Jenkins (1986:189—190), the villages were never truly represented by ALPROMISU, and behind this organization “there moved the strong economic interests of the Somocista congresswoman Alba Rivera de Vallejos, who was the main intermediary in the purchase of tuno from the Indians.”

There undoubtedly were good relations between the Somoza regime and some members of ALPROMISU's leadership, but it also seems true that the organization as such was closely watched by the dictatorship. Of course, it would have been necessary for ALPROMISU to establish certain contacts with the government in order to make an effective attempt to satisfy the peoples’ demands and solve their problems. In this sense, the criticisms made by MEC members and their insistence on ALPROMISU's allegedly

close relations with the dictatorship were possibly part of a strategy to delegitimize the organization with the Sandinista Revolution and to prepare

the way for their own organizational project, at a time when the revolutionary government did not seem willing to accept any kind of Indian organization.

The Somoza regime, for its part, occasionally took it upon itself to discredit ALPROMISU's leaders, circulating the rumor in the villages that they squandered money on trips out of the country. Whether or not this was

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true—and these things are always hard to judge—the fact remains that ALPROMISU's active participation in international meetings and activities contrasted with the low profile it assumed inside the country after an initial period of enthusiam and expectation.? Just before the triumph of the revolution, the organization went through

a period of marked inactivity. Its concentration on the regional ethnic problem—despite MEC's criticisms about its lack of militancy on these questions—and its ambiguous relations with the dictatorship did not allow it

to take on an active role in the wide coalition of social forces who joined with the Sandinistas just after the insurrection. This lack of definition about the conflict that was tearing apart all of Nicaraguan society was the final Straw compromising the organization's legitimacy and gave further arguments to those inside and outside ALPROMISU who were searching for other forms of expression for ethnic demands. SUKAWALA. The National Association of Sumu Villages, known in Sumu as

Sumu Kalpapakna Wahaini Lani SUKAWALA) was founded in November 1974 in Bonanza and originally grouped together twenty-one villages. This

organization was the result of the work of some Capuchin priests and Moravian pastors, several nongovernmental agencies, and technicians with an

interest in supporting the specific demands of the Sumus and promoting development programs.

Although ALPROMISU called itself an organization of Miskitos and Sumus, 1n fact Miskito hegemony was total in it, in the composition of its leadership, the origins of its activists, and its viewpoint on the topics with which it dealt. Therefore, it was thought necessary to support an organization

for the Sumus that would promote the specific demands of the Sumu villages. One of these demands was for a solution to the dramatic problem of water contamination by the mining companies. The use of rivers to eliminate this industry's waste products contaminated the waters with chemicals such as cyanide as well as heavy metals and had terrible effects on the people, their

resources, and the entire ecological system. Many Sumus died from this contamination, and large parts of the forest were turned into deserts, without any effort by the Somoza government to force the companies to put an end to this situation (see Dolores 1985). The new organization had the support of CASIM and CEPAD (Comité Ecuménico para el Desarrollo, Ecumenical Committee for Development), but

it was never very active. It was difficult for SUKAWALA to start development programs because of lack of funding or conditions on funding

that limited its range of activity. In some cases, the foreign companies operating in the mines area were the ones administering funding for SUKAWALA projects, when these projects were supposed to solve some of the social and ecological problems created by these same com-

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panies. Moreover, the Indians’ petitions were not accepted by government agencies. ! SUKAWALA never gained the dynamism and national renown that

ALPROMISU had. In addition to the factors mentioned earlier, other elements may have had an effect: the greater physical isolation of the Sumu

villages, the smaller size of the Sumu population in comparison with the Miskitos and the Creoles, and its much weaker involvement in Moravian Church structures.

sicc. The creation of the Southern Indigenous and Creole Communities was one of the effects of the renovations introduced in the Moravian Church as a

result of nativization. The founding of Indian organizations in northern Zelaya and in the mines area had no direct impact on the Bluefields—Pearl Lagoon area, with its basically Creole and Garifuna population. However, the expectations raised by the appearance of ALPROMISU set an example for the people in the south, reinforcing the renovating tendencies inside and outside the churches. The first Creole organization was actually OPROCO (Organizaci6n para

el Progreso de la Costa, Organization for the Progress of the Coast), but little information remains about it. It was formed in the late 1960s, with an emphasis on community development and social betterment. Its ethnic dimension was present more in the ethnic identity of the people to be served by its activities than the way those activities were designed or the kinds of

questions with which it dealt. One of its main goals was to extend social services to the rural area between Pearl Lagoon and Bluefields. This goal brought the organization into contact with the respective agencies of the Somocista state; some members of OPROCO's leadership also had positions in the local government in Bluefields. These ties caused the organization

and its leaders later to be accused of collaborating with the Somoza government.

Little information is available about SICC as well. It seems to have begun as a result of some workshops for young religious leaders (Moravians and other Protestant denominations) held in Pearl Lagoon by CASIM and CEPAD in mid-1976. These activities were an outgrowth of the development

of community and social action programs that had begun to seep into Moravian Church structures. The participants in these workshops were to continue their work of sensitization and community action in their respective parishes. In these activities of projection and dissemination and of reflexion on the

sociocultural context of pastoral work, many of these young leaders came into contact with black nationalist ideology and with the figure of Martin Luther King, Jr. At the same time, their contact with the people showed

them that certain aspects of this ideology were known in Bluefields.

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 93

Moreover, some pastors who had studied at the Puerto Limén seminary in Costa Rica had books and information on these issues and brought additional elements into this process of cultural renovation. Many of these young people and the people with whom they worked began to identify themselves as blacks, not as Creoles. In turn, their contact with the older residents of Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, and Corn Island allowed them to recuperate the historical memory of the people and their participation in the social struggles of the past. They "discovered" the influence of Marcus

Garvey and Garveyism in Nicaragua, as well as General Hodgson and the Costefios’ participation in the Liberal revolution of 1926.

In this period, the movement took on the name of SICC; the reference to Indian communities alluded to the Rama villages in the bay of Bluefields

and the Garifunas of Pearl Lagoon and, at the same time, showed the

combination of an ethnic viewpoint with the regional scope of the movement. In contrast with the Indian organizations in the northern part of the Atlantic Coast and particularly with respect to ALPROMISU, which began with explicitly socioeconomic demands and later switched to wholly ethnic ones, SICC was from the beginning a cultural revivalist movement, an attempt to recuperate an ethnic identity that had been denied by the

dominant culture; socioeconomic questions seem not to have been of particular importance. The 1960s had brought an important economic reactivation to the Bluefields—Pearl Lagoon—Corn Island area; new employment opportunities largely related to Costefios’ traditional economic

activities and the expansion of urban services made for a general improvement in the people's living conditions. Moreover, the large number of Costefios living in Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and the United States, as well as trade with foreign fishing boats, maintained a certain flow of the imported goods that were an important part of people's way Of life.

In contrast, the higher educational level of the black/Creole population compared to the Indian groups made them particularly sensitive to their exclusion from higher-level positions in the local government. The arrogant behavior of mestizo local officials and their disdain for Creole English and other cultural features of the people came into conflict with the reaffirmation of black/Creole identity and reinforced the importance of cultural demands in the more active segments of the population. The union movement. As in the rest of Nicaragua, the union movement on the Atlantic Coast was small, weak, and confined to towns: teachers' unions

in Waspam and Bluefields, longshoremen's unions in Puerto Cabezas, various trade unions in Bluefields, and a union of mechanics and tractor and truck drivers in Bluefields. When the Somoza regime could not prevent the creation of unions, it sponsored a system of parallel unions. For example, at

94 THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION

the end of the 1970s in Puerto Cabezas there were three longshoremen's unions: the Sindicato de Estibadores y Muelleros de Puerto Cabezas (Longshoremen's Union of Puerto Cabezas), the Sindicato Democratico de Estibadores de Carga de Puerto Cabezas (Democratic Cargo Workers Union of Puerto Cabezas), and the Sindicato de Muelleros Portuarios y Oficios Varios

de Puerto Cabezas (Union of Port Workers and Other Trades of Puerto Cabezas)—all for no more than 1,000 workers in this area.

NOTES 1. The expulsion of farmers from the western region and the change in the use of land toward agroexports reduced the country's capacity to produce basic grains (mainly corn and beans). Nicaragua began to import basic grains

on a large scale at the same time that the agroexport model was being expanded and modernized.

2. A more extensive treatment of this subject may be found in Jenkins (1986); see also Cornejo (1974) and Aguilar Lozano et al. (1978). 3. The dispersion coefficient measures the relationship between the standard deviation of the values of a variable and the arithmetic mean of the same values.

4. Most farmers, in fact, remained subsistence producers of corn and

beans, with decreasing yields. The reason for this is the fragility of the tropical rain forest ecosystem and the few alternatives offered by present scientific knowledge. The replacement of the forest by pastureland or intensive-type cultivation (pineapple, cacao) demands a large amount of money

and technology that small producers do not possess (see Taylor 1970, Budowsk 1980). Moreover, there is always a marked contrast in adaptation to the demands of life in a humid tropic climate by spontaneous migrants and by migrants participating in official colonization programs. The first group is generally more successful, more motivated, can choose where they want to live—usually close to friends who can help them. The second group, despite the assistance they are given, tend to become disillusioned or to succumb to the many difficulties of life on the frontier: see Caufield 1984:190 ff. 5. At the end of the 1970s, direct foreign investment in Nicaragua was estimated at less than $120 million at most (see Vilas 1986, Chapter 2). 6. Cardenas (1961). The same author recommended “changing the names of cities which are now named after pirates and of memories of their piracies, to national names.” 7.1 demonstrated in an earlier study (Vilas 1986, Chapter 3) that there cannot be said to have been an economic crisis in Nicaragua before 1978. The

regional crisis in northern Zelaya in the 1960s was rather a result of the growth of the general Nicaraguan economy in this period. 8. On this, see Wuenderich (1986b).

9. ALPROMISU had participated actively in the meetings and Organizations of the emerging international indigenist movement. ALPROMISU delegates went to the meeting in which the World Council of Indigenous Peoples was created, in October 1975, as well as to the one where

THE ATLANTIC COAST & CAPITALIST MODERNIZATION 95

the Regional Council of Indigenous Peoples was formed, in January 1977. On this occasion, the ALPROMISU representative was named president of the new organization and, as such, an executive member of the World Council.

10. For example, in 1977 Lutheran World Relief gave SUKAWALA, through CEPAD, funds for the project Levantamiento Indigena Montaén—Rio Oriental de Nicaragua—also known as Proyecto LIMON—with the goals of literacy, training health workers, and agricultural and community development.

The funds, however, were managed by the Neptune Mining Company of Bonanza.

The Atlantic Coast and the Sandinista Revolution

THE DEVELOPMENT OF REVOLUTIONARY CONDITIONS The Sandinista revolutionary struggle focused on the overthrowing of the Somoza dictatorship as one stage in a broader and more profound process of national liberation, social emancipation, and broad popular participation. The Struggle against underdevelopment and dependency and the constitution of a popular national state were the basic goals of the revolution. In this context, the FSLN approached the Atlantic Coast as a regional version of the general problem of extemal dependency and economic backwardness but failed to take

account of its ethnic specificities vis-a-vis the Pacific and central regions. The exploitation of the Coast's natural resources by foreign companies, its

historic ties to the international expansion of colonial and neocolonial powers, the general economic backwardness of the region, and the high rates

of illiteracy, malnutrition, and infant mortality took precedence in the Nicaraguan revolutionary viewpoint. Thus, the Coast was subsumed under the general problem of exploited and oppressed classes and social groups,

notwithstanding its peoples’ socioeconomic, cultural, and historical specificities and their marked internal differentiation. The revolutionaries’ goals, which emphasized national liberation and socioeconomic development, were to be achieved with the peoples of the Coast in the same way as with the workers and peasants of the rest of the country. This viewpoint was reductionist and incomplete. The different social organizations of the Costefio groups, the articulation of production relations to the kinship system, the different modalities of legitimation and exercise of authority, ideological and linguistic differentiation, and different historical processes were reduced to a geographically distinct manifestation of the problem of economic backwardness. The revolutionaries’ lack of knowledge about the ethnic question led them to privilege the Costefios' most obvious

material traits: They were poor farmers and mine and lumber company workers, exploited by foreign capital and merchants. At the same time, certain Cooperative productive practices based on reciprocity (such as panapana) and certain characteristics of village life were interpreted as survivals of primitive communism. This partial approach to such a complex question may be explained by 96

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 97

several factors. Some have to do with Nicaragua's specific reality and the way

contradictions arose within it to create the possibility of a revolutionary strategy. Others are of a more general nature, having to do with questions such the formation of revolutionary thinking and practice in economically backward capitalist societies. We shall begin with the specific aspects. From the 1950s through the mid-1970s, the Nicaraguan economy went

through rapid capitalist and widespread growth and change. First, the extraordinary cotton boom; later, industrialization in the context of regional integration; and finally, the expansion of export cattle raising generated a new bourgeois sector and dispossessed thousands of peasant families of their lands. Part of the rural labor force was proletarianized and another part was expelled, either to the cities—where unemployment confined it to an everwidening tertiary sector—or toward the agricultural frontier. In the course of less than a single generation, more than two-thirds of the economically active population of the country, and almost all agrarian workers, were caught up in

these violent transformations; they lost their lands and their sources of subsistence and were forced to migrate; in short, their lives and futures were drastically altered. The Managua earthquake killed a number of those who had escaped the other crises or who had regained part of their losses, and ruined

many others. All this occurred in the general context of intense capitalist exploitation, frequent repression by the National Guard, and the generalized corruption of the Somoza regime. As I pointed out in a previous study, this violent and rapid capitalist transformation created the objective conditions for a revolutionary option in Nicaragua (Vilas 1986: Chapters 2 and 3).

Despite its enormous scope and depth, however, this process was concentrated in the Pacific and central-northern regions: only 40 percent of the country's territory but with more than 90 percent of its population and productive capacity. The Atlantic Coast participated only tangentially in this social earthquake, acting as a frontier and an escape valve for some of the contradictions generated by the violent capitalist expansion.

This spatial and human concentration of the most important contradictions for the development of the revolutionary process made it a logical choice for the FSLN to orient the basic thrust of its activity toward the place where the forces that later would bring down the dictatorship were in fact developing. Therefore, it is not simply a matter of "the revolution not being fought on the Coast," as is often said, but rather that the necessary conditions for the revolution developed outside the Coast. During the three decades between the Liberal revolution of 1926 and the execution of the founder of the Somoza dynasty in 1956, the dynamic center of dependent Capitalism in Nicaragua moved off the Atlantic Coast toward the west, and enclave capitalism gave way to agroexport capitalism with a very high level

of involvement by the domestic agrarian and financial bourgeoisie. At bottom, the greater development of the FSLN's struggle in this area of the

98 | THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

country expresses the geographic shift of the objective conditions for revolutionary activity. The relatively limited development of the struggle on

the Atlantic Coast centered mainly in the mines area, where there was a certain concentration of salaried workers, and farther to the north on the agricultural frontier. '

There was, consequently, a very marked contrast between the violent Capitalist convulsions in the west and the stability or slower social change on the Coast. The Somoza era, especially after World War II, was essentially a continuation of the enclave period on the Coast. The dictator's companies, and those of the new capitalists allied to the regime, occupied the space left vacant after the withdrawal of the foreign companies or reproduced in new settings the same style of capitalist accumulation.

In the Pacific and central-northern regions, capitalist expansion dispossessed the peasants of their land, beginning in the last century with the Indian villages of Matagalpa; but on the Coast the villages acted as a kind of rearguard when salaried employment became scarce because of temporary recessions or the withdrawal of companies. Despite the relatively high level of proletarianization attained on the Atlantic Coast in the 1920s, workers were not divorced from their material conditions of production—the land, the rivers, the forest—as were the mestizo peasants and Indians of the Pacific and

central-northern regions. On the Coast, maintenance of village structure, integrating kinship relationships with economic ones, acted as an economic and demographic cushion, so that the closure of the companies did not have the catastrophic results found in other types of proletarianization—in urban Capitalism, for example. In Chapter 3 we saw that the general progress of the Coast economy and the Nicaraguan state's international relations introduced modifications in the life of the villages. Nevertheless, the ambiguous but effective relationship

between the villages, salaried work, capitalist enterprises, and the international market came together with other political and ideological factors

to create a modus vivendi during the same decades in which convulsions, ruptures, and polarizations were ripping apart the social fabric of the 90 percent of the population in the rest of the country.

One important element of this modus vivendi seems to have been the political presence of the Somoza government through its relationship with local authorities. This is probably what explains the limited presence of the government's repressive machinery—the National Guard—in the villages, although it had a presence in the scattered urban areas. Village chiefs (headmen) acted both as the mediators between the villages and the government and as

the government's capillaries in each village. Their traditional role was supplemented by other, typically governmental functions, such as reporting births and deaths, maintaining local order, collecting taxes, solving conflicts of interest by applying national laws, health control over the Slaughter of

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 99

livestock. In many cases, the chief's authority and this mediating function were institutionalized by designating the chief as sindico or as rural judge (juez de mesta). In addition, many of these local chiefs were also lay pastors or religious leaders (particularly the Moravians). The result was a fusion, in the person of the chief, of three types of authority: "natural" local leader,

representative of government authority (as rural judge or sindico), and religious leader.

This confluence of several types of authority reinforced the position of the chief/sindico/pastor. Moreover, the relationship of the central government

was with each separate village, and not with the set of villages, thus maintaining the institutional isolation of the villages and reproducing an old Coast practice as a mode of government. This situation, observed by Helms

on the Coco River in the 1960s (Helms 1971:158, 166, 178, 179) was maintained in the 1970s and was also noted for the coastal communities farther to the south (Nietschmann 1973:59-—60; CIDCA 1986). But even on

the Coco River in the mid-1960s there was already a visibly greater integration of the Indian communities with the state (Helms 1971:233).? The other element to be emphasized is the active and generalized presence of the Moravian Church, strongly subordinated to U.S. culture (especially a marked anticommunism, after the triumph of the Cuban revolution) and its ideology combining conformity and submission with distribution of social

services. The Moravian Church's old ties to the Atlantic Coast and its Costefio culture have been pointed out in Chapter 2. The changes undergone

by the Moravian Church in the 1960s, sketched in Chapter 3, cannot be compared with those that were shaking the Catholic Church in Latin America, which were strongly felt in Nicaragua and which contributed to the incorporation of many young people into the revolution (Molina 1981; Serra

1985). The phenomena of revolutionary Christians and of liberation theology, with its concept of "structural sin," so conflictive for the established order, was entirely absent from the Moravian Church and other Protestant denominations on the Coast. This absence was even more marked because the Moravian pastors had taken on authority functions in the villages and were mediating between the villages and the central government.?

On the Coast, therefore, there was nothing like the rapid and violent socioeconomic transformations that disarticulated society as a whole in the Pacific and central-northern regions and affected the workers, above all— factory workers, peasants, the self-employed—as well as youth. Nor was there any sign of the generalized feeling, largely borne out by the evidence, that the world was falling apart, that one would lose everything if things went on the way they were, that there was no place for one under the sun, and

that all this was tremendously unjust and avoidable through the collective action of oneself and others like oneself—that is, the transformation of

Objectivity into subjectivity (Gramsci 1977:47-48), of structure into

100 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

consciousness, which constitutes the main factor mobilizing people in favor of the intentional transformation of reality (Moore, Jr. 1978; Vilas 1986, Chapter 3). It would not be correct to say that there was only passivity on the Coast (as was implicit in the unfortunate image, much publicized at the beginning of the revolutionary government, of the Coast as "an awakening giant"). But I should like to emphasize the contrast between the objective contradictions being worked through in the Pacific and central-northern regions and their expression in collective behavior and the low profile of Costefio resistance to Somocismo. The social agitation of the 1920s disappeared with the economic crisis, repression, and general reductions in the level of capitalist economic activity. The mobilizations and protests that took place in the main ports and economic centers on the Coast were typically labor-oriented, both in their methods—strikes—and in their objectives—the defense of workers’ salaries, working conditions, and the like (Gutiérrez Gonzdélez 1977:26ff). The ethnic

aspect was subordinated to class content; the ideological presence of Garveyism, with its combination of proletarian demands, black nationalism, and evangelism, seems to have been important among Creole workers. But the activism of mestizo workers, who at the time formed a high percentage of the workers on the banana plantations, was also important (L6pez 1982). At

any rate, union activism in the years prior to the Liberal revolution of 1926—-which it helped to set off—contrasts with the relative passivity that

one notices in the face of later contradictions, more easily classifiable as ethnic—for example, the absence of significant activity by the Indian villages with respect to the contamination of the rivers by U.S. mining companies.* This accumulation of objective and subjective circumstances explains the

Costefios' low level of involvement in the revolutionary struggle against the dictatorship and even suggests that the very concept of dictatorship must have been quite vague for many people on the Coast—suggesting, at most, the government of the "Spanish" of the Pacific. In Costefio consciousness, the main contradiction remained the one between the Atlantic and the rest of the country (the Pacific), between Costefios and "Spaniards" (mestizos). This viewpoint put into the same sack the dictatorship and those fighting against it, the oppressors (whose ideology many Costefios shared) and the oppressed (whose concrete living conditions were similar to those of many Costefios).

Costefio participation in the revolution took place in the Pacific, particularly through the involvement of young Costefios in the university student movement or the involvement of Costefios who had migrated to Managua at the time of the final Sandinista insurrection (see Smutko 1980). As a general proposition, therefore, it may be accepted that after the 1929 crisis and, above all, after the very heavy repression that followed workers’

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 101

strikes on the Coast and the assassination of General Sandino in 1934, Costefio population disappeared as a social force—that is, as a social group capable of generating specific effects at the political and ideological levels of national society: the government, the political parties, the union movement. In turn, this may be understood as an effect of the changes occurring in

the dominant type of capitalism and of its geographical shift. At the same time that the dynamic center of capitalism in Nicaragua moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific between the 1929 crisis and the end of World War II, there was a change in the type of capitalism. Enclave capitalism, dominated by large foreign extractive corporations, lost ground to agroexport capitalism, hegemonized by the domestic bourgeoisie and the Somocista state.

This combination of factors also explains why the FSLN concentrated its political and military activity in the central-northern region of the country and in the Pacific. Revolutionary practice—not the unilateral creation of an

Organization but rather the result of political analysis of an objective reality—saw the Coast as not propitious for the advance of an antiimperialist and antidictatorial revolutionary strategy. This struggle would be effective in an area where social contradictions were engendered by another type of capitalism. Finally, as I've shown, there were reasons General Sandino did not enjoy wide popularity on the Coast, particularly among the Indians of the north.

Given that Sandino and anti-imperialism were essential parts of the Sandinista struggle, it is easy to understand that many sectors of the Costefio population would not feel very enthusiastic about Sandinismo, even though they might feel hopeful about the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship.

Moreover, the political activities carried out by an organization or government around any issue are closely tied to the way this issue is conceptualized by those who decide on these policies. In this sense, the way

in which the FSLN and the revolutionary government approached the Atlantic Coast and the Costefios in the early days was a result, in good part,

of the way in which the latter, and more generally the indigenous and national questions, were characterized in Nicaraguan mestizo ideology. This ideology reduces being Nicaraguan to being mestizo and the prevailing image

of the Indian to that of a mestizo Indian, semi-peasant or artisan, in the Pacific and central-northern regions. These Indians have totally lost their original languages and have become urbanized; their traditional forms of family, communal, economic, and social organization have disappeared, or are about to disappear, as the result of the development of agrarian and urban capitalism.

This ideological representation permeates all classes, groups, and factions of mestizo society and its political and literary expressions. It can be found, for example, in the poetry of liberal Ruben Dario:

102. THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

. . . ingenuous America with Indian blood, still praying to Jesus and still speaking in Spanish. (Ode to Roosevelt; emphasis added)

... Tama child of America, a grandchild of Spain... (The Swans)?

It can also be found in the prose of the conservative Pablo Antonio Cuadra, with his combination of mestizo ethnocentrism and exaltation of

patriarchal society, when he seeks "the roots of our mestizo culture to nourish and produce a Nicaraguan literature" (Cuadra 1977:15; emphasis added). According to Cuadra, the Nicaraguan nation developed in three stages, or revolutions: the corn revolution, the Christian revolution, and the machine

revolution (Cuadra 1977:149ff). Com, Hispanism, and Catholicism are central elements of the reduction of Nicaraguan society to mestizo culture and

the exaltation of the Spanish roots of Nicaraguan national culture. Dario's

emphasis on the Spanish element forms part of his opposition to U.S. expansionism; imperialism is reduced, in cultural terms, to an activity of Anglo-Saxon civilization. In the writings of Cuadra, who in 1980 became director of the anti-Sandinista newspaper La Prensa, this view appears as one dimension of a reactionary philosophy, both anticapitalist and antisocialist, that longs for and exalts the lost balance of patriarchal, semifeudal society. According to this viewpoint, the Atlantic Coast provides the setting and the

Costefios are the actors who play out the drama of backwardness and primitivism: "cultural yesterday" (Cuadra 1977:212, 213). The FSLN inherited this ideological baggage, in its liberal as well as its conservative manifestations. The first was an effect of the FSLN's origins in the university student movement of Leén and Managua and its ties with the socialist and positivist Nicaraguan thought of the 1950s and 1960s. The sec-

ond was the result of the broad integration into Sandinista ranks of young people from the middle classes and the bourgeoisie in the southern Pacific

region, linked to the Conservative party, who would hold important positions in the revolutionary government. As a result, the policies that were implemented reflected this peculiar conceptualization of the region and its inhabitants.

THE SANDINISTA VIEWPOINT The elements pointed out in the preceding section help explain how the Sandinistas conceptualized the Atlantic Coast. In brief, this viewpoint was a combination of three elements: revolutionary development; revolutionary integration; and control of national territory.

Revolutionary Development Section VI of what is called the FSLN's Historical Program, approved in 1969 and entitled "The Reincorporation of the Atlantic Coast," expresses this dimension of the Sandinista viewpoint well:

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The Popular Sandinista Revolution will put into practice a special

plan for the Atlantic Coast, lost in the depths of the greatest abandonment, in order to incorporate it into national life. A. It will put an end to the iniquitous exploitation that the Atlantic

Coast has suffered throughout its history, from foreign monopolies, and in particular Yankee imperialism;

B. It will prepare the arable land of the area for the development of agriculture and livestock raising; C. It will use the favorable conditions to foment the development of the fishing and lumber industries;

D. It will encourage the flourishing of the local cultural values of

this region, which result from the original aspects of their historical tradition; E. It will eliminate the odious discrimination to which the Miskitos, Sumus, Sambos, and blacks of the region have been subjected.

Similarly, the National Reconstruction Government Program of the

National Reconstruction Government Junta that took charge of the Nicaraguan government after the triumph of the revolution declared in Point 2.12 of its economic section ("Development of the Atlantic”):

The population of the Atlantic Coast will be integrated into the development of the country. To this end a joint and coordinated action of the different state institutions will be undertaken in order

to establish service centers in strategic points of this region, which in coordination with the agrarian reform will offer health

services, education, technical assistance, financing, and

commercialization.

This viewpoint emphasizes the perspective of regional development in the context of revolutionary transformations. The Coast entered into the

revolutionary design as a setting traditionally exploited by foreign companies, pillaged of its natural resources, and with frightening rates of economic and social empoverishment. The ethnic question appears in diluted form in the reference to Costefio cultural values and to racial discrimination. The growth of material and human productive forces through revolutionary

changes in the relationships of production and domination and through national liberation—that is, agrarian reform, the creation of the Area of People's Property, the encouragement of community and cooperative organization, the nationalization of basic resources, foreign trade, and the financial system, the transformation of education, the extension of health services—would create the conditions for overcoming the Coast's problems even in their extraeconomic dimensions (see Ramirez 1981). This preferential attention to the material aspects of the present and the

past shows the way the FSLN inherited, in these first years, the general deficit in Latin American revolutionary thinking on the "Indian question"

(see, on the Guatemalan case, Payeras 1982:128ff). Because social

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revolutions take place in economically backward and peripheral capitalist countries, the problem of economic development and modernization is a primary concem of revolutionary movements and governments. In colonial and neocolonial societies there is the additional task of constituting a national

state that can express popular sovereignty in the face of colonial, neocolonial, and imperialist powers. It is not difficult, in this context, to view the social groups resulting from precapitalist social relations, which have not been totally seized by the antagonistic polarization of capitalist social structure, as the result and the symbol of backwardness—in any case, as provisional social actors that will be converted either into proletariat or

bourgeoisie by the inevitable process of class differentiation. As the revolutionary project blocks any conversion of other classes into the bourgeoisie, there is only the possibility of an evolution—slow, perhaps, but unavoidable—toward the proletariat.

At the same time, the economicist reductionism that took over a good

part of Marxian thinking in the 1920s and tinged its later development privileged production-related factors in the definition of social agents. Class as a historic result of social struggles in all their diversity and richness was replaced by class as an occupational category, as class in itself, knowledge of the social structure of a given society, and the multiplicity of situations and nuances that propel it, gave ground to the recognition of general categories in

contingent realities. In this context, ethnic groups were facilely conceptualized solely in terms of their occupational characteristics (the “economic base") and their specific problems seen as a result of economic backwardness.®

Another general factor in the revolutionaries’ ignorance of the specificity of the ethnic problem came from the development of cultural anthropology parallel with U.S. neocolonial expansion after World War II—just as British

functionalist anthropology had paralleled the expansion of British colonialism in Asia and Africa. The fact that U.S. government agencies frequently referred to cultural anthropological studies of the period converted this school, in many revolutionary circles, into a kind of academic facade for imperialist expansionism and motivated them to repudiate those studies. The impact of U.S. government use of sociological and anthropological research and techniques for political intervention in Latin American affairs—as was

the case of the "Camelot Plan” in Chile in the early 1960s—proved to be longlasting.

These elements, common to the Latin American revolutionary movement in general, are complemented in this case by the kind of socialist and Marxian thinking predominating in Nicaragua in the 1960s, strongly impregnated with elements of positivism and liberal progressivism and closer in many cases to the rationalist determinism of the eighteenth century than to

dialectical historical analysis. Carlos Fonseca, one of the founders of the

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 105

FSLN and its principal leader up to his death in 1976, often warned against

the dangers of this kind of reductionism: "We must be on guard against pseudo-Marxist verbiage, which often appears to be Marxism, but at bottom

is Only economic determinism, a falsification of Marxism. Economic determinism pays attention only to economic facts in the generation of

political realities" (Fonseca 1981:308-—309). But in the concrete circumstances in which revolutionary strategy developed, in that uneven matrix of different contradictions, the temptation to reductionism was too strong for revolutionaries to escape completely. In this context, when economic factors were so much emphasized over

the other dimensions of the Atlantic Coast's reality, there were certain differences of focus between the FSLN's historical program and the Junta's program. The developmentalist perspective of the first is nuanced by political considerations and is closer to the real configuration of Coast society. The ideological issues, racial discrimination, and specific features of Coast society are explicitly mentioned in the Sandinista proposal. This broader perspective contrasts with the crudely developmentalist nature of the Junta program. In

later years the Junta's approach would aggravate the tensions and misunderstandings between the revolutionary government and the Coast people in that it failed to take into account the specific way capitalism developed in the region and the different kind of society that grew out of it. As with other aspects of the revolutionary program (see, for example, Ortega 1986), the differences in emphasis and approach between the 1969 document and the 1979 program illustrate the impact of the FSLN's strategy of broadbased alliances in its struggle against the dictatorship and the inclusion of elements from the urban middle classes and the non-Somocista bourgeoisie in the design and execution of the government's first program over the worker and peasant perspective of the historical program.

Revolutionary Integration By "revolutionary integration" I mean the call for Costefio ethnic groups to

participate in the process of popular, democratic, and anti-imperialist revolutionary transformation, even though this participation took place after July 19—that is, after the difficult task of overthrowing the dictatorship had

been achieved basically through the struggle in the Pacific and centralnorthem regions of the country. Revolutionary integration was, therefore, an

invitation to join in the process of transformation of the economy, the government, and the national culture, within the framework of a specific revolution and with a specific leadership that had grown out of the preceding period. However, the appearance of the word “integration"—-with abhorrent connotations in indigenist semantics—in some revolutionary legal texts and statements caused a generalized adverse reaction in the world of Indian-rights organizations, and prevented them from distinguishing between integration

106 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

subordinated to a state based on social exploitation and oppression and participation in a process of socioeconomic and political transformation: national liberation with popular participation. In this respect, the treatment given by the revolutionary government to Indian groups and their leadership was no different from that given to other

sectors of the population and political and social organizations. The first

months of the revolutionary government were fraught with intense confrontations within the revolutionary coalition, in which different forces

struggled to better their position in the period after the fall of the dictatorship. These tensions and contradictions have been studied with respect

to the relationship between the FSLN and the non-Somocista bourgeoisie (see, for example, Gorman 1981; Vilas 1986, Chapter 4), but they also took place, and very intensely, in relation to the workers' movement and the traditional leftist parties (Vilas 1986, Chapter 5; Ortega 1985). This is part of many revolutionary processes and is no peculiarity of the Sandinista Revolution (see, for example, Farber 1983). MISURASATA, the Indian organization that took on representation of Indian demands after the triumph of the revolution, at first accepted the FSLN

viewpoint. In an early 1980 document titled General Policies, the organization proposed to the revolutionary government:

Finally, we struggle for the genuine integration of our population into national life. An integration which means development and progress for our own people, without impositions on the part of dominant groups, with the basic right to create our own means of

cultural, linguistic, social, religious, economic, and political expression.’

The problem was not, therefore, integration in itself but rather its conditions, modes, and range and the ability of the Indian groups to put forth their own proposal for integration within the principles of the revolution.

Control Over National Territory This is always the first concern of any process of state-building (Claval 1982). Decree 205 of the National Reconstruction Government Junta (December 19, 1979) affirmed Nicaragua's sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the continental shelf with a limit of 200 nautical miles; it is pointed out

“that foreign intervention made impossible, up to July 19 of this year of liberation, the full exercise by the people of Nicaragua of their rights over the continental shelf and neighboring waters, which legitimately correspond to the Nicaraguan nation by right of history, geography, and international law." On February 4, 1980, the government Junta issued a Declaration on the Islands of San Andrés, Providencia, and Adjacent Territories, in which, after recalling that the current Colombian jurisdiction over these islands was the

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result of "the territorial dispossession of Nicaragua begun in 1928," it proceeded to

Declare null and void the Bdrcenas-Meneses Esguerra Treaty, signed March 24, 1928 and ratified March 6, 1930, in a historical context which disqualifies as government leaders the presidents imposed by U.S. interventionist forces in Nicaragua, and which violated, as has already been pointed out, the existing National Constitution.

The revolutionary government's concern for securing the state's territoriality in the Atlantic region fits, therefore, in this framework, but with

certain specific characteristics. From the outset, evidence for the unequal nature of regional development, the difficulty of physically integrating

national territory, the historical features of the formation of Costefio consciousness, Closely tied to the colonialist and imperialist expansion of metropolitan capitalism, the lack of development of the concept of nation within this consciousness, and the weaker political work of the FSLN led to real concern about political and military control in the region. In addition, the U.S. government's early confrontation with the revolutionary process and its increasing support of the military forces of the counterrevolution pointed up

the vulnerability of this part of Nicaragua's territory and led the FSLN to

emphasize from the beginning the need to combine treatment of the economic backwardness and dependency of the Coast with defense of territorial unity and national sovereignty. At bottom, the revolution's concern

for Nicaragua's territorial unity was one dimension of the national unity strategy, a pillar of the Sandinista program.

The revolutionary viewpoint is synthesized in the Declaration of Principles of the Popular Sandinista Revolution on the Indian Communities

of the Atlantic Coast, issued jointly by the FSLN and the National Reconstruction Government on August 12, 1981, by which time conflicts between sectors of the Costefio population and the revolution had erupted violently. In its eight points, the document affirmed: (1) the territorial and political unity of the Nicaraguan nation, the indivisibility of its sovereignty and independence, and the official nature of the Spanish language; (2) equal rights for all citizens, without distinctions of race or religion; the struggle

against all forms of racial, linguistic, and cultural discrimination; (3) government support for the Costefio communities’ preservation of their cultural expressions, including their languages; (4) the guarantee of support

for Costefio community participation in all the social, economic, and political affairs of the region and the nation; (5) the guarantee, by means of legalization and titling, of the Costefio communities’ possession of their

lands, in communal form or in cooperatives; (6) that ownership of Nicaragua's natural resources corresponds to the entire Nicaraguan people, represented by the revolutionary government; the recognition of the Indian communities’ right to part of the benefits derived from the exploitation of

108 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

forest resources, aS investments in community development according to

national plans; (7) that improvement of living conditions in Costefio communities depends on regional economic development, for which national

and local development programs will be carried out; (8) support for the communities’ own forms of organization.

The document showed a kind of compromise between the FSLN's original program and the technocratic and developmentalist vision of the National Reconstruction Government. The issues that in a way had nuanced the economic reductionism of the FSLN's programs—the struggle against

racial discrimination, the support for different cultural expressions, the encouragement of specific forms of organization—were once again made explicit; several of the basic demands of the Costefio population were also

included: village participation, the right to lands villages were already occupying, participation in benefits from natural resource exploitation, together with the reaffirmation of popular sovereignty over resources as a whole.

At the same time, the declaration contained several contradictions and

ambiguities. For example, the commitment to fight against all forms of racial and linguistic discrimination (point 2) and to conserve the traditional languages (point 3) conflicted with the declaration of Spanish as the only official language (point 1). The guarantees of village participation, the ratification of their rights to land and to specific modalities of access to and

exploitation of their lands, coexisted in the same document with the emphasis on centralized definition of policies and the implicitly prioritary nature of national development and investment plans, in the design of which the participation of the Costefio villages was minimal, to say the least. REVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT

Implementation of the revolutionary viewpoint on the Atlantic Coast involved the development of large investment projects, new development Strategies, and changes in many of the basic features that made up people's day-to-day outlook. It was, in many respects, a major social convulsion; not

having been preceded by any process of revolutionary struggle, nor by discussions and consultations with the Coast's leaders and population, its impact was probably much greater than that of similar measures in other parts of the country.

New Government Apparatuses The transformation of this political and economic viewpoint into government

action put strains on government resources and forced it to find new mechanisms for dealing with the Atlantic Coast.

In February 1980, the Nicaraguan Institute for the Atlantic Coast (INNICA) was created as a decentralized ministry-level public administration

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agency under the National Reconstruction Government Junta (see La Gaceta,

Diario Oficial, February 29, 1980). The new agency would be in charge of

coordinating policy initiated by other government agencies for the development of the Atlantic Coast; drawing up plans for the exploration, evaluation, and inventory of the region's resources; training human resources; and coordinating national and international technical assistance. INNICA's territory included the departments of Zelaya and Rfo San Juan. The institute acted as the Coast ministry for more than two years, but its

ability to coordinate government policies toward the region was always problematic, given the lack of a firm concept of what should be done and how, and the multiplicity of government agencies involved in the Coast question, operating with unequal resources and efficacity.

On July 26, 1982, as part of the process of political and administrative regionalization of the country, Decree 1081 created two Special Zones out of the department of Zelaya with their respective regional governments, as mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 1. Special Zone I (corresponding to northern Zelaya) initially had its capital in Rosita, later moved to Puerto Cabezas, and Special Zone II (corresponding to southern Zelaya) had its capital in Bluefields. The agricultural frontier area developed in the preceding decades—Rama, Muelle de los Bueyes, Bocana de Paiwas—was adjudicated to

Region V (the departments of Boaco and Chontales) and Region VI (the departments of Matagalpa and Jinotega). Delegates of ministerial rank were named by the Junta to be the heads of the new regional governments under

the coordination of the Junta. Each ministry created a regional office in charge of carrying out plans for each zone, and INNICA was dissolved. Regionalization of the government's administrative apparatus coincided

with a similar move within the FSLN. The creation of two regional governments and two regional party structures showed the revolutionary leadership's decision to incorporate into governmental practice and party organization the obvious differences within this region. This was true as much for the ethnic and demographic differences in the population as for their specific socioeconomic structures and the problems that these features posed for the revolution.

This was the first time in the history of Nicaragua that regionalization was attempted and the process was, therefore, rather slow. Lack of experience

combined with the scarcity of resources and the lack of even minimal conditions for implementing the new tasks and responsibilities. As in other spheres, tensions arose between the political decision to develop decentralized forms of administration with greater participation at the regional and local

levels and the tendency toward inertia of the central administrations in Managua.

The mechanisms through which the Somoza government had implemented its policies toward the Coast—INFONAC, IAN, and others—were

110 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

eliminated, transformed, or subsumed under the new institutions of the revolutionary government. In August 1979, the Institute for Natural Resources and the Environment (IRENA) was created, in the context of the nationalization of natural resources (see La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, September 18 and

October 25, 1979). The institute was in charge of the regulating national policies on natural resources and the environment; although it dealt with the country as a whole, its impact was perhaps greatest on the Atlantic Coast. IRENA had an active policy of conserving and developing Coast natural re-

sources, principally fishing and lumber, and protecting the environment. Many of its projects, however, conflicted with the villagers’ view of things; these conflicts were often used in the growing confrontations between some sectors of the Indian population and the revolution. Moreover, the enormous amount of resources necessary to carry out an effective program of recuper-

ating the natural resources pillaged by foreign or Somocista companies contrasted with the material limitations of the revolutionary government.

In January 1980 the Junta created the Nicaraguan Institute of Fishing (INPESCA), also at the ministry level, charged with the promotion of rational use of fishing resources and with the economic and administrative organization of catching and exporting the product (see La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, January 8, 1980). INPESCA was authorized to create fishing cooperatives and associations, form new enterprises and encourage the existing ones, and, together with IRENA, develop research on marine resources.

The Nationalization of Natural Resources Decree 56 of August 24, 1979, declared that the state had exclusive rights over the natural resources "included in the earth, the subsoil, the atmosphere, the continental shelf and territorial waters" (see La Gaceta, Diario Oficial,

September 18, 1979).2 On November 2 of the same year, Decree 137 nationalized mining and ended the almost century-long presence of foreign corporations in this sector. The nationalization of the mines had a political and symbolic value as important as its economic value, especially on the Atlantic Coast. Work in the mines was possibly the most brutal form of

exploitation of the Indian population by multinational capital; the contamination of the rivers, used as dumps for the mines' waste materials, decimated the Sumu villages. For this reason the nationalization decree stipulated in Article 5 that "the state reserves the right to exact economic indemnization for human damages, the ecological deterioration of its territory, and for fiscal evasions caused by persons or associations who are affected by the present decree."

State Action Immediately after the triumph of the revolution, an ambitious investment program for the economic reactivation of the Coast and the development of

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 111

its infrastructure began to be carried out. In early 1980 investments of more than $4 million were approved for the reactivation of the recently nationalized mines; it was also decided to reactivate ATCHEMCO, abandoned by its foreign proprietors in reaction to the revolutionary triumph, and the lumber companies. The Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA) defined lines of support for small agricultural and livestock production for the Miskito, Sumu, and mestizo communities. Rural credit to

small producers on the Atlantic Coast went from 7 million cérdobas in 1979/80 to 36.3 million in 1980/81.

Empresa Nicaragiiense de Abastecimientos (ENABAS), the state enterprise for the distribution of basic foods, began operations in late 1979 with two main goals: to buy from small and medium producers at fair prices and to guarantee the supply of basic products (rice, beans, sugar, salt, lard)

and other popular consumer items at accessible prices. Purchase prices between 1979 and 1980 rose 177 percent for com, 295 percent for beans, and 255 percent for rice. The regional commercial structure was transformed; private merchants had to raise their prices substantially in order to compete

with the state network, which rapidly expanded through the creation of numerous storage centers and popular stores. In the department of Zelaya, ENABAS sold more than 7.4 million pounds of basic grains in 1980 and almost 10.7 million pounds in 1981. A wide range of projects to develop economic and social infrastructure were carried out. The construction of the Rfo Blanco—Siuna—Puerto Cabezas

highway and the extension of the telephone network to the mines area and

Puerto Cabezas contributed to the geographical integration of national territory. Several villages received electricity, and water and sewage systems

were improved. Public health and education services were improved and expanded. The generalization of the system of mobile medical units made it possible to carry out ambitious programs of tuberculosis treatment, malaria prevention, vaccinations, and popular health education. The health brigade program was extended to several villages; in the period 1980-1981, in Special Zone I alone, there were more than 200 brigadistas in a hundred

villages. Table 4.1 gives a general view of the evolution of some conventional indices.

In the area of education, the most outstanding event was the National Literacy Campaign in [Native] Languages, which formed the basis for the

bilingual-bicultural education system presently being implemented in Miskito, Sumu, and Creole English. Between 1979 and 1983 the number of teachers in Special Zone I grew 116 percent and the number of students 226 percent. Communities unattended by the Ministry of Education fell from twenty-eight to eight.

The revolutionary government's initial strategy of accumulation, fundamentally oriented toward agricultural exports, assigned several large

7p 1988 112. THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Table 4.1 Evolution of Health Indexes on the Atlantic Coast, 1973 and 1983

SZ 1 SZ II Total

Health 31 Healthcenters clinics197 24 7 67 13

Installations

Doctors 39 26 37 63 Dentists 7 7 — — Nurses 9 46 a —

Nurses’ assistants 61 107 — — Emergency i811 —_ —~ 395,822 32,000 Medical — 237,310 158,512

Medical consultations

Dental 1341 23,399 5,200 Hospital beds 129 — 14]28,599 >—

Operations aA eG aDepartment of Zelaya , bDoes not include the new hospital in Bluefields ——-No information available

investment projects to the Coast, which began to be implemented around 1982. These included an African palm project and the construction of a deepwater port, both in Special Zone II, and a joint Mexico-Nicaragua lumber

project (Productora Forestal del Noreste de Nicaragua S.A., or PROFONICSA) in Special Zone I. These capital- and technology-intensive projects, planned for the medium and long range, were rapidly affected by the unfolding of the counterrevolutionary war, as well as by specific technical and economic limitations.

Agrarian Reform The villages’ claims for their lands and the resources on them were one of the

sources of conflict with the development plans carried out by the Somoza government and the expansion of the agricultural frontier. The agrarian reform law approved by the revolutionary government in August 1981 (see

La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, August 21, 1981) prioritized cooperative organization but also recognized the specific conditions of the Atlantic Coast

and the particular demands of the Indian villages. Special treatment was designed for them as stipulated in Article 30:

The state shall make use of the amount of land necessary for the Miskito, Sumu, and Rama villages to work them individually or collectively and for them to benefit from their natural resources, with

the aim that their inhabitants shall be able to improve their living conditions and contribute to the social and economic development of the Nicaraguan nation.

Table 4.2 shows the development of agrarian reform titling with respect

to the Indian villages. In the first place, it may be noted that all the land

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION = 113

Table 4.2 Land Reform Titles to Indian Villages, 1981-1985

Region 1981-19824 1983 1984 1985 Total

SZ —— 36.4— 48.9— 89.6 SZI Il —174.9 — Thousands of Acres

SZ 1,600 SZI — Il 1,548 —— —200 —3,348 — Families

Source: MIDINRA. 4Begins October 1981

titled was in the north of the department of Zelaya (SZ I). In the second place, the process of legalizing communal lands began only in 1983 and developed slowly in 1984. In 1985 the land area titled was almost equal to that of the preceding two years, although the families involved were far fewer

in number. The. relatively late beginning of village land titling helped to aggravate conflicts with the revolutionary government. It is possible that the counterrevolutionary war on the Atlantic Coast influenced the speed with which government agencies carried out the process: the agrarian reform

technicians and promoters were among the main targets of the counterrevolutionary bands. But, at the same time, this slow pace of reform itself stimulated conflicts and mistrust among the Indians, setting the stage for counterrevolutionary operations. The agrarian reform also addressed the question of mestizo peasants who lacked titles for the land they occupied, although in this case the process began even later than in the Indian villages. Table 4.3 shows that peasant land titling was also concentrated in Special Zone I (70 percent of the land and 80 percent of the families). Differences in the amount of land involved are a result of the different setthement and use patterns of the frontier farmers and the Indian villages.

Tensions and Ambiguities of the Developmentalist Strategy The revolutionary government's fundamental goal was to bring development to the Atlantic Coast; it was, in this sense, a development strategy for the

Coast, but not with the Coast, in that it lacked a regional viewpoint in geographical as well as ethnic terms. As a consequence, many people on the

Coast did not feel involved with government efforts, viewed them with mistrust, and resented the contradictions generated by the technicians, professionals, and political activists who were carrying them out.

The unequal development of capitalism in the Pacific and the central-

northern region vs. the Atlantic, together with the lack of an ethnic dimension in development strategy, brought the revolutionary approach into

114. THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Table 4.3 Agrarian Reform on the Atlantic Coast: Evolution of Land Titling

Region 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 Total

SZ I~a— —— —100.0 264.317.8 33.7 117.8 298.0 SZ Total — — — 364.3 51.5 415.8 SZ —— 1,565 SZ I0———— 344313 621,878 406 Thousands of acres

Families

Total _— — — 1,909 375 2,284 Source: MIDINRA.

conflict with Costefio aspirations and with many aspects of the Costefios’ daily lives. The failure to deal correctly with the specificities of Coast society deepened the differences. There was no attempt to adapt the general strategies and policies defined by the central government to the specific strategies of the region (Yih 1984). With an ingenuousness fed by a fairly extensive ignorance of what was really happening on the Coast, the revolutionary government seemed to expect that overnight the Costefio "giant" should wake up thinking and acting like a mestizo from the Pacific (see Borge 1985).? It was not foreseen that essentially correct general policies could generate specific conflicts for some sectors among the Costefios. For example, the nationalization of the mines sent the foreign companies out of the country. The new policies rapidly changed the miners’ iniquitous working and living conditions, but the low yields already being produced because of the previous irrational exploitation of mining resources, obsolete technology, and, later,

the fall in international gold prices, meant a significant reduction in Operations, temporary closures, and unemployment. We may assume that the foreign companies had already had to face the same problem;!° but for the workers and their families, nationalization of the mines and the subsequent closures were one reality the nght-wing opposition could skillfully exploit.

Moreover, the nationalization of the financial system and the establishment of currency exchange controls ended or severely limited the dollarization of the small domestic economies of the ports and urban centers of the seacoast, restricting the remittances Costefios (mostly Creoles) sent from the United States; moreover, the remittances now had to be through within the nationalized financial system at the official exchange rate, which rapidly fell behind the black-market rate. An even more important factor in the reduction of the availability of dollars was the capital flight of Chinese merchants and foreign business in the months following the triumph of the revolution and the rapid drop in the number of U.S. fishing boats that laid in at Coast ports and stimulated a prosperous retail trade with the inhabitants of the region.

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 115

IRENA's encouragement of policies to conserve and develop natural resources affected local lumbering and fishing, limiting the Costefios' ability

to cut wood, fish, and hunt. General economic restrictions, as a result of external pressures and the process of change itself, affected the people's diet,

both in that people could no longer afford to buy imported food and that many imported products disappeared from the market.!! This last point helps to explain the rapidity with which Creole demands

came into conflict with certain aspects of revolutionary government action. The dollarization of daily life and the consumption of a high percentage of imported goods were characteristic of quite different sectors in the Pacific region and on the Atlantic Coast. In the Pacific, this situation was typical of the bourgeoisie and the better-off groups of the urban middle class. In the

Atlantic region, it was found in wide sectors of the black and Indian population along the coast, despite low salaries and social exploitation—a

Situation that has also been observed in the working classes of other Caribbean societies (Knight 1970; Guerra 1976). Although the affected sectors were quite different in terms of their social position and ethnic composition, they shared an important common denominator in their wide

exposure to and dependency on U.S. currency and goods. The lower percentage of imports could be presented by the political opposition and subsequently by the counterrevolution as proof of the evils engendered by the revolution. This question is, of course, related to the fundamentally anti-imperialist orientation of the Sandinista Revolution, which came into conflict with the perceptions of many Costefios. The concept of imperialist exploitation did

not exist in the Coast, except perhaps in small intellectual circles. Among the Indian populations, this was because of those elements of their ethnic identity that had been transformed by the British strategy of indirect rule and the Moravian Church; in the Creole population, because of its relatively Satisfactory intégration into the enclave-dominated Coast economy. Even when the activities of the foreign companies had disastrous effects on the people—as in the case of the contamination of the rivers, which decimated the Sumu population—the prevailing Moravian ideology of resignation and conformity inhibited or reduced the possibility of questioning. Thus, when the revolution arrived on the Coast with its banners of nationalism and anti-

imperialism, it found a population that, rightly or wrongly, had happy memories of the companies and their U.S. managers. Although the revolutionaries wanted to nationalize natural resources and eliminate foreign presence in order to build their conception of national sovereignty, Costefios

rather yearned for the good old days of jobs and commissaries (See, for example, Dennis 1981 and, more recently, CIDCA 1986).

Moreover, the new state enterprises that replaced the foreign and Somocista companies introduced new labor policies that came into conflict

116 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

with the previous experience of the Costefio workers and even came to decrease their real incomes. For example, when INPESCA took over the nationalized fishing companies in the Bluefields—Corn Island area, it introduced modifications in the kind of pay received by the fishermen; instead

of being paid per volume of fish caught, they were paid a straight salary. Although the workers preferred the previous system, INPESCA continued its policy and finally imposed the salary system over the workers’ opposition.

Months later, this conflict would indirectly feed into the mobilization of Creole protest in Bluefields. In the mines area, the lack of administrative and

technical experience of many of the new cadres antagonized the workers, whose empirical knowledge about the activity was not taken into account. Moreover, the new institutions and government agencies were generally Superimposed on those left over from the Somoza regime: The Nicaraguan Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) took the place of IAN; IRENA replaced INFONAC; ENABAS took the place of INCEI (National Institute of Foreign and Domestic Commerce). In many cases, the new institutions even occupied

the same installations as the old ones; in the mines area, for example, the houses formerly inhabited by technicians and administrators of the foreigns companies were now occupied by the officers of the new government. Many

Costefios saw a continuity between the old forms and the new contents, which hardly made the new situation more attractive, especially when the new forms lacked some of the old contents Costefios had liked (such as the commissaries).

The way some FSLN members dealt with the religious question and relations with the Moravian Church also caused alienation in some Costefio sectors. Although this phenomenon was not confined to the Coast or to this church in particular (see for example, Serra 1985), the force of the Costefio

reaction cannot be explained without taking into account once again the fundamental role of the Moravian Church in the historical formation of

ethnic identity in the region. The dogmatism of many middle-level Sandinistas ("religion is the opium of the people"), which ran counter to the

explicit position of the revolutionary leadership (FSLN 1980), was aggravated by the anticommunism of many Moravian Church sectors, the

church's historical conflict with General Sandino, and its close ties to foreign-owned companies. In addition, the government policy of extending public health and social Security programs threatened the church's near-monopoly in this sphere. This aspect of revolutionary policy meant a gradual transfer to the public sector of

a number of services that had traditionally been the private domain of the church, threatening to eliminate one of the reasons the church had gained such a strong presence among Costefios. Thus, a series of tensions and conflicts—sometimes open, sometimes covert—arose around the extension of social services. This process was similar to that which took place in other

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 117

European and Latin American countries when the extension of state social services meant a loss of authority by the churches and charities controlled by the dominant classes (George and Wilding 1976; Mesa Lago 1978). The Situation worsened when the revolutionary government began to take direct charge of some of these services. A good number of the technical personnel rejected nationalization and left their jobs; this, in addition to the state's

difficulties in carrying out these new functions efficiently, caused a deterioration in services that led to increased dissatisfaction on the part of the local population.

Finally, the lack of Costefio FSLN members helped increase misunderstandings. This scarcity was caused by the factors already mentioned,

but also by the fact that most Costefio Sandinistas had been assigned to a number of different tasks in other regions of the country instead of to the Atlantic Coast. Thus, revolutionary political power still showed a mestizo face, and the reassignment of some Costefio revolutionaries to the region was

not enough to change this image, already of long standing on the Coast.

Both the FSLN and the regional government chose mestizos, even in positions to which Costefio personnel could have been named. This irritated people on the Coast, especially the Creole petty bourgeoisie, who, because of their higher educational level and technical and professional skills, felt

themselves capable of filling the vacuum left by the foreigners and the Somocistas. Although the preference for personnel brought in from the Pacific was

often present at basic political loyalties, it was also the consequence of the kind of economic projects being carried out by the central government on the Coast. These projects called for personnel with higher qualifications than those that could be obtained in the region; 1n order to induce technicians and professionals to stay on the Coast, it was generally necessary to offer higher salaries and fringe benefits, which appeared extravagant to the Costefios. In any case, the practice prolonged through inertia the same situation that had

existed under Somoza. This initial occupational discrimination was to become one of the main determining factors in the Creole protest in late 1980.

What at the level of FSLN leadership and the revolutionary government was little more than lack of knowledge and lack of cultural consciousness, at the level of many newly arrived government officers became arrogance and prejudice. Most mestizos brought to the Coast the same stereotypes Somoza had so often publicized in the Pacific: palm trees, may poles, lazy men, sexy women—primitive and backward people who needed to be civilized. The situation of the new government officers and FSLN members stood in marked contrast to that of the local leaders of MISURASATA, the Indian organization created in November 1979. In general, the latter were Moravian

pastors, older village people (although not necessarily the elderly), with

118 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

family, cultural, and language ties to the region. The MISURASATA leadership strengthened their organization by taking into account preexisting village structures, which the new leadership of the revolution, who did not speak Miskito or Sumu, did not do. The villagers did not know these new officials and distrusted them as they would any stranger; they saw that the newcomers brought no solutions to most of their problems—the land, the forest, the rivers. Thus, the villagers’ lack of enthusiasm for the newcomers, an attitude that differed greatly from that of people in the Pacific. On the Coast, FSLN cadres were strangers who had to win the confidence of the

villagers. It was not difficult for the cadres to confuse distrust with Opposition and to consider the more reticent as contras. Attempts to get Costefios to join the Sandinista mass organizations and labor unions also generated conficts. These organizations had developed in the heat of the Sandinista battle against the dictatorship and were an integral part

of this struggle. They corresponded to the way the FSLN had developed its political and military mass strategy but had little to do with the Costefios’ experiences and needs. In any case, many party and government cadres from outside the region, often more anxious to display long lists of members than to build an effective organization, appeared to force integration into these organizations and caused even more people to reject them—even in sectors that might have participated in them with better political handling. At the same time, some revolutionary government cadres and officers held the belief that the areas not dealt with politically before the triumph of the revolution were identified with Somocismo and foreign intervention, or else were a kind of political vacuum in which the revolutionary government could operate freely. This led some revolutionaries into confrontation with local authorities, whom they considered to have been in league with the dictatorship, without bothering to find out whether or not these authorities had local sources of legitimacy. This led, in some cases, to the imposition of

government structures parallel or even in opposition to local authority structures, as such, they were artificial formations that lost any real meaning as soon as the FSLN organizers left the area. This way of dealing with things disappointed the positive expectations some Costefio sectors had held at first about the revolution.

These contradictions resulted from or were aggravated by a kind of

ethnocentrism in the viewpoint of the FSLN and the revolutionary government—the result of lack of knowledge about the Coast question, the low political level of many people who had joined the FSLN in the last days of struggle against Somoza, and the presence in the government of scores of middle-class mestizo technicians. Revolutionaries could understand wage laborers’ or landless peasants’ seasonal migrations to harvest export crops better than they could Costefio Indian workers' geographic mobility; there were theories and hypotheses to explain the factors that forced workers in the

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 119

urban informal sector to go out every day to "hunt" for an income but none to deal with the case of Indians who hunted wild boar and deer. The former

were seen as victims of modern capitalism, the latter as part of general backwardness. The revolution was better able to understand the mountains than the jungle. The mountains were something more than a great green wilderness (Comandante Omar Cabezas's 1982 book is titled La montana es algo mds que una inmerso estepa verde; in English, Fire from the Mountain); they were "an immense crucible where the best of the FSLN were forged" (Ruiz 1980). The jungle, in contrast, was synonymous with primitiveness— a mystery, the unknown, not to be trusted. However, it would be wrong to reduce everything to ethnocentrism. Lack of knowledge about the Coast and its complexities also resulted from the

relative marginality of the Coast within the revolutionary perspective, precisely because of the region's socioeconomic characteristics. The concern shown by the FSLN National Directorate to recover the history of Indian Struggles of Matagalpa and the Pacific against Spanish colonialism and the Liberal bourgeoisie (Wheelock 1981) indicates that it would be wrong to

speak of anti-Indian prejudice on the part of the FSLN—although this concem also demonstrates how the FSLN's view of the Indian question was colored by its experiences with the proletarianized Indians of the Pacific.

Nevertheless, it would be difficult to avoid the conclusion that these contradictions, even in the context of tradition and historical experience, are not sufficient to explain the extreme polarization that took place after 1981 and the intense Costefio confrontation with the Sandinista Revolution, in contrast with the Costefios' passive acceptance of the Somoza regime. My guess is that the answer can be found in the leadership that came to represent Costefio Indians after the triumph of the revolution and this leadership's close ties to the right-wing opposition and the U.S. policy of confrontation with

the revolution. This supposition does not detract from the importance of other factors, but it was the catalyst that converted them into tools for the counterrevolution.

INDIGENIST IDEOLOGY AND REVOLUTION At first, the revolutionary government was opposed to a specifically Indian organization. It favored dissolving ALPROMISU but finally accepted the arguments of a new generation of Costefio intellectuals and approved the creation of a new organization that, at least nominally, represented the unity

of Miskitos, Sumus, Ramas, and Sandinistas (MISURASATA). The government's initial opposition was the result of several factors. The revolutionaries wanted to carry out the same kind of political work in this region as they had before the revolution in the Indian barrios of Subtiava in Leén and Monimbé6 in Masaya, without taking into account that these were typically working-class barrios rather than Indian ones (Cabezas 1985). Also,

120. THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

the Sandinistas were concerned about ALPROMISU's ambiguous political past, without defined positions on the Somoza dictatorship. Finally, little

was known about the young Miskito intellectuals who, although they advocated abolishing ALPROMISU, wanted to form a new Indian organization.

Most of these young Miskitos had been part of MEC, the Costefio Student Movement of the Managua campus of the National University; they had not played a significant role in the struggle against Somoza. At best, they were an unknown factor for the FSLN and government at a particularly tense moment for the revolutionary coalition, when conflicts with the non-

Somocista bourgeoisie (with the backstage involvement of the U.S. embassy) were worsening within the government. Moreover, the early stages

of any revolution, popular or bourgeois, always emphasize control and centralization (Brinton 1964); in the case of Nicaragua this emphasis was reinforced by the Spanish-American centralist tradition (Véliz 1984). The Indians' demands thus appeared to open up an additional political space and added one more problem to an already complex situation. The prerevolutionary trajectory of Costefio—and particularly Miskito— activists and leaders contributed to this situation. ALPROMISU's ambiguity vis-a-vis the Somoza government, which even led to strong criticism from MEC, has already been mentioned. But, at the same time MEC's lack of a relevant insurrectionary involvement deprived it of initial political legitimacy

in the post-triumph political environment. MEC's position might be contrasted on this respect to that of the women's movement. In a society with a very strong male chauvinist component, such as Nicaragua, the advancement of women's demands and the direct political involvement of

women are not easy tasks. The first organization of women was AMPRONAC (Women's Association Confronting the National Problems), a mostly middle-class, urban organization founded in 1977. AMPRONAC's

program included such objectives as encouraging women's participation

in the resolution of Nicaraguan problems—an indirect but obvious reference to Somoza's dictatorship—defending human rights, and promoting women's participation in all aspects of life. From a conventional (or First

World) feminist perspective, AMPRONAC's was a rather low-profile program. Anyway, the organization involvement and women's participation gave them a strong political legitimacy and a notoriuos visibility as women.

Pre-1979 revolutionary involvement of women made it easier—or at least less difficult—for them legitimately to articulate their demands into the Sandinista government's policies after the revolutionary victory; pre1979 women's participation engendered the conditions for a progressive, but

not automatic, acceptance of their specific problematic by a male-led revolution. This was not the Costefios' case. Ethnically conscious Costefios did not

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 121

participate, as a group, in the anti-Somoza struggle. They did not seed the ground for a post-triumph legitimization of their specific perspectives and demands through their pre-1979 incorporation in the revolution. The political

room built by women for their demands before 1979 was not built by Costefios for theirs. Consequently, they had to face ignorance and mistrust, or paternalism at best, from the mestizo-led revolution. !2 The revolutionary government proposed incorporating the Indians into

the Farm Workers’ Association (ATC), which at the time grouped rural salaried workers together with small farmers. This approach to the Indian question privileged certain aspects of their material conditions, such as the lack of sufficient land and temporary wage labor; but it diluted cultural factors and their social expressions—such as the relevance of the extended family in production and consumption and the specific structures of local authority. Finally, the government and the FSLN accepted the Indians’ proposal to form their own organization, asking only that they recognize the principles of the

revolution that were fundamental in legitimizing it. A few months later MISURASATA's demand for a seat on the Council of State (a colegislative

body established on May 4, 1980) was accepted. Thus, in less than four months (from November 1979 to February 1980) the Atlantic Coast Indian groups went from not having any organization at all to having an officially recognized one that formed part of the government's legislative branch. This was something many working-class sectors in other parts of the country, larger and with a greater participation in the struggle against the dictatorship, would need to spend much time to achieve. A certain division of labor was established between MISURASATA and the government, in which MISURASATA took care of the Indians’ demands and the government carried out national projects for transformation and development. This generated a duality of viewpoints, which was used by MISURASATA to increase its influence in the region and promote a parallel political agenda. The mistakes made by some revolutionaries and increasing U.S. political intervention further aggravated this situation. The increasingly conflictive formulation of MISURASATA's political program had two main aspects: the incremental nature of its demands and the combination of ethnic demands with its own strategy for power. The Incremental Nature of MISURASATA Demands One of the most interesting aspects in the playing out of the conflict between

part of the Indian population and the revolution was the increasingly imperative tone of MISURASATA's demands. Demands that at a given point in time were presented by MISURASATA and accepted by the government later became unacceptable to the organization and were replaced by harder positions. It is difficult to shake off the impression that the organization's strategy consisted of raising the level of confrontation with the revolutionary

122 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

government as a way of legitimizing itself with the Indian population and with international Indian-rights organizations.

MISURASATA's first official statement was made at its founding meeting (see Barricada, November 27, 1979). The newborn organization defined as its "fundamental goals”: "recovering anc promoting our culture" and "satisfying our economic necessities," paying special attention to "the production and distribution of the goods necessary for subsistence." To this end, it proposed as specific tasks "the reconstruction of our history"; “the diffusion of our language and our culture"; collaboration with goverment literacy, education, and development programs; and "learning Spanish, which is the official language of Nicaragua (emphasis added)." MISURASATA apeared to share the revolutionary viewpoint, enriching

it by adding specific demands. It is interesting to note the organization's reference to Spanish as the official language of Nicaragua; when the point

appeared in the Declaration of Principles of the Sandinista Popular Revolution on the Indian Communities of the Atlantic Coast (August 1981),

it caused consternation and outrage in indigenist circles, whereas its appearance in MISURASATA's first statement apparently passed unnoticed.

General Guidelines of MISURASATA, published in early 1980, specified the organization's point of view. The document upholds a set of “fundamental and inalienable rights" to land, education, culture, natural resources, Organization, health, and work. Regarding land, MISURASATA said "that our revolutionary goverment should recognize and guarantee to each of the Indian villages property rights to its own territory, duly registered and in continuous collective form, inalienable and sufficiently extensive to allow

for increases in the population.” On education, it declared that teaching should be done in the native languages "in the first years, gradually changing to a bilingual system." On culture, the government should "guarantee to our

Indian populations the right to be and live according to our customs and develop our cultures, since they are specific ethnic entities. That is, the right to preserve and encourage our cultures, languages, and traditions. We do not wish to imitate outside customs, but rather be as we are." On natural resources, MISURASATA upheld the right to "exploit the riches of nature to satisfy our own needs. If this is totally impossible because they are subject to special regulations, the villages should receive a direct share from the extractions." It also claimed "the right of our Indian groups to

Organize and govern themselves according to our own cultural, social, economic, and political needs without this infringing on our rights as citizens." On health, it asked for the extension of preventive and regular services, the promotion of vaccination campaigns, and the promotion of “indigenous medicine and belief in it by the patients (in a scientific way)."

On the labor question, MISURASATA asked the government for measures

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which would make it possible for us Indians not to have to leave our villages. To this end the government should provide the necessary means for the villages to exploit the natural resources that exist on our lands for our own benefit. Sources of jobs should also be created Close to the villages, and production, distribution, and consumption cooperatives should be promoted.

It was also asked that action be taken against the discriminatory ethnic occupational hierarchy, and direct participation in the Nicaraguan Institute for the Atlantic Coast was also requested. MISURASATA's demands received a favorable response from the government. On August 5, 1980, INNICA, IRENA, and MISURASATA signed an accord on wood-cutting in which IRENA was to pay for wood cut on village lands but not for that cut on national lands; on lands whose jurisdiction was in dispute between the government and the villages, the latter received 80

percent of the value of the wood. MISURASATA committed itself to tum in, within two months, a map showing communal lands and lands in dispute. This accord was explicitly ratified six months later, in February 1981, even though the organization still had not presented the map. Also in August 1980, the Ministry of Education agreed to develop a special literacy campaign in English and the Indian languages, amplifying the

original plan of the National Literacy Crusade (in Spanish); the ministry's decision went beyond MISURASATA's demand, which only referred to Indian languages. Likewise, the Council of State passed a law promoting bilingual education in the languages of the Atlantic Coast (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, December 3, 1980). The law authorized kindergarten and basic primary education (the first four grades) in Miskito and Creole English in the villages of the region and the gradual introduction of Spanish. This was, in essence, the proposal made by the MISURASATA document. It must be pointed out that the organization's point of view implied a de facto recognition of the need for active government support for the defense and promotion of what the organization itself called Indian culture, authentic ways of being, ethnic specificities, at a stage in which many of these aspects were probably deteriorating among the younger generation of Indians. The

demand for government help to strengthen the credibility of traditional medicine is suggestive in this sense. One year after the issuing of the General Guidelines, MISURASATA's

Action Plan, approved in late December 1980 during an organizational meeting in Bilwaskarma and published at the beginning of 1981, revealed a major shift in the organization's policies. The previous demand to participate

in INNICA's activities became a demand for political and administrative control over the ministry. After getting a seat on the Council of State,

MISURASATA began to demand a seat on the Junta of the National Reconstruction Government.

124 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

MISURASATA also asked for the creation of a system of organizations parallel to those already existing on the national level: JM VJuventud de MISURASATA), a MISURASATA youth group; the organization of alli women on the Coast into a single group, MM (Mujeres de MISURASATA),

the organization of Atlantic Coast workers in parallel unions under MISURASATA control, which would be united into a Confederation of Workers’ Unions of the Atlantic Coast. MISURASATA also tried to build an Indian Federation of Communities of the Pacific Region (Federacion Indigena de Communidades del Pacifico) which together with MISURASATA would

constitute a National Indian Confederation (Confederacién Indigena Nacional). Several months later, the report on land tenure in the Indian villages of the Coast would contribute to a further aggravation of the conflicts between MISURASATA's position and the program of the revolution. By that time

the conflict between part of MISURASATA's directorate and the revolutionary government had broken out violently; the faction headed by Steadman Fagoth had gone to Honduras, where he joined with the former members of the Somocista National Guard, who were attacking Nicaraguan

towns from Honduran territory. The situation of the organization and directorate members who had stayed in Managua was likewise precarious. !¢

The document on the demarcation of village lands was prepared by a group of advisers linked to the right-wing domestic opposition, without any

great experience on the topic, and financed with funds from the U.S. organization Cultural Survival.!° The document did not refer to its supposed

goal—the land rights of the villages—but rather concentrated on the historical evolution of the diplomatic conflicts between Nicaragua, Great Britain, and the United States around the Mosquito Coast. The document also introduced concepts and viewpoints typicial of indigenist ideology that up to that time had been absent from MISURASATA's declarations, even though some had appeared in the Action Plan.

In the first place, there was the concept of "Indian nations,” in Opposition to the concept of a Nicaraguan nation, which had appeared in previous documents. The existence of these Indian nations means, according to MISURASATA, that the formation of the nation state is historically later than the formation of Indian nations and, consequently, that "the rights of Indian nations over the territory of their villages is more important than the rights of states over their territory" (MISURASATA 1981). This position introduced the concept of aboriginal rights and rejected that of the primacy of general national interests, which had been accepted in the General Guidelines of 1980. No reference was made in the document to the rights of the villages; on the contrary, these rights were replaced by the demand for territory for an Indian nation. Thus, the initial approach, in which the rights of the nation-state were

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denied in the name of village rights, moved to a second perspective, in which the villages’ rights disappeared in favor of the rights of the Indian nation. There was a similar progression from the demand to participate with equal rights in revolutionary transformation and in the formation of a national state to the demand to constitute an independent power on the Atlantic Coast. The shift is particularly noticeable in relation to the land question. This was no longer a question of the villages’ rights to their lands, as had been claimed in 1980, but of the territory of the Indian nation, which, according to the 1981 document, represented 60 percent of the Atlantic Coast, or 30 percent of the territory of Nicaragua. With this territorial demand, the previous demand for village land was discarded as alien to the concept of an Indian nation: This ancestral right of inheritance and possession of our territory is contrary to the communal kind of property rights which they have always wanted to impose on us. We are opposed to this because it is against our interests and our beliefs, as peoples who have their own rights. These rights derive from our history, traditions, and culture. MISURASATA demands became more and more extensive at the same

time that the organization's leaders began systematically to discredit the goverment. These demands also coincided with the growth of the armed conflict between the revolutionary government and the U.S. governmentsupported contras. The radicalization of MISURASATA's positions played an

important role in the confrontation, but the positions would have been conflictive in their own right, even if the group's leaders had not associated themselves with U.S. opposition to the revolution, as they in fact did. In effect, in the course of little more than a year, MISURASATA went from demanding the nght to organize the people and the economy separately from revolutionary programs to claiming political control over a third of Nicaragua's territory. Moreover, MISURASATA wanted to impose its own

point of view even in the Pacific. The combination of the demand for territory over and above the interests of the popular national state with the demand to organize the Costefio population separately from the rest of the Nicaraguan people (and to do the same in other regions of the country) could only run into conflict with the basic objectives of the Sandinista Revolution: national unity and popular participation. At the same time, the association of the rights of Indian peoples with indigenist ideology, and through this with open conflict with the revolutionary government, reinforced the ethnocentric viewpoint, which rejected all Indian demands as illegitimate. !®

MISURASATA's position also meant leaving the majority of Costefios without any political expression. At this point, more than 60 percent of the Coast's population was mestizo, many of them having lived on the Coast for several generations; another 10 percent were Creoles and Garifunas, who did

not participate in MISURASATA. A MISURASATA monopoly in the

126 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

region would have left almost three-fourths of the Coast's population in a political vacuum. In reality, MISURASATA's position also denied political expression to

the other Indian populations of the Coast. The Ramas were included—in name only—in the organization at the decision of the Miskito leadership, as Ramas did not participate in the constituent assembly in 1979, nor did they later join the organization. As for the Sumus, MISURASATA was opposed to their original organization SUKAWALA, which it tried to present as a manipulative and divisionist plot of the Sandinistas." The original viewpoint of the revolutionary government tended to favor Miskito hegemony within MISURASATA. The general lack of knowledge

of the problems of the Coast led to a simplistic view of the ethnic multiplicity of the region, and, thus, the greater organizational experience of

the Miskito leadership compared with that of the other Indian groups increased the primacy of the Miskitos after the triumph of the revolution.

Indigenism as Politics At the same time that MISURASATA was raising the ante in its demands, it was taking on more and more systematically an ethnic chauvinist viewpoint that allowed it to present as a historic Costefio demand what in reality was a

parallel political project. By “ethnic chauvinism" is meant a kind of reductionism that privileges ethnic elements in the analysis of a given social group, including the mystification of its own history (Varese 1982).

This chauvinism is not in itself limited to ethnic groups; rather, it appears in the first stages of political development of any subordinated social group. Its main characteristics include an oversimplified view of reality and a simplistic, black-and-white schema of confrontations. This

kind of chauvinism can be found, for example, in the initial stages of the women's movement ("men vs. women") and in some types of religious

activism ("believers vs. heretics”). What stands out in the case of MISURASATA is that this kind of chauvinism was, in fact, a covert way of presenting the leadership's political project, whereby ethnicism acted as the geographic demarcator of a political space whose control it expected to reach.

The demands for a monopoly on women's, young people's, and workers’

organizations on the Coast are a good illustration of the subordination of ethnic considerations to political ones. An organization of the kind demanded by MISURASATA has very little to do with Miskito culture; the appeal to ethnic identity in these demands seems to have been motivated solely by the

desire to promote the organization among the Miskitos and in the international organizations with which MISURASATA increasingly became involved. The conflict played out between the FSLN and MISURASATA around organizing the Costefio population was therefore, not primarily a

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conflict between two different types of organization but between two different political projects, each with its own organizations.

MISURASATA’'s attempt to increase the political differentiation between the Coast and the rest of Nicaragua was accompanied by claims of the revolutionary essence of Indians qua Indians:

We declare that the period of almost two centuries of oppression of our peoples shows that the Indians by virtue of their very specificity and internal solidarity have an intrinsic revolutionary vocation and a capacity to resist conquest and domination, which have made and continue to make them dynamic forces and occasionally the leading forces in the struggles for the internal and external decolonization of our communal tradition; the Indians are the most appropriate people

to carry on an essentially Nicaraguan revolutionary process. [MISURASATA 1980:6]

This kind of claim is not exclusive to ethnic groups; it is also found in other social groups in the first stages of their consciousness of themselves as a distinctive social entity: the beginnings of workers’ and peasants’ political activities, the first steps of the women's movement, the more ingenuous expressions of young people's consciousness. It implies a leap from being one more group within the social structure to being a group with a specific

political position: Women, or Indians, or workers, or young people, or

peasants, or Christians are revolutionaries (or reactionaries: What distinguishes revolutionary essentialism from reactionary essentialism is the

ideological orientation of the definition, not the act of definition itself) because they are what they are. It matters not that the group's reality has little to do with the revolutionary essence claimed for it, as has been true of the Atlantic Coast Indians in the last half century, at least. The ideological force, and the political utility of claims of a revolutionary essence, lies in the idea of the group's combative potential and therefore implies an appeal to One's Own troops as an active force in social change. In the specific case of MISURASATA, claims of revolutionary essence were accompanied by an idealized version of the Indians’ own history:

We declare that, as Nicaraguan Indian peoples, we have a system of land use based on social, not individual considerations, profoundly in

accord with all of Biblical doctrine in both the Old and New

Testaments on the possession and use of land. Thus the possibility of

the domination of certain people over other people based on the individual exploitation of the means of production are eliminated from the very start. [MISURASATA 1980:6]

All production, the fruit of our labor or the use of the riches of nature (the entire economy) is for the survival necessities of the people, not

for profit. We produce to live and do not look for work to make

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money; thus we live in a subsistence economy (not a profit-making one). [p. 7]

There is no need to comment on the lack of fit between this idyllic image and Coast reality, even among the rural, nonsalaried sectors. However,

at this point we should go into more detail about the distinction between Indian property and capitalist property brought out in the MISURASATA document.

What the document presents as a socialized form of land tenure is, in fact, a type of private property, the owner of which is the group or the village. MISURASATA contrasts Indian communal property, which it calls social property, with capitalist property ("individual property") and state

property. Here a number of concepts have been confused. The primary characteristic of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, not individual ownership. Private property has to do with the kind of appropriation—the owner's exclusive right to use, transfer, dispose of the property—-not the number of owners. Thus, in capitalism there are many nonindividual forms of private property: The oldest of these is probably the stockholders association. What MISURASATA and indigenist ideology call

communal property is also a form of private property, but group private property: nonindividual private property. !®

We may fairly assume that claims of a Miskito revolutionary essence and of socialist tendencies within Miskito social organization were mainly related to the reigning political climate in the country at that moment. All of

Nicaraguan society was going through a period of intense popular mobilization; the class struggle was exacerbated and was being expressed in terms of land takeovers, factory occupations, and increasing opposition of part of the capitalist class. Moreover, the National Literacy Crusade was keeping the climate of insurrection alive. In the same way that appeals to ethnicity helped MISURASATA gain ground among Costefios, claims of revolutionary essence may have been an attempt to make points with the revolutionary leadership. In any case, references to the Indians’ incipient forms of socialism, “intrinsic revolutionary vocation," or potential to be "the vanguard in the struggles for decolonization" did not keep MISURASATA from coming ever closer to U.S. government strategy; thus, as was logical, these claims gradually disappeared from the organization's statements at the same time that it was moving more and more toward political isolation and direct confrontation with the Nicaraguan government. MISURASATA's ties to U.S. government agencies were close from the Start. In a sense, these relations were a continuation of those maintained before 1979 by ACARIC and ALPROMISU. But in the revolutionary period, with the growing hostility of the U.S. government to the Sandinistas, the

political repercussions, not to mention the political content of the relationship, were different. USAID, via the U.S. embassy in Nicaragua, paid

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MISURASATA's office rental in Managua; in 1980, a USAID representative interviewed MISURASATA leaders Hazel Lau and Brooklin Rivera, offering

to pay for the regional offices as well; U.S. embassy funds financed an

artisanry project sponsored by MISURASATA (Hale 1987b:124). MISURASATA also had good relations with Alfonso Robelo's Nicaraguan Democratic Movement (MDN), at the time the main right-wing opposition political organization. Norman Campbell, head of international relations with MISURASATA, was an active member of the MDN and was in charge of MDN-U.S. embassy relations. According to Hale, by 1980 the MDN had active ties to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The International Indigenist Apparatus MISURASATA's growing adhesion to the better-known aspects of indigenist

ideology went hand in hand with its growing need to obtain support and

assistance from international Indian-rights organizations as its direct confrontation with the revolutionary government intensified. The appeal to indigenist ideology became explicit when MISURASATA acquired close ties to these groups. The case of the U.S. organization Cultural Survival, which paid for the preparation of the document on land tenure, is illustrative. The MISURASATA document applied to the Atlantic Coast the same concepts that Cultural Survival had been applying in the abstract or with reference to other concrete situations, such as aboriginal rights and the Indian nation as a metanhistorical reality. The same may be said of similar organizations, such as the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and the Indian Law Resource Center.

It was easy for MISURASATA to use these concepts because of the codified nature of indigenist ideology. One of this ideology's more interesting aspects is, in fact, that it comes as a sort of package deal, valid

for all indigenous peoples, at any time, in any place. An Indian is an Indian, whatever the historical, ecological, geographic differences in the social processes through which the different indigenous peoples were

formed. This approach becomes clear if one compares, for example,

the MISURASATA version of Miskito society with the myth of Tawantinsuyo (MIP 1979) or with any other indigenist myth about aboriginal society. MISURASATA's attempt to apply this perspective even

to the Pacific region of Nicaragua through the creation of an Indian confederation is consistent with the expansionist nature of the mythology (cf., for example, the first Barbados Declaration and its appeal to Latin American pan-Indianism). This is obviously not the place to make a detailed criticism of indigenist

mythology. However, it is clear that, at least in the case of MISURASATA, the myth was reinforced by the organization's contacts with international Indian-rights organizations. These organizations played an important role in

130 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

the ideological purification of MISURASATA's leadership and supported them greatly in their confrontations with the revolutionary government.

It is also striking that these organizations, charged with overseeing indigenous peoples’ rights, should have expressed their concern for the Indians of the Atlantic Coast only after the triumph of the revolution. In vain

one may search the proceedings, documents, declarations, and pronouncements of these organizations for a position on the Costefio groups before 1979.19

Ethnic Ideology vs. Revolution The rapid distancing of MISURASATA from its original demands and the

goals of the revolution was accompanied by daily confrontations with government institutions on the Coast and the systematic discrediting of the actions of the revolution. The MISURASATA leadership's strategy consisted in blaming the revolution for any mistakes and mismanagements made by government officials and employees, claiming exclusive responsibility for all gains made through agreements and negotiations, and at times even for the implementation of parts of the FSLN's original program: a standard strategy

in any struggle for power. At the same time, it manipulated the anticommunist fears inculcated in the Costefios through their contacts with

and dependency on U.S. companies, Cuban businesspeople, and the ideological apparatus of U.S. imperialism and the Somoza government. Article 30 of the agricultural reform law, which, as we have seen, set up

special regulations for Costefio Indian villages, was presented by the leadership of MISURASATA as evidence of the government's intention to take away the villages’ land (see Rivera 1981:215). The Bosawdas Forest

Reserve Project, designed to prevent the expansion of the agricultural frontier, which would inevitably have destroyed part of the forest and threatened some Sumu village lands, was interpreted as proof of the intent to nationalize Indian lands.?° In this confrontation, MISURASATA strengthened its political ties to the right-wing opposition: the bourgeois political parties, the newspaper La Prensa, right-wing trade unions, the most reactionary and anti-Sandinista

sectors of the Catholic Church, and to U.S. government agencies. If the MISURASATA program appeared to be separatist in terms of its ideological

content and connotations, consolidation of these ties was to bring the organization into the political domain of the counterrevolution.

In MISURASATA's strategy, Miskito demands were tied to the U.S. government's counterrevolutionary campaign and were thus subordinated to an overall plan of confrontation with the Sandinista Revolution. It seems clear that what made it possible for MISURASATA to change the role of Miskito demands was the way the leaders used them in their own power struggles. All in all, the revolutionary government showed sensitivity to

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these demands, especially compared with its response to what could be considered more conventional demands by class-based organizations such as the peasant and labor movements, which had participated more significantly in the Sandinista struggle.”! The political prudence of the organizations that

represented these sectors contrasts with the lack of realism shown by the MISURASATA leadership. In analyzing this organization, one is struck with

the impatience and intolerance of its political style and its consequent inability to form alliances within the broad revolutionary coalition. In the end, this style turned out to be suicidal: by 1981, part of the leadership had joined the counterrevolution, and the organization had been dissolved by the government. This inability to establish political alliances, and the resulting tendency

to isolate itself from the main protagonists of the political scene, undoubtedly had much to do with the personal styles of MISURASATA's leadership. But it 1s also related to indigenist ideology and its emphasis on isolating these movements politically—not in the vulgar sense that "Indians are not left or right," but rather in the sense that the political activity of these movements is always conceived of as separate from the struggles of other popular forces:

The liberation of the Indian populations is carried out on their own, or else it is not liberation. When elements foreign to these peoples try to represent them or to direct their struggle for liberation, a form of colonialism is created which robs the Indian populations of their

inalienable right to be the protagonists of their own struggles. [Barbados Declaration]

The path followed by the MISURASATA leadership between 1980 and

1981 was similar to that taken by the bourgeois opposition, except that MISURASATA traveled it faster. At the beginning, the leaders presented themselves as a third force between the revolution and the U.S. government, but the fragility of their organization (the result, among other things, of its recent beginnings), internal contraditions and the lack of political expertise

among a good part of the leadership, the limitations of the indigenist viewpoint, and, above all, the escalating aggressiveness of the U.S. government accelerated the loss of a middle ground and forced the MISURASATA leaders to choose one or another extreme of a polarized relationship. As with many among the bourgeois political opposition, it was

the dominant tendency of the MISURASATA leadership to choose the counterrevolution.2 Hale (1987b) has analyzed in detail the internal contradictions that split the MISURASATA leadership in those years into two well-defined factions. On one side were a group of leaders with ties to the right-wing opposition

(such as Norman Campbell) or who had collaborated with Somoza's repressive apparatus (such as Steadman Fagoth): these leaders exploited the

132. THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

limitations of the Sandinista viewpoint and the errors and ethnocentrism of government and rank and file members of FSLN in favor of their strategy of parallel power and as grist for the mill of the counterrevolution. On the other side were the younger, less experienced leaders, like Hazel Lau and, at first,

Brooklin Rivera, who tried to convince the government to change its perspectives and practices.

A number of factors caused the more prorevolutionary members of the

leadership to lose the battle and fail to impose their positions in these conflicts. First was their political inexperience, in contrast with people like Steadman Fagoth, Armstrong Wiggins, Norman Campbell, and others—in

other words, the small group that rapidly gained control over the organization. It is not just that Fagoth had been an informer for the dictatorship's OSN (Bureau of National Security, the secret police), but that in the exercise of these functions he came into contact with political, student, and union leaders. He had contacts, understood the world of politics, knew his way around in it; if he had not, he would have had little to inform about. It is also the case that leaders with a religious background, like Wiggins, have a

Superior intellectual formation, oratorical experience, and control of audiences. The young Miskito intellectuals who looked with a certain sympathy on the revolution could not compete in this sphere; their political

experience was limited in the best of cases to the Costefio Student Movement, a small nucleus of university students in Managua. Their emphasis on the ethnic and regional dimension at a point in time when the explosive center of national policy was in the revolution that was advancing rapidly in the Pacific region limited their ability to understand either FSLN

or traditional political party practice. Furthermore, even the university Students’ comprehension of the dominant viewpoints (Latin American Marxism, “dependency theory,” etc.) was limited and, in any case, had to

compete with the counterweight of a previous socialization in the institutional and ideological atmosphere of the Moravian Church, in which, as has been noted, nothing like liberation theology existed. The second factor has to do with the very limitations of the indigenist viewpoint. The primacy given to ethnicity put internal political discussions

on the back bumer. In these conditions the hegemony of the faction dominated by Fagoth and others within MISURASATA tied the organization

and all its leadership—and, in fact, the ethnic question itself—to the most extreme option. The younger leaders were trapped between agitating for ethnic demands within a context of increasing hostility to the revolution and their personal sympathy for the revolution, whose leadership, however, subordinated ethnic demands to the overall revolutionary process. At the same time, indigenist agitation struck deep resonances within Costefio historical

memory and the way this consciousness had been formed; this allowed Fagoth's group to establish strong bases in the villages and led other leaders

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to take the same line in their political discourse, possibly to maintain their positions within the organization. This in turn reinforced the government perception associating MISURASATA with extremist positions. The ethnicist viewpoint further complicated the situation in that it made

it very difficult to combine ethnic demands with national policies in a nonantagonistic way. Because consciousness of oppression was part of the

group's self-identification, any approach made to the nation state by the group could only be interpreted as the expression of a relationship of domination by the state and oppression of the group—this in spite of the fact that at the same time the group demanded action by the state to defend Indian

Culture. In this sense, the group's political behavior was ambivalent: It showed resentment because the government did not intervene, and fear that it might. The indigenist demands and slogans used by MISURASATA's dominant

leaders were first part of a parallel political strategy and finally of a counterrevolutionary one. But we should not reduce the enormous Miskito response to these demands and slogans to a simple question of manipulation.

There was undoubtedly intentional manipulation, as well as ties to representatives of the U.S. government. But there was more than that, even

though in the heat of the political struggle—and, later, the military Struggle—the revolutionary regime emphasized conspiratorial aspects. There

were also subjective and objective factors that made it possible for the MISURASATA leadership's proposals to receive such a warm reception in Miskito villages and for the Miskitos, who in 1974 were thought unlikely to rebel against any authority (Hamlin 1974), to contribute active combatants to the ranks of the counterrevolution. Even a brief analysis of these factors will allow us to take the conflict between the Costefios and the revolution out of the general atmosphere of exceptionality and uniqueness given it by the Opportunistic and ahistorical presentations of propaganda.

The flourishing of cultural revival movements (religious, ethnic, or caste) is strongly associated with processes of downward social mobility (See,

for example, Reed 1971). The weakness of the Miskitos' ties with the new growth areas of the economy (which, in the Nicaragua of the 1960s and 1970s, was agroexport capitalism) and the political system favored a tendency to experience material living conditions as mere ideological process, and to

emphasize differentiating or distancing elements in the group's cultural patterns. The group's affirmation of its identity presents, therefore, a strong

"spiritual" component: The group, in its self-definition, denies or subordinates the material elements on which its societal subordination is constructed and reproduced.

The relative weight of the spiritual component also makes it more likely that religion will be the privileged domain of expression of cultural protest. This situation has been observed frequently in agrarian societies. The protest

134. THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

movements link a rejection of the present with an appeal to the past (Lenin 1905; Moore, Jr. 1966). The repudiation of the culture and, by extension, the

society imposed on the subordinate group goes hand in hand with the aspiration of restoring the original order: the order established by God and nature (see Garcia Pelayo 1958). The use of religion as a legitimate sphere of expression for social protest

and political norms generally occurs in the first stages of the group's selfdefinition in opposition to the rest of society. The group appeals to the power of God because it does not yet dare to rely on its own power. The social order desired by the group is projected as God's own order and thus as a

behavioral norm; at this stage, the group is always the Lord's chosen representative.*? On the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast, religion had been used as

a space for social protest as far back as the nineteenth century. MISURASATA was, furthermore, strongly influenced by the Moravian Church, and Moravian pastors and others of lesser denominations participated in MISURASATA leadership as they previously had in ALPROMISU. From

the outset, in fact, a good number of local MISURASATA activists in the Coco River villages were pastors, and the Rev. Mullins Tillet was appointed president of MISURASATA's Council of Elders in December 1980.

Religion was one of the elements making up day-to-day Costefio identity. It is interesting, in this sense, that when MISURASATA began to make ties with international Indian-rights organizations and to include Fourth

World concepts in its political discourse, this did not further lead to a rejection of Moravian church influence on Miskito culture. In any case, the

sporadic negative references to the church in public statements by MISURASATA leaders refer only to the ritual aspect—original rites vs. imposed Christianity—-without touching the other realms in which Costefio culture was definitively molded by the Moravian Church. The social conflicts lying at the base of cultural revival movements are

experienced with a special intensity by the petty bourgeois intellectual members of these groups. The process of internal differentiation within the group is usually slow because of its lack of access to the faster-growing

economic domains, and this is generally felt more in educational and intellectual terms than in socioeconomic ones. It is manifested when certain

members of the group begin to have access to university training and professions and activities formerly the monopoly of the dominant groups of society and begin to shift toward the urban centers, where educational and employment opportunities are located. The intellectuals’ distancing is the

result of their higher educational level and, more generally, their wider exposure to the symbolic elements of the dominant group's culture. However, the intellectual distance between these members and the rest of the group is greater than its differences in income and general living conditions. Moreover, the Indian intellectual’s cultural differentiation does not keep the

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dominant culture from viewing him as “an itinerant individual with a congenital proclivity toward the freedom of the forest" (Novedades, April 23, 1970). This ambivalence explains why cultural revival movements have such

a strong base in the petty bourgeois intellectual members of these groups: such movements are a way to rediscover cultural roots precisely among those who are the most distanced from them (Cabral 1972). The cultural distancing of intellectuals from the rest of their group raised

expectations of upward mobility and participation in national society that were Satisfied neither before nor after the triumph of the revolution. From the point of view of the revolution, these people were not a significant factor in

the struggle against the dictatorship, which was the main criterion for defining the influence of the participants in the revolutionary process now in power. From the Indians’ indigenist perspective, their marginalization was

the result of the intellectuals’ fidelity to the cause of their people. The revolution approached them with caution because of the ambivalence of their political loyalties; the Indian intellectuals thought the revolutionaries’ lack of confidence was because they were Indians.

Cultural revivalism was particularly strong with the many MISURASATA leaders and activists with a religious background. The village peoples' issues were not very spiritual: the night to cut trees, land rights, the contamination of the rivers, linguistic discrimination, the racism of the new government officials. It was the traits I have just outlined of the new organization's leadership that brought about the "spiritual" or revivalist version of the people's issues.

The inconsistencies and limitations of indigenist ideology are less relevant than its ability to bridge the gap between the petty bourgeois intellectuals and the village people. The leadership's frustrated material and political expectations combined with the people's frustrated hopes for the

immediate and total abolition of their situation of oppression and marginalization. The combination of historical, ethnic, and religious arguments gave a plausible explanation for the social and economic deprivation of the group and their exclusion from political power. It offered

an answer to the people's feelings of oppression. The emphasis on confrontation with the national government, expressed in its mestizo ethnic

component, reinforced the way Costefios experienced their own subordination. The regional confrontation (Atlantic vs. Pacific) and ethnic

confrontation (Indians vs. mestizos) became a political conflict: MISURASATA vs. the Sandinistas. U.S. government support for the Indians in conflict with the state could also be presented as the contemporary expression of a historical constant.

MISURASATA's position above all expressed the contradictions experienced by the Miskito people. In Chapter 2 it was seen that in the midnineteenth century the Miskitos were forced to give up their role as favored

136 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

allies of the colonial powers and the foreign companies and merchants to the Creoles, who shortly thereafter also replaced the Miskitos in the control of the king and later of the chiefs of the Mosquito Reserve. The image of the

good old days was intensified as downward mobility and the generally problematic nature of life increased. Throughout the twentieth century, Miskito workers had been relegated to jobs and working conditions that were worse than those of mestizo and Creole workers; the villages in the territory

ceded to Honduras in 1960 had to move elsewhere; the generalized recession of the economy of the Coco River lowered the Miskitos' living conditions even more. The prolonged nature of this process made it part of the daily life and consciousness of the people. This, combined with Moravian Church doctrine, produced the conformity and resignation on which the Somoza state depended. Its transformation into a detonator of protest in its most violent expression—war—was possible because of its combination with the cultural revivalist discourse motivated by the frustration of Miskito intellectuals within the framework of a wide-ranging democratization of society that allowed all classes, groups, and sectors to express themselves freely.

The Creoles’ position was slightly different. Their frustrated expectations

and rejection of economic deterioration were stronger, or else exploded earlier, than was true of the Miskitos. This seems to have been influenced by several factors. In the first place, the political changes brought about by the triumph of the revolution resulted, for the Creole petty bourgeoisie,

not in more upward mobility into positions of power but rather in a repetition of their former subordination to mestizo officials. Moreover, Creole petty bourgeoisie felt itself better qualified to carry out these

tasks than the new officials, which may well have been the case. However, the revolutionary government chose to assign mestizo officials to the region, even when it would have been possible to name Creoles from among the ranks of revolutionaries. The confrontation between mestizo revolutionaries and Creole revolutionaries that took place in Bluefields immediately after the triumph of the revolution was resolved by the FSLN in

favor of the mestizos (Gordon 1986). The conflict between the Creoles’

expectation that they would participate in the structures of the new government and the continuation of their marginality generated resentment and discontent.

Second, the revolutionary government dealt with the Costefio question in an abstract way, reducing all the different groups to a common denominator

as Indians and all Indians to a common denominator as Miskitos. The

Sandinista viewpoint reinforced the hegemonic tendencies of the MISURASATA leadership and effectively frustrated the Creoles’ aspirations of gaining a voice of their own and a differential representation in the affairs of their region. The revolutionary government gave to MISURASATA the

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION = 137

function of representing all Costefios and created an advisorship in the Junta and a seat on the Council of State for MISURASATA. On the other hand, SICC, the Creole organization of Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon, received no attention from the government. Many sectors of the Creole population felt this series of decisions to be a rejection of their most legitimate aspirations, and even as the first step toward their eventual subordination to the Miskitos. The involvement of the Creoles in national politics, the student movement,

and union organizations was much more developed than that of the MISURASATA leadership; they had more political experience and doubtless more political effectiveness as well.

Third was the rapid deterioration of the economic and occupational Situation in the Bluefields—Pearl Lagoon—Com Island area, caused by the

flight of Somocista and foreign capital, as well as of most of the Chinese tradespeople. The fishing fleet was pillaged by its former owners, and part of

it was sent clandestinely to Honduras, Costa Rica, or San Andrés. The contrast with the years before the revolution was notable, because the 1960s had seen a relative economic boom in southem Zelaya. Once more, the new authorities’ lack of knowledge about the region, as well as the technocratic and developmentalist viewpoints of many of them, complicated things still further in that it was difficult to respond rapidly to some of the problems.

Finally, the activities undertaken by the new government institutions— changing working conditions, reducing incomes, marginalizing Costefio human resources—combined with the ethnocentrism, arrogance, and sectarianism of many newly arrived government officials, piled more fuel on the fire.

The combination of the Creoles’ resentment with anticommunist or, more specifically, anti-Cuban ideology took place within this objective framework. Lack of information and many people's reticence when talking about this topic make it difficult to reconstruct the facts with a more or less reasonable interpretation. However, this seems to have been, above all, an antiforeign protest. As such, it was directed against the presence of Cuban technicians in the fishing industry, but also included in the "foreign" category

were the mestizos who had arrived with the revolution. There was a great contrast between the foreigners "from before" (Somocista government officials, mestizo and North American managers of the fishing companies), who incorporated some Creoles into economic and administrative institutions

(albeit in subordinate positions), and the latest set of foreigners, who were frustrating the Creoles' expectations of change, and the potential for conflict was even greater. The same may be said about the contrast between the dictatorship's treatment of Costefios (a mixture of cynicism, paternalism, and bonhomie) and the militant and imperative rhetoric of the new government and FSLN officials.

Given the expressions of anti-imperialism and solidarity with the

138 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Cuban revolution that characterized Sandinista discourse, anticommunist

and anti-Cuban slogans must have seemed the best way for Costefios to express their protest against a situation they felt to be unfair. In a sense, the revolution'’s inability to open up to the specific problems of the Creole population—together with the atmosphere created by two decades of anticommunist and anti-Castro propaganda from the Somoza regime, U.S. government agencies, and certain churches—made it possible for Creoles to express their unhappiness in the ideological terms of their enemies.**

The revolutionary government responded to the Bluefields protest, which

was massive and peaceful, by jailing the movement's principal leaders.

The government initially denounced it as segregationist but later recognized that it had been set off by poor handling of the problem by the government and local FSLN members (see La Prensa, October 9, 1980).

SICC, which assumed responsibility for organizing the protest, was dissolved, and the director of the Moravian High School was expelled, accused of having links to the CIA. From that point on, Creoles kept a low profile. Some aspects of their ethnicity—their mainly urban background, the strong influence of middle-class images and practices, the ability to speak

English, job skills, relationships with other countries in the Caribbean Basin—allowed them to find individual ways to survive the crisis: looking

for better employment opportunities in the government's new development programs, adaptation to the new situation, or, in the worst case, emigration to the Pacific region or outside the country. Among those who remained, open protest gave way to a generalized feeling of resentment and frustration. The different types of political expression of the different Costefio ethnic

groups are related to differences in specific authority structures and relationships between the leadership and the base. In the Indian villages, the people's participation is strongly mediated by the leadership. The conflicts between Indian leaders and the revolution were what mobilized the villages;

or, rather, the leadership's perception that the revolution was bad for the villages led the villagers to rise up against the revolution. In this case the relationship of the revolution to the Indian leadership failed, and the crisis of this relationship—a result of ignorance and ethnocentrism on the part of the representatives of the revolution and power plays and connivance with the

U.S. government on the part of the Indian leadership—was what led to confrontation. In the case of the Creoles, there was a clear participation of the

rank and file in the October incidents, although it cannot be denied that previous organizing work had been done. The people felt directly wronged by government policies and expressed, massively and directly, their resentment; the mediation of local leadership does not seem to have been a determining factor.

THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 139

NOTES 1. See the report to José David Ziufliga in J. J. Gonzalez (1985), and the statements of Comandante Manuel Calderén in Ohland and Schneider (1983). In the mid-1960s the mines of Bonanza, Siuna, and Rosita together employed

almost 2,800 workers. But just before the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution this labor force had dropped to just over 1,500, because of the closure of the La Luz (Siuna) Mine and the introduction of new technology: see Mufioz 1986:27-28.

2. Dennis (1981) and Adams (1981) point out that many Miskitos joined the ranks of the Somocista National Guard. At first, the recruitment of Indians was compulsory (Grossmann 1930) but later became an alternative employment opportunity. 3. It should be pointed out that in his extensive analysis of the role of the Protestant and Catholic churches in the formation of critical Christianity in Central America, Berryman (1984) does not mention the Moravian Church at all. 4.It is possible that this may have been influenced by the geographical dispersion of the Indian villages, in contrast with the concentration of workers in the ports and on the banana plantations in the 1920s. 5. For a more detailed analysis, see Cerutti 1977. 6. The First Latin American Communist Congress, which met in Buenos

Aires in June 1929, dedicated some attention to this topic (SSAIC 1929:

263-317). But the later concentration of attention by the Communist International on the advance of fascism in Europe distracted the local parties from this topic and relegated almost to oblivion the question of "race in Latin America." However, it should be said that this deficit was characteristic not

only of what is conventionally termed "orthodox" Marxism—that is, the

tendency closest to the Communist party of the USSR and the Soviet government—but also of the varieties that started to develop in Latin America in the 1960s.

7.In the translation published in Ohland and Schneider (1983:48-63) this document is wrongly dated as 1982. 8. The decree defines natural resources as those of the soil and surface and underground waters; mineral resources, hydrocarbons, and energy resources, including geothermic ones; forest and wildlife resources, including all national

species of flora and fauna, in their natural habitats; fishing resources; the ecosystems in which those animals and plants considered to be renewable natural resources live and reproduce; river basins; the geographical areas that, because of their hydrometeorological, geological, and ecological features, can

be used for an integral form of conservation and rational use of natural resources in general (Article 3).

9.In a sense, there was the same situation on the Coast that a

Sandinista activist remarked on with respect to the peasantry: "People say peasants have a magical view of life. But the ones who have a magical view of

life are the politicians who believe consciousness can be transmitted magically, like putting a stamp on an envelope" (Bolt 1986). 10. In these same years, for example, Rosario Mining Resources got rid

140 THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

of its gold deposits in the Dominican Republic through a lucrative sale to the government of that country. 11. Gordon (1985) points out that in a survey done some time ago among the Creole population of Bluefields the biggest complaint was "not to be able

to go to the corner store and buy, for example, Kraft processed cheese or Lifebuoy soap, even when nationally manufactured substitutes are available.”

12.On women's participation in the Sandinista struggle, see Maier (1980) and Vilas (1986, Chapter 3). The idea that lack of active involvement in the insurrectionary struggle and guerrilla movement deprived Costefos’

demands for autonoumus rule and participation in the elaboration of government policies toward the region of legitimacy was still present in the conceptions of many high-ranking officers in the Nicaraguan government when the autonomy law was passed in the National Assembly in 1987. 13. MISURASATA was referring to the Federation of Indian Communities

of the Central Region and the Pacific of Nicaragua, created in Sébaco (in the department of Matagalpa) in September 1980. MISURASATA attended the constituent assembly as an observer and offered its support to the federation, which did not receive it with enthusiasm. In a meeting with the government Junta in late November of the same year the federation presented a wide range

of demands (land titling, access to rural credit, economic and social infrastructure, such as roads, schools, and medical attention), expressed its support for the revolution and the incorporation of its membership into the

Sandinista People's Militias, and denounced the rumors of "bourgeois politicians and their spokesmen” to the effect that the federation intended to be a “shock force against the Revolution or a state within a state" (La Prensa, September 2, 1980; Barricada, December 1, 1980). The federation, however, was short-lived; its demands were generally the same as those of the mestizo peasants of the region, and its membership, or part of it, joined the recently created National Union of Farmers and Livestock Growers (UNAG) after April 1981.

14. See accounts of these aspects in CIDCA (1984); Brown (1985).

15. For example, Dr. Armando Rojas Smith, a Miskito lawyer and expresident of ALPROMISU, whose B.A. thesis had dealt precisely with the Costefio Indian groups’ land rights, did not participate. 16. For example, the reports that MISURASATA tried to charge taxes in some Costefio villages. This seems to have been rather a series of spontancous

activities by people who waited on the road to request, sometimes too insistently, small voluntary contributions for local improvements from the drivers of vehicles—a very general practice throughout the country in the months following the triumph of the revolution.

17.In September 1981 Brooklin Rivera, in Honduras, presented the question of SUKAWALA as an attempt by the FSLN to divide the Indian people, against the will of the Sumu people (Rivera 1981:214).

18. It should not be understood, however, that communal property is synonymous with capitalism. In reality, this type of property, like other associative types of property, is a kind of feather in the wind: If the wind is blowing capitalism, it tends to reproduce capitalism; if the wind is blowing

| THE ATLANTIC COAST & THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION 141

socialism, it tends to reproduce socialism. In any case, it is interesting how

some anthropological thinking loses its analytical distance and ends up identifying itself with its object of study. Thus, it has been affirmed that "the land constitutes both a condition of individual security and the cohesion of the

group, as opposed to what happens with non-Indians, who use it as an instrument of domination, as a means of production to make a profit" (Barre 1983:162—163; emphasis added). It is obvious that for the author all nonIndians are oligarchs or big landowners, and that "non-Indian" peasants are a Western fantasy. 19. It is striking, for example, that there is no mention of the situation

of Nicaraguan Indians nor of ALPROMISU in the pre-1979 literature on indigenist movements in America, even in works that show a certain sympathy for them. See, by way of illustration, Barre 1983.

20. For example, during the antimalaria vaccination campaign (1981) MISURASATA activists advised the people of the villages not to take the tablets distributed by the Ministry of Health, because they turned people into communists (a similar argument circulated in Cuba during the first anti-polio vaccination campaigns in the first years of the revolution). It also accused certain Indians who participated in the literacy crusade in the languages of the Atlantic Coast of being traitors to the Miskito people (see Barricada, May 22, 1980). 21.1 am referring, for example, to the successive postponements in the Council of State of the discussion of Labor Code reforms, of the suspension of the right to strike, of the deterioration in the real wages of the workers and the prices paid to farmers. 22. In late 1981 the Nicaraguan Democratic Movement had practically all

its leaders out of the country and a number of them had joined the counterrevolution; the leadership of COSEP (Higher Council of Private Enterprise) was sent to jail for a time after trying to carry out an international propaganda campaign against the revolutionary government and the FSLN, accusing them of putting the Nicaraguan people in danger of "a new genocide." 23. There are numerous examples: see Reed 1971; Scott 1977; Wilmore 1983; Jayawardena 1983; and, in general, Marx & Engels 1968. It may also be

recalled that the first uprisings of the European bourgeoisie against the absolutist state took the form of religious wars. 24. According to some observers, the Bluefields protest was not really against the Cuban schoolteachers—who were only passing through the city— nor against the doctors—who were benefiting the people—but rather against the Cuban technicians brought in mainly by INPESCA, who, the people felt, were displacing Costefios.

From Confrontation to Autonomy

THE CONFLICT EXPLODES The increase in counterrevolutionary activities led the Nicaraguan government

to give national defense priority over all other goals and focus on the problem of territorial control in dealing with the Coast question. Only in late 1984 would conditions allow the problem to be looked at from a political

perspective, always taking into account the defense of the revolution. A growing number of Costefio party members were coming into leadership positions in regional political structures and government institutions, and representatives of the Indian and Creole populations were elected to the National Assembly in the November 1984 general elections. In the course of

the war, the Sandinista Revolution was able to learn more about the particularities of the region and the ethnic question; this made it possible for the Nicaraguan government to distinguish legitimate Costefio demands from demands influenced by U.S. government strategies and to see the former as part of the popular and democratic revolutionary project. War introduced deep political differentiations within Miskito leadership. MISURASATA was broken up into three conflicting factions. One adopted the name of MISURA (Miskito, Sumus, and Ramas), allied itself with the counterrevolution based in Honduras, and was closely dependent on U.S. government agencies and former National Guard members. Another retained the name of MISURASATA and was tied to the counterrevolution based in Costa Rica, with ambivalent relations with the U.S. government. A third

group chose to stay in Nicaragua and fight on political and ideological grounds from inside the country. Later on, the amnesty for Costefio prisoners who had participated in counterrevolutionary activities (December 1983) and their return to their places of origin created the conditions for the formation, in 1984, of a new Miskito organization, MISATAN (Miskitu Asla Takanka

Nicaragua) identified in general terms with the goals of the revolution. In 1985 SUKAWALA was reactivated as the Sumu organization. The reformulation of the policies and programs for the Coast and the gradual abandonment of revolutionary ethnocentrism and indigenist chauvinism set the stage

for a more open relationship between the FSLN and the revolutionary government, on the one hand, and Costefio leaders, on the other. 142

FROM CONFRONTATION TO AUTONOMY 143

The change in viewpoint on both sides advanced discussion of the autonomy project and, as a result, the establishment of a cease-fire. In turn, this made possible the provision of basic supplies to the population—food, medicine, construction materials—the return to the villages of the Coco River, and the reconstruction of areas destroyed by the war.

War on the Coast The period between late 1979 and early 1981 was marked by a radicalization of the public positions of MISURASATA and growing confrontation with

the revolutionary government. The hegemony within MISURASATA of leaders with close ties to the U.S. embassy and the right-wing parties led the organization to emphasize the mistakes and deficiencies of the revolutionary strategy on the local level and ignore the receptivity government institutions had shown to MISURASATA demands. The leadership's strategy consisted in blaming all negative aspects on the ethnocentrism and anti-Indian prejudices of the Sandinistas—although the same mistakes were being made in the same period with part of the mestizo population—and a supposedly communist

ideology. This way of dealing with things fit well with the anti-Sandino, anticommunist consciousness inculcated by the missionaries and the village people's viewpoint, generally concentrated on day-to-day local life. In turn, this traditional approach of people in the villages was replaced by the broad foothold MISURASATA activists had gained in most villages through the

National Literacy Campaign in [Native] Languages and their ability to incorporate most of the natural village leaders into the ranks of their organization. Working on this basis, and with a historical background of mutual distrust and resentment, MISURASATA developed a strategy for

gaining power (the strategy is synthesized in the public documents commented on in Chapter 4). The hardening of MISURASATA's positions increased the government's distrust. In early 1981 revolutionary authorities learned of the plans of some

middle-level MISURASATA activists involved in separatist and even counterrevolutionary activities and linked to bands of former National Guard members, which had been making raids into Nicaraguan territory from their bases in Honduras since 1980. Revolutionary security forces learned that MISURASATA activists would try to use the end of the Literacy Campaign

in (Native) Languages in February 1981 to carry out a mobilization of village people in the city of Puerto Cabezas and in other centers of the Coast

to pressure the government to give in to the organization's demands for regional power.

On February 20, 1981, four members of the Sandinista People's Army (EPS) broke into a closing ceremony for the Literacy Campaign in Native Languages being celebrated in the Moravian church in Prinzapolka, with orders to arrest a group of MISURASATA leaders. The leaders resisted arrest,

144. FROM CONFRONTATION TO AUTONOMY

people tried to stop the operation, and a shoot-out started inside the church that left eight people dead, among whom were the four EPS soldiers. The MISURASATA leaders fled, taking with them the soldiers' weapons. These events had an immediate impact with enormous repercussions. The news spread quickly through the surrounding villages and in a few days was known all over the region. Costefios were offended as much by the way the action had been carried out as by the action itself, showing lack of respect for the

church and people's beliefs. Many young people with links to MISURASATA hid in the bush. Shortly thereafter, Steadman Fagoth, the top leader of MISURASATA, was arrested after it was discovered that he had been an informant for the Bureau of National Security, the Somoza government's intelligence agency, which had been responsible for the arrest, torture, and disappearance of many Nicaraguans opposed to the dictatorship. Fagoth's arrest added more fuel to

the flames. The reasons for his arrest were largely irrelevant for most Costefios, and they felt his jailing as a great insult.! Moreover, at the time of

his arrest, Fagoth was a member of the Council of State and had parliamentary immunity; his arrest thus created a conflict between the executive branch, which was responsible for Fagoth’s arrest, and the legislative branch—a conflict that was resolved ex post facto by suspending this immunity. Discontent on the Coast and pressure from other MISURASATA leaders

obtained Fagoth’s release, after a well-publicized self-criticism. Fagoth promised to return briefly to the Coast to soothe the feelings of the people and then leave Nicaragua to study. However, as soon as Fagoth arrived in the region, he began to refuel the conflict and soon moved to Honduras, followed by around 3,000 Miskito from many Coco River villages. There he began to

broadcast counterrevolutionary propaganda on the Quince de Septiembre (September 15) radio station, operated by former National Guard members with U.S. support. In a short time, Fagoth organized a small Miskito armed group on Honduran territory that began to attack the Indian villages on the Nicaraguan side of the border.

A few months later, other leaders of the organization—such as Norman Campbell and Wycliffe Diego—went the way of Fagoth. The position of the leaders who stayed in Nicaragua was not easy, caught as they were between the counterrevolutionary positions of their colleagues in Honduras and the increasing distrust or open rancor of the revolutionary government. In July 1981 MISURASATA released a press communiqué

signed by its new directorship: Brooklin Rivera, Hazel Lau, Marcos Hoppington, and Delano Martin. The communiqué repudiated the position

Fagoth had taken and particularly his alliance with the former National Guard and other "Nicaraguan exiles" and denounced the fact that “imperialism

is openly manipulating the situation of our Indian brothers who have

FROM CONFRONTATION TO AUTONOMY 145

taken refuge in Honduras and is using them to intervene against our country." This attempt on the part of the leaders who had remained in Nicaragua

bore no fruit. A few months after this communiqué Brooklin Rivera left Nicaragua and joined the armed opposition. Of the original national-level MISURASATA leaders, only Hazel Lau was to remain in the country, together with other Costefio leaders such as Ray Hooker, Armando Rojas, and Ronas Dolores, keeping up the struggle for ethnic minority rights within the revolution. As for Rivera, his disagreements with Fagoth rapidly led him to split with his former ally and go to Costa Rica, where he organized his own armed forces against the revolution. Fagoth actively joined the counterrevolutionary

groups operating under the name Fuerza Democrdtica Nicaragiiense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force, FDN), closely dependent on the U.S. government and Argentine military advisers, and gave his organization a new name—MISURA—that eliminated any reference to the Sandinistas. Rivera,

however, kept the nnme MISURASATA, and later joined forces with the newly created ARDE, the Alianza Revolucionaria Democrdatica (Democratic Revolutionary Alliance), led by Edén Pastora and Alfonso Robelo, who had both joined the counterrevolution in early 1982.

In September 1981 Fagoth set up several military training camps in Mocor6n and other places in southeast Honduras with the support of the Honduran army. The instructors were former National Guard members in Honduras, plus a group of fifty Argentinean military advisers (Cardos

1987:305—314). Small groups of Miskitos trained there were secretly sent back to their villages to set up support bases, recruit young people,

and do military training in isolated areas of the Atlantic Coast—for example, close to Sandy Bay north of Puerto Cabezas and around Tasbapauni

in the Pearl Lagoon area. According to CIDCA research, at least eight Moravian pastors participated directly in these activities or supported them (CIDCA 1984:28—29; see also Dickey 1985:131ff). In the final months of 1981, at least fifteen villages suffered attacks by these armed bands, among which were Asang, Andrés, San Carlos, Bilwaskarma, and

Tasbapauni. The actions included kidnappings, torture and murder of members of government organizations, attacks on health and supply centers, and theft of materials and equipment (see Ministerio de Justicia 1983:83ff).7

The goal of the counterrevolutionary forces at this point was the creation of "strategic hamlets" on the Atlantic Coast, which could act as a source for recruitment and to resupply counterrevolutionary forces: FDN's supply lines were still precarious. This was a strategy that had already been used by U.S. armed forces in Vietnam in the 1970s. Between 1982 and 1983, MISURA and MISURASATA (the latter on a much smaller scale) had put together

146 FROM CONFRONTATION TO AUTONOMY

around 4,000 troops and spread their attacks to economic objectives in the region.

Counterrevolutionary organizations developed a strategy based on two

elements: (1) initially, to exploit certain objective problems of the revolutionary government (the arrogance of government officials, supply

problems, lack of knowledge of local customs, etc.) and the rancor or frustrated expectations of the people; and (2) to deploy, early on, a large military force into the region. This force, at times, would be larger than that of the revolutionary government—for example, the “Jorge Salazar" Regional Commando of the FDN in the area of La Cruz del Rfo Grande, opposed by the rather modest forces of the People's Militias, the Ministry of the Interior, and the EPS. MISURASATA also, as was mentioned earlier, had a large

number of local activists throughout the region, well known to the population and part of village life.

In these circumstances, the attitudes of people in these areas were influenced by a number of factors. First, they were affected by the new problems arising from the revolutionary government's actions and evaluated

them negatively, either because they were in fact negative or because no previous political work had been done to explain the problems or offer alternative evaluations. Moreover, they thought that the counterrevolutionary organizations were militarily more powerful than the EPS or the militias and that they would overthrow the government. Furthermore, in many cases the

first counterrevolutionary leaders were local people, even relatives of the village people, compared with the newly arrived revolutionary officials, activists, and combatants. Thus, it was a relatively simple matter to decide to join the contras, or at least collaborate with them: No one bets on a loser. Ethnic identity also influenced people's attitudes. The history of conflicts and confrontations between Costefios and "Spanish" added the weight of inertia to the political definitions made by the people of the region, but this history did not act in a vacuum and was not the only factor in play. Not all Indians and Creoles joined in the armed confrontation to the revolutionary government, nor did all mestizo peasants support the revolution. Rather, the concrete process of working out tensions and contradictions on the local level

(the village and the township, or comarca) and the expression of these tensions and contradictions by the opposing forces were the main factors influencing the way people lined up in this conflict. In the Pearl Lagoon basin, for example, the Garifuna communities always strongly supported the revolution and were notably impervious to the ideological enticements of the contras; armed self-defense groups in the villages allowed them to ward off the MISURASATA forces operating in the area. On the other hand, when the mestizo peasants in the downriver region of La Cruz del Rfo Grande, living close to Miskito villages and in some cases having family ties to Miskitos,

FROM CONFRONTATION TO AUTONOMY 147

decided to take up arms against the government, they joined MISURASATA, an Indian group, not the FDN, the mestizo one.

In 1982 and 1983 more than 800 Sumu Indians were kidnapped in MISURA raids into the villages of Musaw4s and Awastigni; more than 1,000 people were kidnapped after the attack on Slilmalila, where MISURA also destroyed IRENA’s regional offices and the houses of the workers, most of whom were Miskitos. Close to 3,000 Indians were kidnapped in the Sandy Bay area north of Puerto Cabezas and forced to go to Honduras. The villages of Sukatpin, Francia Sirpi, and Prinzapolka, among others, were attacked and destroyed; close to the villages of Lapan, Sisin, and El Mango, bridges were destroyed and the highways mined. In the propaganda battle for world public Opinion, the mass kidnappings of Indians and their forced resettlement in

camps in Honduras were presented by MISURA and U.S. government agencies as Indians fleeing Sandinista atrocities. The most widely publicized movement of Indians into Honduras was that

of the village of Francia Sirpi in December 1983. In late December, counterrevolutionary propaganda recounting alleged Sandinista atrocities against Indians culminated in the removal of the entire population of the village to the Honduran camps. The Catholic bishop of northern Zelaya, Salvador Schlaefer—a U.S. citizen—accompanied the Indians. The incident was presented internationally as evidence of Miskito repudiation of the Sandinistas and, in fact, took the revolutionary government by surprise—

-among other reasons, because at the beginning of the same month an amnesty law had freed more than 300 Indians and Creoles who had been involved in the Red Christmas operation at the end of 1981 (see Americas Watch 1984; Brown 1985).

Nevertheless, the counterrevolutionaries' goal—to lead the Indians into the Honduran camps—had only partial success. In general, the village

people refused to abandon their villages: in some cases, because of their strong ties to their villages; in others, because of lack of confidence in the counterrevolutionary groups; and sometimes simply out of fear. Thus, a large percentage of the Indians who went to the camps did so under some form of violent persuasion by the counterrevolutionary groups, and this fact reinforced the idea of return in the minds of the people in the camps. In Sandy Bay, for instance, counterrevolutionary forces persuaded threefourths of the people to leave their villages after the fighting in March 1984;

however, some 600 people decided to stay, and of those who left only half (around 1,200 people) followed the contras into Honduras; the rest went to

Puerto Cabezas or other places in northern Zelaya. Likewise, after the counterrevolutionary attack on the resettlement village of Sumubila in April

1984, only some 40 inhabitants—out of a total population of more than 2,000 people—obeyed the contras' order to leave; of these, some escaped and

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went back, and some of the others apparently were physically kidnapped by the counterrevolutionaries (Americas Watch 1984: 36-37). In late 1981 U.S. armed forces began to use the Honduran Mosdquitia, bordering on Nicaragua, to carry out military maneuvers, which soon became

large-scale. The first, in October 1981, was Falcon View, involving 300

U.S. soldiers; its objectives were to intercept ships and carry out disembarkation exercises on the beaches of an enemy country in ecological conditions like those of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. In 1983 the Awas Tara (Big Pine) I maneuvers began, 24 miles from the Nicaraguan border, mobilizing 16,000 U.S. and 4,000 Honduran troops. Between August 1983 and February 1984 the Awas Tara (Big Pine) II maneuvers were carried out,

including disembarkation exercises; 11,500 U.S. and Honduran troops participated in it, as well as two aircraft carriers and their combat escorts. The Universal Trek exercise in May 1985 used more than 7,000 U.S. troops and

36 battleships; its objectives were to acclimate U.S. troops to the natural conditions of the Atlantic Central American region. Later on, the Cabafias 85 maneuvers practiced encircling and destroying guerrilla columns (see Borge 1986; INSEH 1987). These maneuvers also made major improvements in Honduras’ military

infrastructure with the aim of converting Honduras into a regional base for counterinsurgency operations—including the destabilization of the Nicaraguan government. For example, during the Awas Tara II maneuvers four military bases were constructed on Honduran territory. After that, U.S. armed forces constructed the air base at La Ceiba, on the Honduran Atlantic Coast, adapted for rapid combat operations. In Trujillo (in the department of Coldn, in the Atlantic region), the airport landing field was enlarged to allow U.S. C-130 cargo planes to land; in Puerto Lempira (in the department of Gracias a Dios, also in the Atlantic region), a landing strip was constructed with a capacity for heavy planes. The almost permanent presence in the Honduran Mosquitia of thousands of U.S. troops with heavy, sophisticated equipment, the increased operative Capacity of the Honduran armed forces, and the improvement of the strategic infrastructure of the country created an atmosphere of growing concer in the

Nicaraguan revolutionary leadership. In addition, the ties between the growing presence of U.S. troops and counterrevolutionary camps were public

(see, for example, Miles 1986; Vergara Meneses et al. 1987). In these conditions, considering the U.S. military invasion of Grenada in 1983, it is not difficult to understand why Nicaragua held the firm conviction that U.S. government strategy was to invade the Atlantic Coast behind a screen of

Indian armed groups, set up a “liberated zone," and claim international recognition. If we add to all this the territorial claims of MISURASATA, as Stated in its Action Plan, and—yet again—the legacy of a conflictive history,

the behavior of the U.S. government reinforced the revolutionary leaders’

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decision to emphasize territorial control and military strength in their handling of the Coast question. The increasing U.S. military intervention caused the Coast question to be subsumed under the question of national defense.

At the beginning of the conflict, however, the revolutionary government

tried to carry on with its development and social service programs. The renovation of the Puerto Cabezas, Bilwaskarma, and San Carlos hospitals, for example, was going ahead, as well as the vaccination campaigns. But gradually the lack of safety because of attacks by armed bands led to a reduction of government activities in the villages and eventually to their complete discontinuation. During 1982 and 1983, attacks on villages and government projects increased, as did confrontations with the EPS and the Sandinista People's Militias. The main theater of operations on the Coast was in the north, and counterrevolutionary activities were carried out there by MISURA, closely tied to the FDN. In 1983 some attacks began in the south by MISURASATA forces operating out of bases in Costa Rican territory.

In addition to the cost in human lives and the destruction or

abandonment of most of the villages, the entire life of the region was

disrupted by the war: communication between villages; supplies; infrastructure, machinery and equipment for the development projects; productive activities; health centers; schools—in short, everything in the

region was a potential target for counterrevolutionary activity. The kidnapping and forced relocation of Indians to Honduras divided many families.

U.S. government propaganda against the Sandinista Revolution presented the war on the Coast as a clear case of genocide and systematic and

massive violations of human rights. White House communiqués called the Situation a "holocaust"; they spoke of the slaughter of thousands of Indians. In 1982 Secretary of State Alexander Haig presented a photograph of burning

bodies as proof of Sandinista atrocities against the Miskitos; shortly afterward, it was discovered that the photograph had been taken several years

earlier during the armed insurrection against Somoza, and the bodies were those of young revolutionaries murdered by the Somocista National Guard (Diskin, Bossert, Nahmad, and Varese 1986:12). With the exception of a few isolated incidents, the human rights agencies could not prove any of the U.S. government's accusations (see, for example, IACHR 1985; Americas Watch 1984 and 1986; Dunbar Ortiz 1986).

THE RESETTLEMENT OF THE MISKITO POPULATION One of the most traumatic episodes in the complex relationship between the revolution and the Costefio Indian populations was the relocation of the Coco River villages to Tasba Pni. Counterrrevolutionary war made it necessary to move much of the rural

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population living in combat zones to safer areas. In late 1987 it was estimated that more than 250,000 peasants had been displaced from their places of origin and resettled in places that offered more safety from contra attacks. The areas most affected by these measures have been Region I (the departments of Nueva Segovia, Madriz, and Esteli), Region VI (Matagalpa and Jinotega), Special Zones I and II (the department of Zelaya), and Special Zone III (the department of Rfo San Juan). The first of these relocations affected Miskito and Sumu villages on the Coco River.

In December 1981 combats between counterrevolutionaries based in Honduras and the Sandinista People's Army increased along the Coco River. At the same time, the Nicaraguan government received word of an imminent increase in operations, part of MISURASATA's Action Plan and the U.S. military maneuvers on the Honduras-Nicaragua border. It was decided to relocate villages in combat zones to safer ground: approximately 48 miles to the south, along the highway between the mines area and Puerto Cabezas. The new settlement, to which some 9,000 people from almost forty villages were initially moved, was called Tasba Pri (free land, in Miskito). The FSLN assumed that the 20,000 or so Miskitos and Sumus living in the Coco River villages would agree to leave the area because of the war, but

it was wrong. Almost half the population instead crossed the river into Honduras, basically because of the uncertainty generated by the relocation. Tasba Pri was to become one of the main points of counterrevolutionary

ideology. The resetthement was presented by U.S. government officials, counterrevolutionary leaders, and MISURASATA leaders as evidence of an

ethnocidal policy consciously and systematically followed by the revolutionary government. In this interpretation, the revolution was forced to annihilate the Miskitos because it had been unable to crush their resistance.

In time, it was proven that almost none of the accusations were based on established fact (see a discussion of these accusations in CIDCA 1984; also Americas Watch 1984; Diskin, Bossert, Nahmad, and Varese 1986; Dunbar Ortiz 1986).

The Nicaraguan Bishop's Conference, which at the time was in open confrontation with the revolutionary government, published a communiqué in February 1982 condemning the resettlement decision, the way it was carried out, and its negative impact on the lives of the Indians. According to the Catholic bishops' document, the measure demonstrated the revolutionary

government's lack of understanding of the human rights of the people involved (La Prensa, February 19, 1982). However, a group of fifteen Catholic and Protestant religious leaders who had visited the settlement took a more conciliatory position (EJ Nuevo Diario, March 10, 1982). Shortly

before this, in a ceremony celebrated at the Jesuit Central American University in Managua, the Moravian Bishop John Wilson, speaking of the resettlement of the Coco River villages, proposed "a permanent dialog and

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constant collaboration for the culture shock and the energies liberated [by this

move] to be channeled in positive ways for all the people of our country." The bishop recognized "deficiencies and errors" on the part of the Moravian Church, admitting "that brothers of ours have committed actions against the Sandinista Revolution and against the deepest interests of our own people" and demanded of the revolutionary government that the church be informed of the programs to be carried out on the Coast and that more attention be given

by “the officers of State Security and government technicians to the idiosyncracies and special characteristics of the Atlantic Coast."

Brown (1985:295) and Jenkins (1986:267) affirm that the project of resettling the river villages was in existence even before it was carried out in

January 1982. They mention, in this respect, that a feasibility study was carried out in November 1981 by INNICA, "with the goal of a resettlement that would create the conditions for a better social and economic integration

of the Coco River villages into the revolutionary model through the execution of new agricultural projects and better access to the national market" (Brown 1985:295).

In reality the INNICA study was about a very different problem— periodic flooding in the downriver area and the feasibility of relocating the villages in this area. Every year the floods cause enormous losses in the rice harvest—in some villages, over 60 percent and the death of cattle. In 1979 rice losses averaged 48 percent, and in 1980 the average was 68.5 percent. In addition, erosion had forced the villagers to abandon their homes and relocate in areas farther away from the flooding but in swampy, unhealthy locations. The infant mortality rate oscillated between 160 and 200 per thousand; the

illiteracy rate was around 80-85 percent of the adult population; and 60 percent of the children under six showed signs of malnutrition. The study also revealed that none of the villages had wells for drinking water or latrines; the people drank river water, but without boiling it. It was suggested that one

solution would be to move the villages to a new site relatively close to the original one but safer. The project was to include the villages of Andres,

Klampa, Boom, Sawa, Auya Pura, Uhran, Sih, Living Creek, and Ulamasta—located in what the project called the "disaster area"—and also those of Tuskru Tara, Tuskru Sirpi, Wasla, Kum, Kiwas Tara, and Raya Pura. The total area of the project covered a surface of 297.3 square miles, with a population of 635 families (INNICA 1981). Thus, it would be difficult to relate this project to the decision made a

year later, in totally different conditions and involving a much larger population. The officials and technicians who took part in the installation of the villages in Tasba Pri—even those who still believe that the decision was correct—point out that the decision to evacuate the river was taken from one day to the next, without previous studies about the places where the people could be relocated, and everything was put together after the project

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had already got under way and with all the urgency required by the circumstances.

However, it is clear that the military decision to withdraw the river people from the theater of operations coincided with old proposals made by the more developmentalist sectors (see, for example, Cardenas 1961) and with a similar approach to that used in some revolutions in Third World agrarian societies (see Boesen et al. 1977). In addition, the early 1960s Tasba Raya project had tried to solve the problem of the Miskito villages displaced from the northern bank of the river by the World Court decision. In other words, the revolution’s need for military defense combined with preceding ideas and experiences that made it possible to resettle a large population in a very short

time. In particular, some aspects of the Tasba Pri project came from the preceding Tasba Raya experience, and some of the technicians who had worked in Tasba Raya were called in to work on Tasba Pri. Tasba Pn consisted of five settlements and a cacao project, located in the

municipality of Puerto Cabezas, 39 miles west of the city in an area of approximately 132,000 acres (76,000 manzanas) on both sides of the Puerto Cabezas—Rosita highway. The area was already occupied by mestizo peasant families with titles to the land. In general, these peasants did not want to take part in the project, so they were paid for improvements so that they would move off the land. Many of them moved closer to the highway in the same area.*

At first, the people were organized into brigades in each settlement to do

the work that had to be done: building houses, preparing the land, and planting. At the end of 1982 the emergency phase of the operation was more or less over. Instead of brigades, production cooperatives were organized by village of origin. Each settlement received a communal land title, civilians

replaced military leaders, and more Miskitos were named to leadership positions. At the end of the year, a state-owned cacao production enterprise began. The main type of cooperative was the credit and services cooperative, using, in general, a rotational, pana-pana form of labor. The cooperatives were the result of pressure by the political leaders of the settlements rather

than the will of the people; different policy measures forced people to participate in them in order to produce. The attempt to organize production in cooperatives failed, for a number of reasons in addition to the people's lack of enthusiasm. First, the real price of production deteriorated rapidly because of the price policies of the state

commercial enterprise ENABAS. There was also a great deal of improvisation in the design of production plans. Closely related to the first point was the existence of better-paying alternatives, such as salaried work in the cacao project, the state lumber project PROFONICSA, and the projects

of the Ministry of Construction, strengthened by the historical tradition of

the region. Finally, it was difficult to see that the socioeconomic

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perspectives would improve in the short term, and this disheartened people. Economic failures contributed significantly to a weakening in the Indians’

faith in the revolution's desire or ability to deal with their problems. In addition, government policies paid more attention to the state-owned cacao project than to the cooperatives. For example, although the total volume of credit given to the cooperatives was around 4 or 5 million cordobas in three years, the cacao project absorbed more than 30 million in less than a year and a half. The same thing happened with the PROFONICSA project. The first administrative structures in Tasba Pri were made up of the military and FSLN activists, almost all from the Pacific. In addition, each village had its representative, named by the administration of the settlement. This structure was provisional; a few months later, the administration of the settlements was in the hands of Miskitos named by the villages themselves. At first, the defense of the settlements was solely the responsibility of the EPS; later, militias and revolutionary self-defence groups were organized in each settlement. The influence of traditional leaders of the Miskito villages—pastors, older people—remained strong, although the increasingly better educated

young people began to question the authority of the older people. The schoolteachers began to lose social standing; many of them became FSLN activists, and this may have had an effect on their position with respect to the village people. But their influence was also affected by the increase in the number of teachers and the developemnt of a more urban life-style.

This last is an important point. With the resettlement, the Miskitos were faced with a total change in their life-style. Their physical environment was different from that on the river. Moreover, they had gone from small, isolated villages to large settlements grouping together several villages from different areas and from a rural life-style to an urban one. This had certain advantages—above all, the accessibility and quality of services—but the Miskito never really adapted. Possibly the main obstacle, apart from the obligatory nature of the resettlement, was the physical design of the project. The large settlements contrasted with the much smaller sizes of the villages; the Sumubila settlement, for example, had 3,700 inhabitants, and Columbus, the smallest settlement, had 1,600. In adition, the lots were too small; no one had taken into account the importance in Miskito culture of fruit trees as a guarantee for future generations, as a way of putting down roots—"permanent ties to the land," as one Costefio intellectual called them. There was no way of reconstructing the family economy; it was difficult to raise pigs and chickens and grow vegetables, and only a small number of the

garden crops usually grown on the river, such as bananas, plantains, and sugarcane, could be grown on the lots. Scarcity and the need to buy many of the products they had formerly produced for themselves lessened the villagers’ ability to exchange gifts among family members or receive visitors in the

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style to which they were accustomed. Houses were mostly built and finished by teams of workers (many of whom were mestizos) from the Ministry of Housing. Time was thus saved, but the Indian tradition that a house be built by the man whose family is going to live in it was broken. Miskitos never felt those houses were their own. On the other hand, coexistence among differer:t villages (considered barrios, or sectors, in Tasba Pri) was recognized as positive by the people. Relations were established between villages that previously had not known one another. This opening of perspectives was greater in the young people, who also received most of the benefits of education in the settlements. The government attempted to create the best possible living conditions for the people of Tasba Pri, but it seems that every measure taken generated a new conflict with the people. However, the resettlement heightened some differentiation among the Indian population. The young people were attracted

by the educational possibilities in the settlements; slowly, some of them began to participate in FSLN-sponsored activities: communal activities, scholarships to study abroad or in Managua, even participation in the People's Militias.

It is possible that, from a military perspective, the resettlement accomplished its objectives. But from other points of view, the result was negative. Tasba Pri was never attractive for most of the people taken there; the demand to return to the river remained alive for years, and as soon as military and political conditions permitted, people went back.>

The resettlement of the Coco River villages to Tasba Pri was not the only resettlement. A number of people from Waspam and villages from the plains area north of Puerto Cabezas were resettled, or moved on their own initiative, to Puerto Cabezas. At the end of 1982, some Sumu and Miskito villages in the mines area and in the department of Jinotega also had to be resettled because of counter-revolutionary war. Between 1982 and 1984, mestizo peasants from the mines area, many of them long-term sympathizers and collaborators with the FSLN during the struggle against Somoza, and in 1983 mestizos from El Tortuguero and La Cruz del Rfo Grande in central Zelaya were resettled for security reasons. The concentration by international propaganda campaigns on Tasba Pri

provides one more demonstration of the frivolity, opportunism, and counterrevolutionary sympathies that underlay them. The desire to discredit the revolutionary government seems to have been more important than the tremendous impact of these resettlement processes on all the people involved in them. Tasba Pri became famous because it appeared to be embarrassing for the revolutionary government, and the other resettlement situations were simply ignored.®

But it also seems clear that the resettlement of the Coco River villages was particularly traumatic in that the river was, and continued to be, crucial

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to the identity of many Miskitos. The forced abandonment of the river was a rude blow to this identity, and the return to the river remained a live issue during the following years for all who had had to leave it, until changes in security conditions and the revolutionaries' approach made a return possible.’

AN AUTONOMOUS GOVERNMENT At the end of 1984 the revolutionary government began to develop a project

for an autonomous government in Special Zones I and II of the Atlantic Coast. Positive developments in the war in that region had reduced military pressures and opened up more political space for the treatment of specific local problems. Moreover, as was mentioned earlier, the revolutionary government had come to the conclusion that a purely military approach was inadequate for the kind of war being fought on the Coast. In fact, the idea of acknowledging some kind of local self-government for the Atlantic Coast villages had already been raised at the same time as the

resettlement of the Coco River villages to Tasba Pri. However, the conditions at the time were still not propitious for such a decision. The FSLN's and the revolutionary government's understanding of the complex Coast problem was still being formed, and the counterrevolutionary war was an important element in their conception of the Coast situation. However, the existence within the revolutionary government of sectors and institutions

in favor of the development of this kind of government as a way of overcoming the conflicts between the revolution and the Costefios made it possible for this project to make rapid progress as soon as circumstances

allowed it to begin. One of the most important factors in this was the patience and wisdom of a group of Indian and Creole leaders, pastors, intellectuals, and professionals, some of them former MISURASATA or SICC leaders, who in the difficult years of 1980-1981 had decided to struggle

for minority rights within the revolutionary camp, or at least within Nicaragua. The first step in this direction was the broad-based amnesty for Costefios

jailed for their participation in counterrevolutionary activities, among whom were some of the participants in the Red Christmas operation. The decision was adopted in early December 1983 and benefited more than 300 Miskitos,

Sumus, and Creoles. The amnesty was the beginning of a process of reunification of Costefio families, one of the most deeply felt demands of the people of the Atlantic Coast. In 1984 another 900 Indians were pardoned or included in amnesty act.

Changes in the Ethnic Composition of the Regional Governments During 1984 civil servants from outside the region were gradually replaced

with local people. This made it possible to satisfy one of the people's demands and improve the functioning of several governmental institutions.

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Dr. Mima Cunningham, from the Coco River, was named as the delegate minister of the National Reconstruction Government in Special Zone I; after the general elections of November 1984 and the subsequent reorganization of the national government, she was named delegate minister of the presidency of the Republic. A similar process took place in the FSLN party structures

on the Coast at an even more rapid pace. In the general elections of November 1984, three Costefio deputies, elected by the direct vote of the people of the region, entered the National Assembly.

The process of replacing the mestizo leaders and government functionaries from the Pacific with Costefios, including mestizos from the Coast, was not easy, nor is it even today. There are few qualified people from

the Coast, and many of them have emigrated to the Pacific or abroad; the percentage of young Costefio university graduates who have gone back to the Coast after completing their studies is very low. Moreover, the question of political loyalties, from the point of view of the FSLN, must be taken into account. In the conflict between the revolution and the Coast, there was a clear geographic and ethnic definition of the revolution in terms of the Pacific and the mestizos and a certain lack of confidence in the Coast. This

attitude retarded the growth of the FSLN on the Coast and thus limited

the number of "trustworthy" Costefios who could be taken into the government.

Progress, however, has been evident, as a result of several factors. First, the higher percentage of Costefios in government posts satisfies a basic demand of the people and brings them more into contact with regional

and national power structures. Second, the greater involvement of local people in the government has created a greater commitment on the part of the Costefios to managing their local affairs. Costefios also have

more knowledge of the region, its specific problems, and ways of dealing with them. Costefio officials have better relations with local people.

As a small illustration of a much broader process, Table 5.1 shows the changes in the ethnic composition of high-level positions in public agencies

in Special Zone II (local government, the banks, public services, state enterprises). In late 1987, just before the autonomy law began to be implemented, the delegates of the national government in Special Zones I and II were natives of their respective zones, as were many Officials of the local delegations of the

different national ministries, including the Ministry of the Interior and, in particular, the security and intelligence agencies; one of the vice ministers

of INPESCA—without a doubt, one of the Coast's most important ministries in terms of the region's natural resources—is a native Creole of Special Zone II. Moreover, the regional governments are actively working to get Costefio technicians and professionals living in the Pacific to return to the Coast.

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Table 5.1 Special Zone II: Changes in Ethnic Distribution in Managerial Positions in the Main State Institutions

Pre-1979 1984

Mestizos 54 47 Creoles 26 53 Others 20 0

Total 100 100 Source: Yih (1985).

Reactivation of the Indian Organizations One of the first problems the revolutionary goverment had to face in trying to reestablish good relations with the Costefios was the lack of organizational structures within the population. SICC, the Creole organization, had been dissolved by the government after the Bluefields incidents in 1980, and the same had happened to MISURASATA in 1981; SUKAWALA, the Sumu organization formed in the 1970s, had remained inactive throughout the entire revolutionary period. In late 1983 a group of Miskito professionals formed a

Professionals’ Association of the Atlantic Coast in Puerto Cabezas, extremely short-lived because of the lack of confidence of some government authorities. This lack of trust also made it difficult to approach the Indians who had gone to Honduras and were in refugee camps with precarious living conditions. In this context, the revolutionary government favored the creation of the Miskito organization MISATAN in the Tasba Pri settlements in mid-1984. The major motive for the formation of this organization seems to have been the December 1983 amnesty and the return of the pardoned prisoners to their villages and, in many cases, to Tasba Pri, where their families lived. On June

26, 1984, there was a meeting in Sumubila, one of the Tasba Pri settlements, in which 500 delegates of the resettled villages participated; the

major demand was for the reunification of Miskito families and a greater participation by Miskitos in the government and government institutions of the region. In late July, a second meeting of some 600 delegates of seventyfive villages in northern Zelaya and Jinotega saw the creation of MISATAN. The leadership of MISATAN and many of its activists lived in the Tasba Pri settlements and participated in different activities there; in general, they

had backgrounds of participation in some FSLN mass organizations, in particular the ATC (Farm Workers' Association). They were Miskitos who thought of themselves as Sandinistas, or at least as revolutionaries, and who were trying to retain a space for specifically Miskito demands within the

context of the revolution. :

The first topic around which MISATAN's work centered was the reunification of Miskito families, but other questions were rapidly added.

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MISATAN worked for and obtained the cancellation of Miskito farmers’ debts

with the National Development Bank, including those of Miskitos living in Honduras at the time. It also obtained government authorization for the people of the village of Boom Sirpi to go back to their village and material

support for the move. It established contacts with the UN High Commissioner on Refugees in order to locate relatives in Nicaragua who were looking for Miskitos who had been kidnapped and taken to Honduras.

MISATAN also worked with MIDINRA to obtain better prices for Miskito rice growers and with the Ministry of the Interior to release Miskitos

who had been arrested. MISATAN also submitted proposals on the exploitation of natural resources on the lands of villages on the Coast and in Region VI (Matagalpa-Jinotega) to guarantee the rights both of the villages and the government and to ensure that the resources would be renewed.’ MISATAN supported the Patriotic Military Service Law passed by the

Council of State in 1983, in response to the rapid escalation of the counterrevolutionary war, but at the same time it asked for a postponement of recruitment for young village Miskitos until the text of the law should be explained to them—which involved, among other things, translating it into

Miskito. MISATAN based its position on the active opposition to recruitment in some villages—for example, Krukira—caused partly by an excess of zeal on the part of the recruiters and partly by the lack of trust in the Sandinista army still felt in the villages. The organization asked for a

postponement of obligatory military service until an autonomous government had been set up. Also proposed was a system of alternative service in the voluntary police to protect economic objectives in the region, in health brigades, and in groups organized to protect the forests, fight fires, teach in the rural schools, and take part in civil defense. MISATAN proposed

that after a certain time in these groups the young men be taken into the territorial militias. The organization attempted to reconcile the government's point of view, which gave priority to the question of national defense, with

the viewpoint of the villagers, who were unenthusiastic about or openly Opposed to military service. However, MISATAN's proposal was not accepted.

During its less than two-year existence, MISATAN had to face several difficulties. For example, the organization had an effective presence only in the Tasba Pri settlements, and even there with only some of the people. The settlements were the focus of the government's concern for the Indians and as such were the ideal environment for MISATAN to carry out its work of mediation. But MISATAN's presence was much slighter in the villages that in one way or another had been able to remain in their original locations, or among the Miskitos who had moved out of their villages (for example, in Puerto Cabezas). This caused many people on and off the Coast to associate MISATAN with the Sandinista government. In fact, for many Miskitos, and

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for many religious leaders, MISATAN was a creature of the revolutionary government, and this made it difficult for the organization to take root in the villages. But at the same time, by taking on some of the Miskitos' most deeply felt demands, MISATAN ended up gaining the distrust—and in some cases the open opposition—of many government and party officials, for whom whatever was Indian was associated with the counterrevolution. To

this should be added certain opportunistic tendencies in MISATAN's leadership, which often led it to take confrontational stances vis-a-vis the government and the FSLN in order to gain support from the people, making it even more difficult for the revolutionary government to deal with the organization.

MISATAN was explicitly an organization that tried to express the demands of the Miskitos and did not claim to represent other Costefio groups.

In March 1985 SUKAWALA was reactivated; in an assembly held that month, a new directive board was elected, and steps were taken to begin to bring back the Sumus from the resettlement camps in Nicaragua and from the

refugee camps in Honduras, where they had either been taken by counterrevolutionary forces or had gone voluntarily to escape from the theater of operations. SUKAWALA also took up the question of the contamination

of river water by mining activity in the Bonanza and Rosita areas, the promotion of a bilingual-bicultural education program in Sumu, and the reconstruction of the villages.

Conversations with the Armed Groups At the same time, the Nicaraguan government initiated direct conversations with the two Indian armed groups, MISURASATA and MISURA. During a visit to Puerto Cabezas in August 1984, Comandante Daniel Ortega (at that

time, the coordinator of the Junta of the National Reconstruction Government, and after the November elections, the president of the Republic)

invited Brooklin Rivera and the Miskitos living outside of Nicaragua to return to the country. He repeated the offer in a speech before the UN General Assembly in September. In a private meeting with Rivera, arranged through U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, Ortega insisted on the invitation once again and arranged Rivera's trip to Nicaragua and to the Atlantic Coast in order to make direct contact with the Miskito people.? Rivera arrived in Nicaragua in late October, accompanied by a member of

the Rama Indian group, a representative of the French government, one of Senator Kennedy's aides, a representative of the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights of the OAS, and representatives of Cultural Survival and the Moravian Church. Rivera visited Miskito villages and different urban

centers of the Coast, including the Tasba Pri settlements; he had the

opportunity to talk directly to many Miskitos. Rivera insisted on MISURASATA's demand for a Miskito territory and opposed the

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resettlement camps; he asked for the government's recognition of the Miskitos' rights to a separate territory and to autonomy and admitted that he was allied with the counterrevolutionary organization ARDE (La Prensa, October 21, 1984; Barricada, October 25, 1984). Rivera and his advisers tried to give this visit a religious tone. The Moravian pastor Fernando Colomer, a member of the commission, presented Rivera as "one sent by our Lord Jesus Christ.” It may be assumed that in visiting Nicaragua and reestablishing contact with the Miskitos of the Coast Rivera was attempting to set himself up as the only representative of the Miskito people and exclusive interlocutor with the Nicaraguan government. Therefore, at the end of his visit to Nicaragua, Rivera went to Honduras with the intention of visiting the refugee camps to

inform them of his conversations in Nicaragua. He could not do so; Honduran authorities detained him in the Tegucigalpa airport, interrogated him, and finally expelled him from the country. This incident illustrates the

heavy rivalry that still existed between MISURASATA and MISURA (Steadman Fagoth's group), as well as MISURA's close links with the Honduran military and security apparatus. Rivera's intent to negotiate was rejected by MISURA’'s leadership, which also led several MISURASATA comandantes to denounce Rivera's decision as treason and to go over to MISURA. Nevertheless, in December 1984 direct conversations began between the Nicaraguan government and a MISURASATA delegation; some MISURA members and international observers were also present. The Nicaraguan government delegation was headed by Commander Luis Carrion, a member of the FSLN National Directorate and, at that time, vice minister of the interior and president of the recently created National Autonomy Commission. The

delegation was also made up of Nicaraguan government officials, representatives of Costefio Indian groups and church leaders working on the Coast. The first meeting took place in Bogoté. The Nicaraguan government

delegation reiterated its recognition of the necessity for Costefio ethnic groups to have special autonomy rights in order to preserve their ethnic identity and for these rights to be formalized on a legal and constitutional level. The government delegation proposed focusing on the different points relating to autonomy—such as land and other natural resources, education, health, housing, transportation, respect for different cultures—in order to

define the government's and the peoples’ respective rights and responsibilities. At the same time, it proposed establishing a three-month truce and repatriating refugees. MISURASATA, for its part, repeated its

previous demand for territorial sovereignty and asked the Nicaraguan government for recognition of the Miskitos, Sumus, and Ramas as sovereign

peoples with full rights to political self-determination, as well as the

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demilitarization of the Coast, indemnization of the villages for damages suffered during the war, formal recognition of MISURASATA, and a cease-

fire after the replacement of government EPS troops by MISURASATA troops. It also asked for the creation of a tripartite commission composed of two government delegates, two MISURASATA delegates, and three delegates from the foreign governments and observers present at the meeting. Conversations continued in Bogoté (January 1985), Mexico City (April 1985), and again Bogota (May 1985). In the Mexico City meeting (April 20-

22), the Nicaraguan government promised to resume sending medical supplies and food to the villages and to have humanitarian agencies aid the

villages in coordination with the government. The government also committed itself to help reestablish subsistence activities (hunting, fishing, agriculture, and trade) in the villages. MISURASATA, for its part, agreed to have its members support these accords and make sure they were carried out. In order to support the accords, MISURASATA and the government agreed to avoid offensive military operations. The Nicaraguan government additionally agreed to broaden the December 1983 amnesty decree to include all the

Indians and Creoles who were still in prison because of their ties to MISURA and MISURASATA (see the complete text of the agreement in Barricada, April 23, 1985).

By virtue of this agreement, the Nicaraguan government set fourteen people free. The Nicaraguan government, taking additional steps not included in the agreement, lifted certain restrictions imposed in 1981 and 1982 (such

as special identity cards for Coast residents) as a result of the population movements in and out of the region as well as within it. During the ceasefire period several incidents occurred; the most serious were MISURASATA attacks on Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon less than a month after the Mexico

City agreement had been signed. In addition, many problems arose in verifying the carrying out of the agreement.

The fourth round of negotiations took place in Bogota in May, only a few days after the attacks on Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon. In this meeting, the Nicaraguan government delegation took up the question of these and other, lesser incidents (ambushes, small-scale armed confrontations); the existence of elements in MISURASATA that did not respond to Rivera's

leadership; and the need to form a joint body (Nicaraguan govemmment/MISURASATA) to coordinate and implement the accords on the

ground. Rivera opposed all these proposals and accused the Nicaraguan government of hardening its line. He criticized the Nicaraguan government's decision to carry out an autonomy project for the Coast and proposed that in

the future the conversations should be carried out indirectly, through the mediation of Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo. The Nicaraguan govermnemt delegation rejected these demands, after which the MISURASATA delegation withdrew from the meeting and unilaterally ended the negotiations. !°

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In May 1987, during the U.S. congressional "Irangate" hearings, it was revealed that the U.S. government, directly and indirectly, had provided Brooklin Rivera with $100,000 so that MISURASATA would interrupt its negotiations with the Nicaraguan government (see Washington Post, May 15, 1987).1! Moreover, Rivera's proposal for Cardinal Obando y Bravo to mediate the negotiations coincided with the one President Reagan and the FDN had made only a few weeks before: that the Nicaraguan government should start negotiations with the counterrevolution with the cardinal as mediator.

Money paid to Rivera was part of the financial campaign organized by the United States in support of counterrevolutionary organizations. Later in

the same year, the White House would ask for, and get, congressional approval of $27 million in "humanitarian aid" for the counterrevolution. In 1986 Congress had approved, at Reagan's request, $100 million, primarily

military spending; at the same time a special fund of $5 million was explicitly approved for MISURASATA. It is clear that the U.S. government was concerned about the possibility

of an understanding between the Indians in the armed groups and the Sandinista government. Peace on the Coast, and the return of Costefio refugees, would put an end to one of the aspects of the Nicaraguan situation most skillfully, and most fruitfully, manipulated by the U.S. government. Moreover, although the revolutionary government, by approaching the Indian organizations, showed its intent to deal differently with the Indian armed opposition (in marked contrast with its earlier policy), the U.S. government's policy diluted the Indian question into the general strategy of destabilization of the revolutionary government. !2

Simultaneously with the public conversations with MISURASATA outside Nicaragua, the Sandinista government initiated a less-publicized dialogue on the ground in Special Zone I with some MISURA leaders who wanted to end the armed confrontation. The reason for the private nature of these meetings seems to have been mainly the need to guarantee a minimum of personal safety for these MISURA leaders, who were, in fact, defying their

organization's official policy. The negotiations ended in a cease-fire agreement, signed on May 17, 1985, in the Miskito village of Yulu, on the plains south of Puerto Cabezas, between a Nicaraguan government delegation

and Eduardo Pantin, the top MISURA leader inside Nicaragua. Forty MISURA leaders participated in the conversations prior to the accord, in addition to some MISURASATA leaders who disagreed with Rivera's

walkout in Bogota. Participants on the government side included Subcomandante José Gonzalez, delegate minister of the Ministry of the

Interior, leaders of the FSLN and the regional government, and representatives of the churches of Special Zone I and of the Red Cross. !3

On May 20 the peace accords were signed in Yulu. They included

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agreements: (1) to declare a definitive cease-fire between the Sandinista armed forces and the MISURA groups led by Comandante Pantin; (2) to permit the

free movement of civilian and government vehicles; (3) not to allow new arms and military supplies to be brought into the country; (4) to support the return of the villagers to their places of origin; (5) to carry out the autonomy project for the Atlantic Coast as the best way for the Indian peoples to obtain their rights with respect for their ethnic identities. On June 23, a month after the Yulu accords were signed, Pantin died in circumstances that were not completely clear,!* but the cease-fire remained in

effect. The villages began to receive basic supplies once again. Soon afterwards, the Nicaraguan government authorized the people resettled in Tasba Pri to return to their villages and provided transportation and other resources for them to do so. In June 1985 counterrevolutionary leaders, apparently sponsored by the

U.S. government, gathered in Miami to integrate MISURA and MISURASATA into a new organization, Asla (Unity, in Miskito). At the

meeting, the leaders called for an assembly to be held in August or September of the same year in which the directors of the new organization were to be elected. The meeting took place September 1—3 in the Honduran village of Rus Rus, close to the Nicaraguan border. Rivera was prevented

from attending by the Honduran government, which detained him in Tegucigalpa and expelled him from the country. The meeting was dominated by the MISURA war faction, and an openly counterrevolutionary stance was adopted. Asla was dissolved and a new organization created, called KISAN (in

Miskito, Kus Indianka Asla Nicaragua ra, Union of Coast Indians in Nicaragua), whose goal was to continue the war against the Nicaraguan

government. The creation of KISAN implied that MISURA and MISURASATA no longer existed; thus, both Rivera and Fagoth were in opposition to the new organization. According to estimates, KISAN, at the time of its creation, had around 3,000 armed men, of whom about 2,000 had belonged to MISURA. Observers who attended the Rus Rus meeting later reported the presence

of officials of the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa, who took charge of the meeting from the start. The assembly was openly opposed to dialogue with the Nicaraguan government and decided that KISAN would formally be incorporated into UNO (Unidad Nicaragiiense de Oposicién, Union of the Nicaraguan Opposition), the new umbrella organization for the Nicaraguan counterrevolution. UNO, whose armed branch was the FDN, was led by Adolfo Calero, Arturo Cruz, and Alfonso Robelo and had been created in May of the same year in San Salvador in order to receive the funds the White House was asking from Congress to finance the counterrevolutionary war.

KISAN was to receive $300,000 as part of the $27 million approved by Congress in mid-1985. In the Rus Rus meeting KISAN defined as its goals

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carrying out military operations close to the cease-fire zones, in order to place

the blame on the MISURA leaders who had been negotiating with the

Nicaraguan government, and creating other obstacles for the peace negotiations. !°

In late September 1985 the peace accords between the armed Indian groups and the Nicaraguan government were broadened. Conversations were held between the regional authorities of Special Zone I and MISURA leaders in Wawa Boom; at the same time, several military opposition leaders from the Sandy Bay area signed an agreement with Nicaraguan authorities in which they agreed to lay down their arms, go back to their communities, and join in the autonomy process. It was also decided that the forces that gave up their Opposition would start to take on the tasks of development and defense of their villages, such as reactivating the local economy, working in the area of production, and local police and defense activities; the latter function led to the creation, in 1986, of the Indian Autonomy Militias (MIA). This process

of gradual reinsertion in the reconstruction and defense of the region was carried out in coordination with the EPS, the Ministry of the Interior, and the

regional government. The peace process spread progressively from the southern plains toward other areas of northern Zelaya. MISATAN was taken by surprise by the government's negotiations with

Rivera, MISURA, and other armed Indian groups, as well as by the autonomy initiative. Apparently MISATAN's leaders felt that the increased number of Miskito interlocutors with the government threatened their own aspirations to be the only representatives of the Miskito people. Moreover, it must have become clear to them that the Sandinista label, which had accrued to them as a result of the circumstances already described, did not help them to take a decisive part in the way events were unfolding on the Coast. Rather, it decreased their influence among the Miskito people, especially now that the older organizations were returning to the political arena.

In mid-1985 MISATAN began to change its position vis-a-vis the government, taking more critical positions and denouncing what it termed the

government's role in the autonomy process. It is possible that these positions were taken in the hope of broadening MISATAN's base; in this sense, it was not very successful, but the change in style and orientation

created distrust and opposition on the part of some of the Nicaraguan authorities of Special Zone I. In its search for a new niche in a situation that was changing practically day by day, MISATAN went into crisis. In October 1985 it withdrew from the regional autonomy commission, a decision that coincided with that of Andy Shogreen, the superintendent of the Moravian

Church, and CEPAD. Having written itself out of the most important political process on the Coast, MISATAN began to fall apart and virtually disappeared as an organization.

The churches on the Coast played an important role in the peace talks.

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After an initial period of open confrontation, the Nicaraguan government and the FSLN reopened contact with Costefio religious leaders in 1983 as part of the process leading to the December amnesty. Several pastors later began to make radio appeals to the armed Miskitos to put down their arms and return. In 1985 interdenominational commissions were created to give more force to the churches’ activities. These commissions supported the talks that led to the Yulu and Wawa accords; religious leaders participated in the meetings,

and the churches guaranteed that agreements would be carried out. In September 1987 an interdenominational (Moravian, Catholic, Assembly of God, Anglican, Church of the Word, Baptist, Maranathic, and Apostolic) pastors’ commission was created in Puerto Cabezas in order to establish communication with the Indians in Honduran camps, send them information about the process of dialogue and autonomy, and convince them to return to Nicaragua, in the context of the Esquipulas II accords signed in Guatemala in August of the same year by the Central American presidents.

The Peace Process The peace accords of May and September 1985 began an ever-widening process in which many Indians and Creoles gave up their armed opposition to the Nicaraguan government. In turn, this process allowed those Indians who had gone to Honduras to return home to their villages. In the first year after the Yulu and Wawa accords, 200 Miskitos left the armed organizations and another 800 living in the Honduras camps returned to Nicaragua; some 500 Sumus were repatriated under the same conditions. The return to the Coco River villages began in late 1985 in particularly precarious conditions. The war had done great damage to the region, and the villages were totally destroyed; there were no fruit trees left standing, and the buildings were in ruins, even in the relatively large urban centers of Waspam and Bilwaskarma. The jungle had invaded everywhere. In early 1986 12,000 Miskitos had gone back to the river villages, but in late March around 8,000 went to Honduras as the result of a terrorist campaign carried out by KISAN

in accord with the strategy of U.S. government agencies. At the time, the White House was trying to win congressional approval for $100 million for the counterrevolution, and the Indians’ move to Honduras was presented as one more proof of the Miskitos' fear of Sandinista atrocities. Months later, however, the Indians began to go back to Nicaragua (see Americas Watch 1986), including some 2,000 who had previously been living in the camps. The process of return to the villages and the repatriation of refugees was

strengthened by the creation and diffusion of the Peace and Autonomy Commissions. These commissions are formed directly by the people of the villages, who elect their own representatives; they are a new kind of popular participation in the process of repatriation, peace, and reconstruction of the villages. Many of the members of these commissions are religious leaders,

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Moravians and of other denominations. In November 1986 an assembly of 100 delegates, representing the villages around the river (Kum, Leimus, Waspam, Asang, San Carlos, Saklin, Kisalaya, Bismuna, and Francia Sirpi, among others), was held in La Tronquera to elect the leadership of the zone's Peace and Autonomy Commission for the Coco River. The commission

rapidly began to participate actively in the peace process, convincing members of armed groups to return to their villages, repatriating refugees and reunifying families, and rebuilding the villages.

At the end of 1987 more than 19,000 people had been repatriated, of whom more than 70 percent were Miskitos; between May 17, 1985, and the end of 1987 more than 2,000 Costefios had left the armed groups. By May

1988 about 20,000 Miskitos had returned to their villages on the Coco River, and another 10,000 were expected before the year's end (IHCA 1988). In 1987 more than 120 Peace and Autonomy Commissions were functioning on the Coco River and in the coastal villages, with Yulu as the main center. There were also commissions in Puerto Cabezas, Prinzapolka, Rosita, and Bonanza.

The reincorporation of former members of the armed groups is a complex issue. The brutality of the counterrevolutionary organizations’ actions against the villages, the kidnapping and murder of many people, and

the destruction of people's livelihoods are still bitter memories for the Costefios who remained in Nicaragua. The political reasoning behind the peace process and the reintegration of former members of these groups often escapes people who have difficulty in resigning themselves to it. However,

the question persists of the integration of former members of the armed

Opposition into governmental military structures. In addition to the remaining fears, there is the fact that many of these people do not want to lay

down their arms. In order to resolve this question, and given that the autonomy project includes organizing vigilance on the local level as a function of the autonomous governments, the MIA were created in 1986 as part of the Sandinista armed forces. In this way, the Indians who have left the armed opposition may retain their military equipment and participate in the defense of the villages and the maintenance of order in coordination with the EPS. According to some Ministry of Defense sources, Costefios made up 70 percent of the rank and file of militias in Northern Zelaya and 30 percent of its officers corps IHCA 1988). In the definitive cease-fire accord between the Sandinista armed forces and

the Indian groups in dialogue, under Comandante Uriel Vanegas (Puerto Cabezas, October 3, 1987), there was an attempt to systematize the ways in

which the Indian forces would take part in the life of the region. The agreement allowed a third of the forces in dialogue to be absorbed into the productive sector—agriculture, small-scale fishing, mining, and lumbering—

with credit from the National Development Bank; another third would

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participate in training programs for technicians or hold scholarships for study in Nicaragua or abroad; and a third would join the armed forces, with the officers’ ranks used in the EPS and the Ministry of Interior applied to the members of the MIA within the armed forces. The advance of the peace talks and the autonomy project—discussed in detail later in this chapter—generated a deep division within KISAN. In early 1986 the tendency favoring negotiations with the Nicaraguan government took on the name of KISAN for Peace, which later became KISAN for Peace,

Justice, and Autonomy. Together with the Peace and Autonomy Commissions, this organization became the main interlocutor with the government and the FSLN around concrete problems such as local selfgovernment, development projects, and relocation of the people coming back from Honduras.

As this process advanced, the U.S. government lost justification for its claims. One sign of this was the omission of all reference to the Miskito question in Ronald Reagan's speech asking for $100 million in aid for the counterrevolutionary forces. This omission also illustrates the increasing

subordination of the Indian armed opposition to the FDN, the gradual

disappearance of a specific space for the Indian question in counterrevolutionary strategy, and the subordination of the Indian to the mestizo command structure.

This process of subordination became Clearer in March 1987 with the formation in Honduras of FAUCAN (Fuerzas Armadas Unidas de la Costa Atlantica, United Armed Forces of the Atlantic Coast) to replace KISAN; not even the name of the organization was Miskito. FAUCAN was basically an organizational attempt by certain Honduran army officers, supported by U.S. advisers, and was extremely short-lived. A few months later it was replaced by a new organization, this time with a Miskito name: YATAMA (Yapti Tasbaya Masrika, Children of Mother Earth). The organization's leadership

brought together once more the original leaders of the Miskito armed Opposition: Fagoth, Rivera, Wycliff Diego, Osorno Coleman, and others. The rapid replacement of one organization by another shows the inability

of the counterrevolutionary forces to make effective use of the Miskito question in its confrontation with the revolutionary government. In addition, the return of Indian refugees to Nicaragua reduces the population in the camps

and leaves a smaller base from which to recruit members of the armed groups. Seven years after the incident in the Prinzapolka Moravian Church, it is clear that the Coast is on the way to peace, and the refugees are returning en masse to their villages.

Political Differentiation Among the Costefio Population The development of the events described in the preceding sections led to a process of political differentiation for the different ethnic groups of the Coast.

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It has been a slow process, with many twists and turns, closely tied to the history of the war, the confrontation between the Indian organizations and the revolutionary government, and, more recently, the peace process. The relative

political unity of the Costefio population with respect to national-level political processes is giving way to a differentiation within and among the different groups. Possibly the clearest sign of this process is the formation of the different organizations claiming to represent the Costefio people. At the beginning of

the revolutionary period there was only MISURASATA, which claimed to represent all the Indian groups of the Coast and was in fact the only Costefio organization after SICC was dissolved. The dynamics of the confrontation

with the revolutionary government, the ties this group had with the counterrevolutionary organizations operating from Honduras and Costa Rica and with U.S. government agencies, and competition among the different

leaders later led to the breakup of MISURASATA into two different organizations.

The formation of MISATAN responded to the demand for an organization of Miskitos in the settlements; these Miskitos were not necessarily Sandinistas and, in many cases, were not even sympathetic to the revolution but needed organizational structures through which to deal with governmental and party structures and to find concrete solutions for their concrete problems. In particular, the demand to reunite Miskito families—

and, therefore, to bring back the Miskitos in the Honduran camps-— distinguished the Nicaraguan Miskito organization from the prowar groups outside of Nicaragua who used the camps to recruit combatants, often by force, and had no interest in the return of the refugees. The settlement experience also helped create differences in attitudes and behavior—in particular, with respect to government agencies. The young people in the settlements were interested in the opportunities for education, scholarships, greater freedom from family pressures, and broader social

contacts that the settlements afforded. For the older people, the young people's interest was evidence that they were losing their ethnic identity, but for the young people such opportunities meant getting ahead in life, even in the difficult conditions in the settlements. Possibly the young women were the most affected by the new perspectives.

The advances made in the autonomy project and the return of excombatants and refugees to Nicaragua introduced new catalyzing elements into the Indian groups. There were concrete issues requiring equally concrete definitions and positions and for which the old points of view were not very relevant.

The emergence of new issues also favored a new kind of leadership, either from within the old leadership structures or outside of them. The war, for example, brought new leaders to the fore. The heads of the armed groups

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iN Opposition to the government, who took part in the peace talks in the northern region, became political leaders, for example, in the pilot autonomy

project. In some cases, they have assumed the traditional symbols of authority; in others, they have gained power through their military experiences in the armed opposition and through their participation in negotiations with the Nicaraguan government. In the village of Yulu, for example, which is one of the most important pilot autonomy projects, the head of the Council of Elders is Rayli Wilson, a former KISAN comandante, only a little over forty, whose prestige among the Miskitos results from his position as a military leader and a participant in the peace accords. It is still too early to judge to what extent these new criteria are an alternative to the

traditional ones, but they show that new elements are coming into the picture. The traditional association of age with wisdom has been called into question by the appearance of these new leaders coming out of the war and

the peace accords.!© From a different perspective, the reactivation of SUKAWALA has allowed the Sumus to gain a voice of their own and, to a

Certain extent, has put an end to the hegemonist aspirations of certain Miskito leaders. These changes in the organizational forms and in collective definitions

are also expressed at the individual level. Analysis of the November 1984 election results in Zelaya shows that there were relatively wide variations in opinion. There is as yet no detailed study of the elections, but Judy Butler's

work, which is one of the few to appear to date, strongly supports the hypothesis of political differentiation among the Costefio people within and across ethnic groups (Butler 1985). Table 5.2 shows the general results of the elections for president, vice

president, and National Assembly representatives. The table shows the differences in the percentages obtained by the different parties in each of the two special zones of the department of Zelaya. Northern Zelaya turned out to

be relatively more Sandinista than the south. The electoral results for the PCD (the Conservative Democratic party) and the PLI (the Independent Liberal party) are reversed in the north and the south. Continuing a regional political tradition, the Liberals had a fairly strong turnout in southern Zelaya: They obtained 22 percent of the votes in Bluefields for the presidential and vice presidential slates. According to Butler, the main FSLN voting bloc were the mestizos in the rural areas: Of their votes, 93 percent went to the FSLN. The Sumus and Ramas followed, with 71 percent for the FSLN in both cases, and then the Garifunas, with 70 percent; only 56 percent of the Creoles and 48 percent of

the Miskitos in the rural sector voted for the FSLN. In the Tasba Pri settlements, the FSLN obtained more than 90 percent of the vote (Butler 1985).

The initial attitude of the Indian organizations in the face of this

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Table 5.2. November 1984 General Election Results in the Department of Zelaya (in percentages)

PPSC MAP-ML PCD FSLN PCdeN PLI PSN

President and Vice President North Zelaya (Special Zone) 6.6 11 14.8 70.5 12 4.8 1.0 South Zelaya

(Special Zone I) 4.2 1.7 10.1 64.5 2.0 16.0 1.4 National Assembly Representatives

North Zelaya

(Special Zone) 9.1 0.8 17.0 64.6 1.2 6.8 0.5 (Special Zone 4.3 1.7 9.2 65.8 1.9 15.6 1.4

South Zelaya

PPSC: Partido Popular Social Cristiano (Popular Social Christian party) MAP-ML: Movimiento de Accién Popular Marxista-Leninista (Marxist-Leninist Popular Action Party) PCD: Partido Conservador Demécratica (Conservative Democratic party) FSLN: Frente Sandinista de Liberacién Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front) PCdeN: Partido Comunista de Nicaragua (Nicaraguan Communist party) PLI: Partido Liberal Independiente (Independent Liberal Party) PSN: Partido Socialista Nicaragiiense (Nicaraguan Socialist party) Source: Butler (1985).

gradual political differentiation was confrontational. One of the common denominators among the leaders of the Indian organizations— MISURASATA and MISURA as well as MISATAN—has been, and possibly continues to be, their interest in exclusive rights to represention of the Miskito people. This may have to do with ideological—or cultural—

problems, in addition to their hopes of gaining privileged access to governmental and outside funding and resources (which can only be obtained by means of an exclusive role in mediating between these agencies and the villages) as well as to their aspirations to power, a necessary motivation of all politicians. Moreover, the revolutionary government initially preferred to

deal with a single organization, MISURASATA, to represent all Costefio

ethnic groups. But, with the experience gained from early errors, the government and the FSLN later began to recognize the various leaders who had a real base and to initiate a dialogue relationship with all of them as long

as this relation furthered the cause of peace. Events seem to show that differentiation among the Costefio population is inevitable and that this must be expressed in a greater range of organizations and political viewpoints.

The Autonomy Project The political and institutional framework for the peace process and the return of Indian combatants and refugees was established by the development of an autonomy project for the Costefio ethnic groups and communities.

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In December 1984 the Nicaraguan government created the National Autonomy Commission, headed by a member of the FSLN's National Directorate.” As has been mentioned, the concept of specific rights for the Costefio ethnic groups and communities had been around for a long time at certain levels of the government and the FSLN, but political and military conditions on the Coast had made it impossible for this position to gain ground.

The National Autonomy Commission's goal was to take concrete steps to institutionalize an autonomous government for the people of the Atlantic Coast within the framework of the proposed Nicaraguan constitution. Shortly thereafter, regional autonomy commissions were organized in each of the Special Zones, with broad participation by Costefio leaders—in particular, religious leaders. Gradually the regional commissions began to take on a more important role. Consultations were held with Costefio leaders in order to identify concrete issues around autonomy.

From the beginning it was apparent that most people had no clear concept of autonomy; there was a broad consensus that Costefios should manage their own affairs, but it was difficult to go beyond this. The same

was true of the government and in many sectors of the FSLN. Slowly, however, the commissions’ work identified the topics of most concern for the Costefio people: land, resources, language, self-government, the preservation of their cultures, religion, relations with the central government, the powers of the regional governments, modes of participation. In June 1985 an assembly of representatives of the ethnic groups of the

Atlantic Coast, the FSLN, and the national government unanimously approved the document Principles and Policies for the Exercise of the Autonomy Rights of the Indian Peoples and Communities of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (Comisi6n Nacional de Autonomfa 1985). The content of the document, and the fact that it had been approved unanimously, show how far the Sandinista Revolution and Costefio leaders had come in understanding one another.

The document reaffirms the unity and indivisibility of the Nicaraguan nation and the sovereignty of the state, recognizes the multiethnic nature of

the country, and ratifies the struggle against all forms of racism, ethnocentrism, separatism, and hegemony. It recognizes that the Indian people and ethnic communities of the Atlantic Coast are an indissoluble part of the Nicaraguan people and that the preservation of their ethnic identities

requires that they have their own material base. It affirms the right to collective and individual property on the lands Costefios have traditionally occupied; respect for the procedures for transmission of property and land use that have been established by Costefio customs; the right to the use of the woods and waters of the areas where they live. It establishes that part of the

profits resulting from the use of natural resources on the Coast will be

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reinvested in the region, "as shall be determined by the Costefios through their own authorities. The Indian peoples and communities of the Atlantic Coast shall determine the rational use of the natural resources of the region." The statement of these principles goes beyond the limitations of the Joint Declaration of the government and the FSLN in August 1981 in that it takes on one of the fundamental demands of the Costefio people: participation in defining policies and making decisions about the region's natural resources.

The document provides for the creation of two autonomous regional governments and defines their main functions: to participate in the creation of economic, social, and cultural policies; to promote in the regions the defense

of sovereignty and territorial integrity of the nation; to participate in the planning and execution of national economic policies in all aspects having to do with the autonomous regions of the Coast, such as

a. Property and land tenure; b. Economic programs; c. Development programs; d. Investment projects; e. Business organization and administration; f. Profits generated by natural resources and work. (Comision Nacional de Autonomfa 1985:21—22)

The document, published in Spanish, English, Miskito, and Sumu, also

presents certain general considerations and historical antecedents, the principles and goals of autonomy, and a proposal for the organization and

functions of the autonomous regional governments. A simplified and illustrated version of this document was used in the process of popular consultation that took place in both regions in late 1985. Trained volunteers

went from house to house in the more accessible areas, distributing pamphlets and discussing them with the people. In more isolated areas, the inhabitants were invited to assemblies to explain the project; the same was done by social sectors, institutions, and ethnic groups. The consultation was carried out by each of the two regional autonomy commissions and allowed the different communities' perspectives to be incorporated into the document. The results of the consultation were used as input for writing different drafts of the autonomy law. In some villages in Special Zone I, harassment by KISAN troops made it difficult for people to participate in the consultations. Nevertheless, despite the problems of access, security, and some people's distrust, there was fairly broad participation. In general, people emphasized economic issues, education, self-government, and village rights. On several occasions, they criticized what they felt to be an excessive influence by the government on the autonomy commissions. The armed organizations operating from outside Nicaragua took divergent

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positions with respect to the autonomy project. MISURASATA criticized the project as a unilateral imposition by the government, although it was in agreement with the idea; MISURA and KISAN and, later, YATAMA were openly opposed to it, although their military chiefs inside Nicaragua joined in the discussion and dialogue. Within Nicaragua, autonomy means different things to different people, as may be learned from the results of the consultations. For the Miskitos of

northern Zelaya, the reunification of families, access by the villages to the natural resources of their lands, and the reestablishing of communal rights, especially to the land, were recurrent themes; there was much interest in the preservation of the symbolic elements of ethnic identity: religion, language,

and traditions; often mentioned was the demand for a center of higher education to train local technicians and professionals. In Special Zone II, with a high percentage of Creoles, the emphasis on

the economy and on labor questions was greater than in the north. Certain problems were brought up in relation to the representation of the different

ethnic groups in the autonomous government, and some Creoles even thought that the mestizos—the majority ethnic group in both regions— should not be allowed to vote. There was also a demand for a regional university-level educational center (an aspiration dating from the Somoza period). Another demand was for more economic ties with the Caribbean Basin. Among the Sumus, the emphasis was on the return of refugees from the camps in Honduras and the settlements in Nicaragua; another demand was for

the mestizo farmers who occupied lands traditionally belonging to the villages to be resettled elsewhere. People brought up the necessity of preserving their language and developing bilingual education. There was also

concem about what were considered to be certain tendencies to reproduce Miskito domination in the Costefio ethnic hierarchy. In the Garffuna villages in the Pearl Lagoon, basic attention was paid to questions of local self-government and community development, whereas the Ramas asked for a bilingual-bicultural education project, more attention to the preservation of their language, and local development activities.

The mestizo population of the Coast did not seem to be highly motivated in favor of the autonomy project, although there 1s consensus on

autonomy as it involves decentralization and greater local and regional influence on a wide range of issues, particularly economic ones: more

supplies and inputs for production and consumption, prices, better distribution. But it is clear that the ethnic dimension of autonomy is not a determining factor for mestizos, the majority ethnic group of the Coast and in the country as a whole. Mestizos feel themselves to be represented by the national government, although there are criticisms of specific policies with respect to supplies, prices, and what is seen as excessive centralization.

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Finally, the central government is carrying out the autonomy project, but many of the local-level officials are more concerned about the political and territorial unity of the country and still have a tendency to associate autonomy with separatism. This concem is brought about as much by the

survival of a certain ethnocentrism as by the inertia of the national administrative system.

In July 1986 the Regional Multiethnic Assembly in Pearl Lagoon discussed a draft autonomy law written up in Special Zone II; almost 100 leaders of the local communities participated in the assembly. Other goals of

the assembly were to evaluate the results of the popular consultation, propose a territorial demarcation for the autonomous region, design a policy for natural resources, and propose a structure and an electoral procedure for the autonomous regional government. In October 1986 elections were held for

Community Councils in the villages at the mouth of the Rfo Grande in Special Zone II; 70 percent of the eligible voters participated in the elections. The elected representatives for these councils went to Bluefields for a seminar

on the financial affairs of the region and made contact with regional authorities and delegates of the central government. In November of the same year elections for Community Councils were held in several villages in the Pearl Lagoon area (Orinoco, Marshall Point, Pueblo Nuevo); 71 percent of the eligible voters participated. The tasks of these councils include improving local infrastructure, acquiring construction materials and equipment, building

schools, supporting bilingual-bicultural education, and encouraging local people fighting with counterrevolutionary forces to return to their villages. In Yulu a pilot self-government project began in 1986, with a structure similar to that of the Community Councils in the south. These pilot projects are experiments adapted to the specific nature of each

community and area. They are concrete forms of democracy and local participation, through which the villages are beginning to learn the tasks of

local self-government and to participate in a dialogue with the regional government, and which have a demonstration effect on the surrounding villages. These experiments were also important in the compiling of information and experience to be included in the draft autonomy law discussed in the National Assembly in September 1987. Bilingual-bicultural education programs are being developed in Miskito,

Sumu, and Creole English, and one is soon to begin in the Rama language. It has been necessary to carry out complex and costly linguistic research in order to develop these projects and produce grammars, dictionaries, teaching materials, and readers in these languages. In some cases special treatment has been necessary to save languages that were in danger of being lost.!8 In addition, debates on the Nicaraguan constitution in many popular consultations and at the National Assembly made it possible to include the basic principles for autonomous government in the text of the constitution.

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Article 8 of the Constitution affirms the multiethnic nature of the Nicaraguan

people, and Article 11 provides for the officialization of the Costefio languages in the autonomous regions on the same level as Spanish; Article 121 guarantees the villages’ right to education in their own languages. The right of the villages to organize without any discrimination "in order to carry out their aspirations according to their own interests and participate in the construction of a new society" (Article 49). Chapter II of Title [IX of the Constitution deals specifically with the Atlantic Coast. Article 180 establishes that

the Communities of the Atlantic Coast have the right to live and develop with forms of social organization which correspond to their historical and cultural traditions. The State guarantees to these communities the enjoyment of their natural resources, the legality of their forms of communal property, and the right to freely elect their authorities and representatives. At the same time it guarantees the preservation of their cultures and languages, religions, and customs.

The new constitution includes the fundamental issues of Costefio ethnicity: political organization and participation, access to the use of the region's natural resources, preservation of the symbolic elements of their cultures. Article 181 establishes the basic institutional political principle for

the effective use of these rights: "The State shall establish by law autonomous government for the regions inhabited by the Atlantic Coast Communities for the exercise of their nghts." In compliance with this article of the constitution, in September 1987 the National Assembly approved the Autonomy Statute for the Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (see La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, October 30, 1987), which sets forth many of the results of the popular consultations and the Multiethnic Assembly held in Puerto Cabezas in April of the same year,

in which more than 220 representatives from all areas of the Coast participated.!?

The law creates two autonomous regions: the Autonomous Region of the North Atlantic (RAAN) and the Autonomous Region of the South Atlantic (RAAS), which coincide with the former Special Zones I and II, respectively. Each of the autonomous regions will have the following administrative organisms: (1) a regional council; (2) a regional coordinator; (3) municipal and community authorities; (4) other organisms corresponding to the administrative subdivision of municipalities (Article 115).

According to the law, autonomy is the ability of the regions to participate effectively in the creation and execution of development plans and programs in order to adapt them to the interests of the different communities and to carry out their own projects; the administration of programs for health, education, culture, supply, transportation, communal services, and others, in

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coordination with the corresponding central ministries; the promotion of a

rational use of natural resources and preservation of the ecology; the conservation and development of the Coast's historical, artistic, and linguistic heritage; the establishment of regional taxes; the promotion of commercial exchange with the Caribbean Basin; the integration of the regional, national, and international markets (Article 8). The exploitation of natural resources

will take into account the rights of the villages “and should benefit the inhabitants in a fair proportion by means of agreements between the Regional Government and the Central Government" (Article 19). Each regional council will be made up of forty-five members elected by universal, equal, direct, free, and secret vote, and "all the ethnic groups of the

Autonomous Region must be represented, in accord with the system determined by the electoral law" (Article 19); the National Assembly representatives of the autonomous regions will also be full members of the regional council of their region (Article 20). The attributes of the regional council include participating in the drawing up and execution of national programs and policies conceming the region; making up the draft of the regional budget in coordination with the Ministry of Finance of the central government; electing and finding replacements for the regional coordinator from among its members—although this function may also be assumed by the regional delegate of the presidency (Articles 23.8 and 31); promoting the development and participation of women in all aspects of life in the region; making up bills for laws on the rational use and conservation of natural resources (Article 23). The regional coordinator has executive powers in the region, such as representing the region, naming administrative officials, and administering the special development fund (Article 30). Each region's income will be made up of regional taxes—including taxes on the profits of business in the region—and funds from the General Budget of the Republic (Article 32). The law sets up a special fund for development

and social betterment, with internal and external funding and other extraordinary funds not included in the budget; this fund will be spent on social, productive, and cultural projects in the autonomous regions (Article 33).

The law guarantees equal rights and duties for all the inhabitants of the

Costefio communities, “irrespective of their number and level of development"; the right to the preservation and development of their cultures; the right to the uses and enjoyment of communal waters, woods, and lands in

conformity with national development plans; the right to the free development of their social and productive organization; the right to education in their own languages and in Spanish; the right to the full exercise of communal, collective, or individual forms of property and its transfer; the right to elect and be elected to the government organisms of their region; the right to "preserve scientifically and in coordination with the national health

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system the knowledge of natural medicine which has been accumulated throughout their history" (Article 11). It is also established that "communal property" is made up of the lands, waters, and woods which have traditionally belonged to the

Communities of the Atlantic Coast, and which are subject to the following stipulations:

1. Communal lands are inalienable; they cannot be donated, sold, seized, or taxed, and are imprescriptible;

2. The inhabitants of the Communities have the right to work plots of communal property and to enjoy the goods generated by the work they have done.

As for the thorny issue of national defense in the autonomous regions, the law declares that "the defense of life, justice, peace, and our country for

the integral development of the nation is the fundamental duty of the inhabitants of the Communities of the Atlantic Coast" (Article 13). Consequently, Article 14 establishes that "in the Autonomous regions, defense will be directed by the Sandinista Peoples' Army and the State's security and order apparatus. The inhabitants of these Communities have priority in the defense of sovereignty in these regions."

Notwithstanding the apparent will of the Nicaraguan government to involve in the discussion On autonomy every opinion coming from Coast's population, it is evident that the law expresses mainly the government and FSLN approach to the question. Oppositionist Indian leaders decided not to participate in the debates, although the opportunities to do so were offered to them. In particular, the reluctance of MISURASATA’'s leaders—namely,

Brooklin Rivera—to accept legal and personal guarantees from the government to stay in Nicaragua and participate in the discussion of the project has prevented a broader and more detailed elaboration. MISURASATA

agrees with autonomy, but from a different perspective. Instead of a law,

MISURASATA proposed to sign a treaty or agreement "between the indigenous peoples of the Atlantic Coast region and the Nicaraguan government, as opposed to a unilaterally decreed statute." MISURASATA proposed a unique autonomous region (Yapti Tasba) including the entire

Atlantic Coast without internal divisions, submitted to the exclusive authority of the Indian nations, as opposed to the statute's and assemblies proposals of two autonomous regions in accordance with ethnic, historical, and ecological differences. Local and regional authorities should be selected by all communities, instead of being elected—as stated in the autonomy law. Competences of the autonomous government are larger in MISURASATA's proposal (Wiggins 1987). It was obvious, then, that by the time the National Assembly was about to discuss and eventually pass the autonomy law, strong differences on the nature and extent of autonomous rule and on the concept of people's political

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participation subsisted between the Nicaraguan government and MISURASATA leaders. At the same time, the government's project had to confront the opposition of most of the minority political parties represented in the National Assembly, which, although they finally voted for the law, expressed an open distrust of the very idea of autonomy, on the assumption that it could lead to a separatist regional Indian government and, eventually, to a fracturing of the national territory.”° An analysis of the autonomy statute from the perspective of law lies outside my competence. Nevertheless, it might be well to make a few brief comments:

1. The text of the law is the product of certain compromises between the

centralizing viewpoint of the state and the desire of the Costefios for autonomy and decentralization. Although less repetitively than in the 1985 document Principles and Policies ..., the autonomy law still emphasizes the unity of the state. This doubtless has to do with the unitary nature of the Nicaraguan state but also with the survival of fears about separatism and secession, Therefore, it is likely that there will be problems in the delegation of powers and the decentralization of structures and functions.

2. This is an autonomous government within a unitary state structure that already exists in the autonomous regions. It is therefore, to a certain extent, autonomy from above, and consequently many of the functions of the autonomous regions are shared with the central state—for example, in accord with Article 23, sections 5 and 10, the regional council has the power only to make up drafts for laws and not to approve the final version (with respect to the budget and the exploitation of natural resources). 3. The statute also represents a compromise between the common law traditional in the villages and the law of the central government, embodied in legal codes and other legislation. This is particularly clear in all the sections

referring to communal property (Article 36 of the law), but doubtless this question will also arise with respect to the administration of local justice, patterns of family organization, use of natural resources, etc.

4. The destruction and disintegration of the productive and service infrastructure, the lack of financial resources, and the scarcity of trained people makes it likely that in the first stage, which may be relatively long, the autonomous regions' ability effectively to exercise the powers given them in Article 8 will be problematic. In this light, the special development fund and the ability to obtain funding from governmental and nongovernmental organisms will take on great importance. As for funding from the central government and from the exploitation of natural resources belonging to the

State but located on the Coast, it will be necessary to make up coparticipation agreements to the satisfaction of both the central and the regional governments.

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5. The law leaves open several problems that are difficult to resolve. Article 19, for example, leaves undefined the criteria for representation of the

different ethnic groups in each regional council: a proportional type of representation would make dominance by the mestizos inevitable, given their large demographic majority on the Coast, and would distort the real sense of

the autonomy project; an arithmetically equal representation would overrepresent the smaller groups, some of which have less than a thousand members. 6. The law stipulates no procedures to resolve the controversies between the central government and the autonomous regions that may arise in the application of the law. In other experiences with autonomous regions, the lack of provisions for this problem has led to an accumulation of tensions with no satisfactory solution and occasionally to conflicts. It may not be too much to assume that there will be differences of opinion and interpretation

about such matters as the application of the autonomy law and the delimitation of powers of the central government and the regional governments and that it will be necessary to design procedures that can lead to a peaceful solution. The Supreme Court of Justice may be a juridically acceptable procedure, but the completely mestizo ethnic makeup of the Court may give rise to fears among the Costefios. The establishment of a specific court to judge these questions, with magistrates from different ethnic groups proposed by the autonomous regions and the central government and named by the National Assembly, could be a way of overcoming the problem. 7. As for defense, the "prioritary responsibility" of the inhabitants of the villages, under the direction of the EPS and the security forces, could be a

formula that effectively responds to the combined points of view of the Costefios and the national government. The creation of the Indian Autonomy

Militias (MIA), based on Indian combatants who have left the armed organizations as a specific part of the EPS, is doubtless the concrete referent of the legal concept. This system, if it works, could resolve the problem of the need to combine national defense on the Coast with the Costefios' interest in taking charge of the tasks of security and order within their villages.

Notwithstanding these and similar questions, the importance of the

autonomy law lies in its political significance more than its legal technique—not because the latter is irrelevant, but in the sense that the law expresses the political will of the revolutionary government to honor the commitments assumed from the beginning of the process of dilogue with Costefio leaders and armed Indian organizations. I have also shown that in the drawing up of the project a great deal of attention was paid to the results of

the popular consultations, open meetings, and other kinds of direct participation by the Costefios. Finally, the autonomy law represents the recognition of a legitimate political space and a means for the Costefio

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people to carry out the autonomy process, and their own development, in accord with their own needs and expectations.

One conclusion that stands out in the process that ended with the approval of the autonomy law is that the political and military ethnic conflict

on the Coast arose, and subsided, on the basis of elements that had long existed and, at bottom, were still the same, but the resolution was based on a different interpretation of these facts by the revolutionary government and the FSLN, and on the consequent rectification of their own practices and policies. First, the revolutionary government began to recognize explicitly, after late 1983, the justice of many of the Costefios' demands, regardless of the

way in which they were expressed and even if they were identified with counterrevolutionary organizations or interventionist policies of the U.S. government. This allowed for a different treatment to be given to these demands, and the groups that were making them, in comparison with the sectors of the population that make up the counterrevolution in other parts of the country. Second, as a consequence of this recognition, the tone and content of

revolutionary political discourse changed. There was a shift from giving orders to searching for dialogue; today's issues are autonomy, Costefio participation, adapting national development strategies to regional and local specificities, satisfying people's aspirations, and involving Costefios more directly in managing their own affairs. Third, the legitimacy of the local authority structures that had existed

since before the arrival of the revolutionary government on the Coast— pastors, local notables, priests, older people—was recognized, and attempts were made to approach these leaders as mediators and promoters of the peace talks. Fourth, the revolutionary government demonstrated that it can effectively guarantee the physical safety of the people, their villages, and their economic activities, including the men who had left the armed opposition groups. In

other words, it demonstrated its military superiority by defeating the counterrevolution in an area many Costefios perceived as a test of physical strength. The decisive factors in this were the higher level of operativity of the EPS and the security forces, improved relations between the military and

the local population, and the greater incorporation of local people into defense-related activities. But possibly even more important was the change in the political perception of the war on the Coast. It is significant that the most effective and consistent dialogue process with the Indian organizations with ties to the counterrevolution was initiated and carried out precisely by the regional leaders of the Ministry of the Interior and the Sandinista People's

Amy. Fifth, the development of pilot autonomy projects in northern Zelaya, the Pearl Lagoon basin, and the mouth of the Rfo Grande, the return to the

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villages, and the slow but steady reconstruction of the villages have shown people that autonomy is more than just words. Sixth is the political maturity of the Costefio leadership, including some sectors that in the early years of the conflict were openly opposed to the revolutionary government. The fantasy of the military or political defeat of the Sandinistas (that is, the overthrow of the government) has dissipated, except perhaps in the most recalcitrant sectors or among those who have found a way of life in the armed opposition (in both cases, lacking a physical presence inside Nicaragua). Experience has shown the viability of negotiation around concrete demands and autonomy rights for the Costefio people as part of the general broadening and deepening of the revolutionary process.

PERSPECTIVES FOR THE REACTIVATION OF THE COAST ECONOMY?! The contrast between the present situation on the Coast and that reigning in early 1982 could not be more striking: The peace process is well advanced, people are going back to their villages, Costefios are actively participating in reconstruction, production, and defense; the autonomy project is on the way; and there is a better understanding by the revolutionary government of the complex problems of the Coast. But, at the same time, six years of war and the impact on the region of problems in the Nicaraguan economy as a whole

have had a serious impact on the Coast economy and prospects for developing it. State centralism remains strong. As we have seen in preceding chapters, the boom period in the Coast economy ended, in general, with the 1929-1930 crisis, although there were brief reactivations in certain sectors and regions from then until the 1970s.

The conflict aggravated preexisting problems and generated others. The existing infrastructure was destroyed: bridges, wharves, piers, landing strips, roads; most of the improvements made during the first years of the revolution

suffered the same fate. The telephone lines between the Atlantic and the Pacific have been destroyed by counterrevolutionary attacks. The systems of Supply and transportation have been interrupted, the local market has fallen apart; the dependency of the rural areas on the few urban centers has increased, as has the dependency of the Coast on the Pacific.

Whole subregions of the Coast are virtually deserted, such as Punta Gorda, the upper Coco River area, Prinzapolka, El Tortuguero. On the other hand, the urban population of Puerto Cabezas has grown enormously. The

arrival of refugees from the Coco River and surrounding villages almost tripled the population of Puerto Cabezas, from around 7,000 inhabitants in 1980 to almost 20,000 in 1985. Bluefields had less than 12,000 inhabitants in 1980 and close to 30,000 in 1986. Living conditions in these cities have deteriorated rapidly.

Agricultural activities in the villages disappeared with the war. Small-

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scale production went into crisis, even in areas generally suited to this type of production, such as fishing and lumbering. The insecurity created by counterrevolutionary attacks, official price policies, and the lack of credit hurt these traditional economic activities, in which the Costefios had accumulated a great deal of experience. Large public investment projects could not be carried out on schedule; lack of skilled labor, holdups in the delivery of materials for production, lack of experience, overcentralization, and other

factors slowed up the progress of the original programs. Counterrevolutionary attacks centered particularly on economic targets.

Many obstacles remain for a strategy of regional development on the Atlantic Coast. In the first place, the magnitude of the depredation of natural resources by the enclave economy, resulting in the almost total exhaustion of the pine forests, the irrational exploitation of mineral deposits, the advanced

state of contamination of many rivers, and the destruction of the tropical rainforest by the advance of the agricultural frontier present a complex Situation that must be seen as a precondition for any development policy. In turn, the destruction of resources demands investments that far exceed the capacity of the Nicaraguan economy and will not be able to produce returns for a relatively long time. There are good prospects for development on the Coast, but all in the long term. Moreover, the economic limitations and problems of the rest of Nicaragua make it difficult to expect a large amount of assistance from the national government. Just as in many other aspects of Nicaraguan society, the possibility that the Coast economy will recover is

tied to outside funding and lines of credit, as well as the ability of the regional governments and Costefio participation in the administration of the economy to transform outside aid into accumulation and development. In the second place, crisis and war severed the Coast economy's outside

ties before it could integrate into that of the rest of the country. Coast producers have lost their traditional markets, both to sell their products and to

acquire the supplies they need for their activities. The general strategy of reinsertion into the international division of labor, which underlies the revolutionary government's efforts in this field, has not yet been able to fill the vacuum left on the Coast after it withdrew from the Caribbean Basin market. The advance of the autonomy process has allowed the government to take some measures, however. In 1985 the regional government in southern Zelaya, now the Autonomous Region of the South Atlantic, established the Caribbean Commercial Corporation, which exports nontraditional products for the Caribbean market. The surplus generated from foreign trade is invested in regional development projects and administered by regional authorities. The regional governments have also obtained from the central government ministries substantial rises in the prices paid for village crops and fish, better

conditions for trade, and improvements in the supply of materials for production.

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In the third place, the experience of the years since the triumph of the revolution has shown the need to design a strategy for economic development and social change that is open to the broad participation of the people. This

implies, minimally, a definitive regionalization of development strategies and, therefore, decentralization of the decision-making process. Such a design

requires as a consequence that a technology more suited to the resources, Capacities, and conditions of the region be developed and that technical and scientific knowledge be made accessible to those involved in these activities.

In fact, this is not a question dealing exclusively with the Atlantic Coast. The tension between the technocratic, developmentalist emphasis on the expansion of productive forces and broader-based strategies involving the participation of the people involved (whether they are mestizo workers and peasants or Costefio villages) affects all the revolutionary government's main economic initiatives and large investment projects (see Vilas 1987b). This

debate has also arisen in other processes of revolutionary change in economically backward and impoverished societies in the Third World.

The revolution's initial economic strategy for the Coast was not attractive for the Costefios. Many of them feel that the developmentalist approach to investment policy is not in accord with local modalities of production and exchange on which the people build their day-to-day lives and

their hopes for the future. Moreover, as of 1989, the central government's economic strategy has not shown itself to be effective in meeting even its own goals. The war has been a decisive factor in this, but an additional factor

is the isolation of government strategy from people's modes of social organization and their work experiences.

This question is related, in particular, to the recovery of the village as a

mode of organization of social life and its integration into a strategy for development and change. There is still a strong tendency on the part of many

State officials to see the Atlantic Coast villages, with their small-scale production techniques and their application of technology adapted to local resources, aS sO many proofs of the people's backwardness and primitivism. This is an attitude that also appeared in the agrarian reform and the treatment of the peasant question. In these matters, the government and the FSLN understood that it is impossible to develop productive forces and transform social relations without the active collaboration of the people; therefore, it is necessary to adapt programs and policies to existing reality. The same cannot yet be said of the development projects on the Coast. But if the autonomy project is to be effective, the central government must

make substantial modifications in its main economic initiatives, choose planning and development strategies better suited to the specificities, needs,

and potentials of each region of the country, work for a greater decentralization of its functions and resources, and accept broad popular participation in the design of policies and strategies of development and

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social organization. The constitutional sanctioning of autonomy and the recent approval of the autonomy law represent important advances, but the law's real content and prospects will depend on the specific policies adopted and on the actual ability of the autonomous governments to take part in their design and execution.

NOTES

1.1 am grateful to Reverend Lloyd Miguel for a great deal of the information on these incidents. See also J. Wilson (1984).

2. At times, the situation itself engendered a chain of events that escalated confrontation and the polarization of forces. For example, on December 20, 1981, in the MISURA attack on the town of San Carlos on the

Coco River, seven EPS soldiers were taken prisoner and later tortured, mutilated, and murdered. The following day, a group of Miskitos traveling from

Puerto Cabezas to Leimus was ambushed by Sandinista military; several Miskitos died in the attack, and some of the survivors were taken prisoner.

3. The conciliatory, dialogue-oriented position of Bishop Wilson was not, at the time, the majority viewpoint within the Moravian Church. Shortly

thereafter, Wilson was sent to continue his religious work outside of Nicaragua.

4.The following exposition is a summary of points presented in more detail in CIDCA (1986).

5. As far as I know, the only systematic study of the impact of the resettlements on the population is that by Nolan (1986). Although Nolan confines her study to the people resettled in Puerto Cabezas, her analysis is relevant to Tasba Pri as well. 6. It is interesting to compare international accusations about Tasba Pri with, for example, the total silence on the expulsion of hundreds of thousands

of inhabitants of the city of Buenos Aires during the military dictatorship imposed in Argentina in March 1976. As a result of the eradication of the

“villas miseria" (spontaneous settlements of poor families) and of the construction of urban freeways, 410,974 people over the age of five (children under that age were not listed) were expelled from Buenos Aires and their houses destroyed, including hundreds of relatively new multifamily dwellings. However, no one raised an outcry in the defense of these unfortunates, and few even know where they are today.

7. AS expressed by Ray Hooker, a Creole intellectual and political leader, on the enormous influence of the Coco River on Miskito culture:

They (the Miskitos) were intimately conscious of their surroundings, the Coco River, their "Panamerican Highway", as one of them put it, their highway built by Jesus Christ, as another said. But the River and its surroundings were much more than that. It was the place where thay had seen their children born “and where they had buried their dead; it was where they had planted their fruit trees and where they ate their fruit; it was where they had built their houses and where they enjoyed their families. It was where they bathed and swam and where

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they looked at the young girls; it was where they showed their manly prowess with their canoes and the road they traveled to the mines, to silicosis and tuberculosis; it was where they relieved themselves and

how they took their rice and beans to sell in Waspam; it was the source of fertility for their lands through the destruction inflicted by the floods, and their connection with the unknown Pacific and with the Caribbean and the green turtles. The Coco River was the source of life and death for the Miskitos. [INNICA 1982] , 8. According to the MISATAN proposal, 80 percent of the profits from lumber would go to the village where the trees were felled and the other 20 percent to IRENA, which would send it to the Proyecto Forestal del Noreste (Northeast Forest Project). In the case of pine, 45 percent of the trees should be conserved in any given area, whereas with the other species the trees closest to the villages should not be felled. MISATAN also proposed that the labor for the extraction of natural resources should come from the villages. The MISATAN proposal was not approved immediately, but it served as input for decisions made later on (MISATAN 1985).

9. The following exposition is based on newspaper information and conversations with observers at the meetings. See, among others on the same subject, Diskin, Bossert, Nahmad, and Varese (1986); Dunbar Ortiz (1986). 10. In the meetings with the Nicaraguan government delegation, Brooklin Rivera was advised by representatives of indigenist organizations such as the World Council of Indian Peoples, the Indian Law Resource Center, Cultural Survival, and others, some of which were very sensitive to the opinions of the U.S. government. 11. In an article recently published in the Mexican newspaper Uno mds Uno and reprinted in Barricada (Managua), Noam Chomsky (1988) states that shortly after the five Central American presidents signed the peace accords in

Guatemala in August 1987, the CIA offered bribes of $3,000 a month to fourteen Miskito leaders "to get them to keep up the military conflict and thus

destroy the peace accords in the Nicaraguan Atlantic region." Chomsky's statement shows, in addition to the U.S. government's interest in stopping the

peace process and prolonging the war on the Coast, one more facet of the ethnic hierarchization of U.S. strategy. Whereas Indian leaders were offered $3,000 a month, mestizo counterrevolutionary leaders such as Arturo Cruz were paid $7,000 a month, and Alfonso Robelo received $10,000 a month, tax-free. 12. The Coast and the Costefios were not specifically dealt with in the perspective of the non-Indian counterrevolutionary forces. Even in the few

analyses with intellectual pretensions by authors with ties to ARDE, the Atlantic Coast appears as the privileged sphere of primitivism, sects, and dialects: See, for example, Velazquez (1986).

13. Present for the Nicaraguan delegation when the accords were signed were Comandante Antenor Rosales, head of the Seventh Military Region of the EPS; Subcomandante José Gonzalez, delegate of the Ministry of the Interior; Julio Lépez Campos, head of the Department of International Relations (DRI) of the FSLN; Dr. Mirna Cunningham, delegate minister of the presidency for Special Zone I, and members of the Sandinista armed forces. The MISURA

186 FROM CONFRONTATION TO AUTONOMY

leaders were, in addition to Pantin, Orlando McClean (Mak Siksa), Juan Salgado (Piuta), Elias Wilfred (Waca), Welcome Reymundo (Zebra 36), and others. Also present were Dr. Eldo Lau, the Red Cross representative, Rev. Lloyd Miguel of the Baptist Church, Rev. Victor Ordofiez of the Anglican Church, and other regional leaders.

14. According to the counterrevolutionary organizations, Pantin was killed by the Sandinistas. According to unofficial and unconfirmed stories, Pantin died accidentally while he was drawing a gun. According to certain religious leaders whom I interviewed in September 1987, Pantin was murdered by KISAN groups opposed to the peace negotiations. In reality, the only ones who could have benefited in the short term from Pantin's disappearance from

the scene were those opposed to the peace talks. The fact that the conversations continued in spite of Pantin’s death shows that peace on the Coast was a goal shared by broad sectors of the armed Indian organizations. The hypotheses of an accidental death was confirmed after this book was completed by Uriel Vanegas, one of Pantin’s officers, who was with him when he died. See interview in Carcache (1988).

15.1 am grateful to journalist Gill Brown, who attended the Rus Rus

meeting, for the information given in the text. Cf. a similar version in Diskin, Bossert, Nahmad, and Varese (1986).

16. Equivalent changes have been registered in other societies based on

communal or tribal structures when these were exposed to revolutionary processes. See Lan (1985) for the case of Zimbabwe. 17. The National Autonomy Commission was presided over from the time it was formed up to April 1985 by Comandante Luis Carrién and after that date by Comandante Tomas Borge. The commission was made up of Orlando Nufiez Soto (mestizo, general director of CIERA), who acted as coordinator; Hazel Lau

(Miskito, representative for Special Zone I in the National Assembly); Ray Hooker (Creole, representative for Special Zone II in the National Assembly); Galio Gurdian Lépez (mestizo, director of CIDCA); and Manuel Ortega Hegg (mestizo, researcher on the ethnic and national questions).

18.In this context, I should mention the linguistic research carried out by Danilo Salamanca on Miskito, Susan Norwood on Sumu, and Colette Craig on Rama. On the process of bilingual-bicultural education, see, for example, Schapiro (1987).

19. See Yih (1987b) for an analysis of debates at the Puerto Cabezas assembly.

20. {I was present as an observer during the debates at the National

Assembly on the autonomy law. The main argument of right wing Oppositionist parties was that a population that amounted to less than 8 percent of the entire Nicaraguan population had no right to be acknowledged as

a separated government of more than 50 percent of the national territory. A second argument was that the unitary character of the Nicaraguan state made the

establishment of autonomous regional governments unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the persuasiveness of the FSLN's representatives at the National Assembly—especially those from the Atlantic Coast—and the evidence that the law was going to be passed in any case because of the internal correlation

FROM CONFRONTATION TO AUTONOMY 187

of forces (as the FSLN held more than two-thirds of the seats) made it possible for the law to be passed with the support of the entire Assembly. 21. This book was completed well before hurricane Joan (October 1988)

destroyed almost completelly the economic and social infrastructure and severely damaged the ecological system of the Autonomous Region of the South Atlantic—particularly the areas near Bluefields, Corn Island, Rama Cay, Pearl Lagoon, and Monkey Point.

Final Considerations: The Unequal Development of Social Revolutions

Lenin (1916) and Trotsky (1930) dealt with the unequal and combined nature of capitalist development: unequal in its international dimension, as the base

for and expression of imperialist expansion; combined in its internal or domestic dimension. More recently, structuralist-influenced Marxian literature has formulated the question in terms of a combination of different modes of

production within a single socioeconomic formation (for example, Rey 1978). Despite the differences in perspectives of these authors, they have in every case been referring to the same concept: Capitalism does not develop at the same time and in the same way or with the same intensity in all parts of a given society, nor does it replace or overcome everywhere and at the same time all precapitalist forms of production; it may combine with them and put them to work for the benefit of its own enlarged reproduction.

This idea may also be applied to the development of processes of revolutionary change in backward capitalist countries—in fact, the only countries in which such revolutionary processes have taken place. When we speak of the unequal development of revolutionary processes, we are talking

about two things: (1) The conditions for the development of these processes-—the socioeconomic and political contradictions that set the stage

for a revolution—do not develop in the same way or in all places of the society in question; and (2) the different problems, topics, and questions of a given society do not all strike the attention of revolutionaries at the same

time, nor are they dealt with at the same time by the strategy of revolutionary change. Some are posited before, others after; others are ignored

until they cause deep crises; still others only arise as secondary issues with respect to other topics that are seen as more urgent or relevant. Unequal revolutionary development in the territorial sense has occurred

in all revolutionary processes. In the Soviet Revolution, the rapidly developing urban revolutionary axis of Moscow and St. Petersburg was in

sharp contrast with the dominant tone in the smaller cities and in the countryside. In the Mexican revolution there was a great disparity between the activation of the peasantry in the north and the relative passivity of the south, in Mozambique there was a similar contrast between the development of the revolutionary struggle for independence in the northern and central 188

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS 189

regions of the country and the situation in the south, closer to South Africa. We could go on adding examples; possibly the extreme case of this situation

was Vietnam. Nicaragua, where the Sandinista revolutionary process developed at different rates in the Pacific and the central-northern region on

the one hand, and on the Atlantic Coast on the other, is thus part of the normal run of revolutionary processes.

The unequal development of revolutionary struggle implies that the "revolutionizing" of society, before the taking of power, is also unequal. By “revolutionizing of society" I mean the generally rather long process through which numerically large sectors of a country develop a collective sentiment of rejection of their living conditions and translate this feeling into collective behavior in violent opposition to the ruling political power and to the groups and classes that hold power and benefit from it. The people's experiences of struggle, their questioning "from below" of

the old social order, their development of a feeling of the political effectiveness of the struggle against the oppressive political power, and the

characterization of that power as oppressive, and of the reigning socioeconomic structures and relationships as unjust, acquire very different forms and levels of existence in the areas where the revolution was fought before the triumph and in the areas where the struggle never happened or was fought on a lesser level or took place after the old regime was already on the

way out or, in any other way, did not form a decisive part of the daily experiences of the people in the area. In regions where there was no revolutionary activity before the triumph, the revolution arrives as an established power, as government, with a large

number of officials from outside the region who are generally not well known to the local people. The information known to the new authorities about the region is often very sparse, to say the least; it may be tinged with

biases, prejudices, and distrust as a result of the local population's prerevolutionary passivity and may be partly based on the knowledge of the region produced or accumulated by the previous regime. There is also little or no familiarity on the part of the local people with the discourse and practices

of the revolution, its goals and its style; such knowledge has often been additionally distorted by the political discourse and the ideological apparatus of the regime just deposed—in the case of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, the anti-Sandinista ideology of the Somocista state. Under these conditions, there are inevitable time gaps between (1) the formal taking of power by the institutions and officials of the revolutionary

government in the region and (2) the new government's ability to take effective root in the region through the recruitment of local cadres, adapting itself to the concrete forms of the region's own problems and styles; and between (3) the expectations of an improvement in living conditions on the part of the local population, often having as their most important aspect the

190 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

expectation of real participation in the region's government, and (4) the effective capacity of the new government to give a satisfactory reply to these

expectations. These gaps tend to generate frustrations, resentments, and, given certain conditions, opposition to the revolutionary government among the inhabitants of the region.

This situation is more acute in a multiethnic society. In Third World countries, different regions often house different ethnic groups. In addition, the organization leading the revolutionary struggle tends to take on a specific

ethnic identity: mestizo in the case of the FSLN, Balanta in the case of Guinea-Bissau, Indian in the case of Guyana. There are few cases of multiethnic revolutionary organizations. The explanations are many: Among

them is unequal access by the members of different ethnic groups to the educational institutions and to the process of social mobility and institutional

modernization within the preceding regime (that is to say, the educated culture in which, in peripheral societies, revolutionary thinking and practice

first take root); or else, access to these institutions and process involves assimilation, to some extent, with other ethnic groups. When the process of social differentiation within the ethnic group is not

well developed, the tendency for the group as a whole to take on certain attitudes or political positions is reinforced. There are, thus, ethnic groups that appear to be more revolutionary and others that appear to be less revolutionary or nonrevolutionary. At other times, colonial or neocolonial domination manipulates and accentuates interethnic factionalism and tensions in order to consolidate its own power. In Sri Lanka, the Tamils of the Jaffna Peninsula benefited, to a certain extent, from British domination; in Guinea-

Bissau, the Portuguese established an alliance with the Fula leadership in order to control the Balantas; in Nigeria, the British resorted to a similar kind of external leadership in order to dominate the Ibos. On the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, the privileged ties, first of the Miskitos and later of the Creoles, to foreign political and economic interests and to the Protestant ethic of the Moravian Church generated a local ethnic hierarchy whose peak was occupied first by the Miskitos and later by the Creoles.

If the process of social differentiation in the dominant ethnic group comes to constitute distinct social classes within the group, it often happens that the revolutionary ranks, which are fundamentally made up of members of the subordinated classes, tend to reproduce the views, concepts, and prejudices of the dominant class with respect to oppressed ethnic groups. This is often

even more marked in revolutionary processes that adopt strategies of multiclass alliances and which incorporate some members of the dominant classes (for example the "patriotic bourgeoisie") and the middle classes

(technicians and professionals, among others) into the ranks of the revolutionary organizations and government. These sectors, which are traditionally the producers of the dominant ideology, inject their own

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS 191

perceptions into the revolutionary alliance; if the popular classes (the peasantry, the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie) and the political leadership of the revolutionary vanguard do not have their own conception on certain

topics—in this case, the question of a region inhabited by ethnic minorities—they will tend to adopt these perceptions. The ethnic identity of a group is not limited to the symbolic aspects of its culture—language, beliefs, attitudes—but is also related to the modes of access to economic resources and political power. A revolution introduces

profound changes in the society's economic structure, as well as in the configuration of the power structure and the way it is implemented, and has a

serious impact on these fundamental aspects of the ethnic identity of minority ethnic groups. The conflictiveness of these situations is often intense. The tensions between different ethnic groups tend to be aggravated by the deterioration of the economic situation that generally follows the

establishment of the revolutionary government because of the maladjustments that are part of every process of social change. Such economic deterioration results from the flight of capital and from disinvestment strategies that are the response of formerly dominant groups;

and from the military aggression resorted to by former colonial or neocolonial powers. With the replacement of the authoritarianism of the previous regime by processes—at first, inorganic but nevertheless real—of democratization and broad participation, all subordinated groups (social

classes, ethnic groups, age or gender categories) have the possibility of expressing their demands and complaints and of raising the level of urgency

of these demands. The intensity of these social struggles, including competition among different ethnic groups, increases after the triumph of the

revolution. When power has a given ethnic identity, the criticisms and confrontations of that power on the part of other ethnic groups take on the nature of ethnic conflicts and not political ones; or, rather, political conflicts appear only as one aspect of ethnic demands. These conflicts are also influenced by the development policies designed or promoted by the revolutionary government in its attempt to overcome the productive backwardness of the country, its lack of infrastructure, technology, territorial integration. There is also an expansion of the state's institutions, services, functions, and agencies and, thus, an increased physical presence on

the part of the state and its officials in the region. There is a reduction of geographical distance—of isolation caused by lack of transportation, communication, and services—among the different groups and regions of the country. Frequently, however, where the revolutionaries see marginality and isolation, the ethnic minorities see autonomy and protection from a central govemment that is still perceived as belonging to other ethnic groups that are

oppressive or segregationist. When development policies do not take into account such factors as the ethnic groups’ different relationships with the

192 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

region's natural resources or their specific integration of productive relationships with kinship structures, the mobilizing capacity of these policies is doubtful; they are more apt to generate indifference or even rejection than enthusiasm and participation. In these conditions, it is difficult for the different ethnic groups of the region to perceive the difference between "before" and “after.”

TWO REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES

When a revolution that has already become a government arrives in a given region for the first time, it has two main entry strategies: (1) to revolutionize the region from above, incorporating new institutions, cadres, styles, and

policies, or (2) to ally itself insofar as possible with the preexisting institutions and leaders of the region and try to operate through them—. something like revolutionizing from outside.

The first strategy involves the more or less rapid replacement of the existing leaders and institutions of the region by institutions, officials, organizing forms, and styles brought in from other regions. It adopts, in practice, the form of an outside intervention in the region, or at least is seen as such by the local population. In general, it takes place during the days or

weeks immediately following the triumph of the revolution—which is normally a political and military victory—and thus appears to many people in the region as a military operation. This strategy attempts, minimally, to establish a physical presence by the new authorities in the region and, in this sense, expresses the need of any government to achieve an effective presence throughout the country in the shortest time possible. But it also attempts to compensate for the "backwardness" of the population of the territory in

question, incorporating it into the dynamism emanating from these exogenous resources. This strategy of the revolution’s entry from above, through the apparatus of the new state and the new political organizations, is often a response to a

more or less urgent objective need to control the territory, maintain the physical integrity of the country, and defend against attacks or threats of attacks by counterrevolutionaries or former colonial powers. Attempts to dismember the territory of young revolutionary states, establishing "liberated

zones" from which to claim international recognition or at least guarantee external material support, constitute a traditional ingredient of the maneuvers designed to destabilize or attack revolutionary governments by the classes and groups that have been removed from power. Often this strategy also has to do with factors of a subjective nature. One of these is the tendency of many revolutionaries to consider these "backward"

regions as an empty space where the revolutionary government has practically unlimited freedom of action. This has to do with the way in which

the dominant revolutionary paradigm interprets the socioeconomic

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS 193

characteristics of the region's population and with the tendency to consider

the institutions and leadership the revolution finds in the region as the creatures and accomplices of the regime that has just been overthrown, as being in opposition to the revolution, or even as counterrevolutionary: in other words, a linear projection from the nature of the national-level power Structures, which does not even begin to consider the possibility that local institutions may respond in some way to the local population's needs and

views. A consequence of this view is the belief that these political Superstructures must be destroyed and replaced with revolutionary institutions and cadres—that then the people will be happy.

Another subjective factor that is often present in this strategy in multiethnic societies is the ethnocentrism of many revolutionary cadres from the dominant ethnic group. The regions where the revolutionary struggle was less or later are often seen as backward or primitive, and the people living

there must be introduced to progress through the doors opened by the revolution. When these are also regions where the presence of colonial or imperialist Companies, interests, and institutions was marked, or where ethnic minorities established meaningful ties with these external factors, this ethnocentrism often includes considerations as to the alienation and ignorance of these populations. In the best of cases, this leads to a paternalistic attitude by the revolutionaries toward the people of the region and, in the worst case,

to an Open instrumentalism and a kind of delusion of omnipotence: It is assumed that the presence of new revolutionary institutions will allow the people of these regions to go through, in a few months or years, the same political and ideological process that the workers and peasants of the rest of the country probably needed several decades to attain. The results of this strategy are mixed and problematic. To the extent that it responds to national defense needs, the strategy is often successful, but its

political cost is usually very great. The strategy “from above" tends to produce a greater presence of the state than of the revolution—or, if one prefers, tends to reduce the revolution to the physical presence of the institutions and cadres of the state, the government, and the party. What in a

revolution is the active and direct participation of the people tends to be absent in the first years and to develop very slowly after that. The people of the region see the revolution, with its new institutions, faces, and discourse,

as something strange and foreign, and it frequently is. There is little motivation for people to get involved and a large dose of distrust. The new institutions and political styles have little to do with the people and conflict with their own styles and experiences. The government's questioning of their traditional forms of organization and behavior, coming as it does from above and from strangers, tends to produce the opposite of its intended effect: It reproduces and reinforces these forms, but no longer as something natural or spontaneous but rather as a reaffirmation of the identity and unity of the

194. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

group in the face of the outside, foreign power. It is not uncommon for the people of the region to begin to feel that things are getting worse just when the revolutionaries are trying to make them better: "Before," the state did not

bother them: "now," it intrudes, is everywhere, and their frustrated expectations of change reinforces their feelings of marginality. In these

conditions, there is ample opportunity for the manipulation of these contradictions and misunderstandings by counterrevolutionary forces.

The second strategy, which I have called revolution "from outside,” consists in reducing to a minimum the presence of new institutions and officials in the region and in establishing alliances with local institutions and leaders. This strategy implies a recognition that local institutions and leaders have at least a certain legitimacy from the point of view of the people of the

region—over and above the relationships they may have had with the previous regime—because of their ethnic identity, the people's participation in their designation, the functions they carry out. Upon creating alliances

with them, the victorious revolution converts these local forms of organization and authority into intermediaries between the new government and the people of the region; the revolution acts, within the region, through

these traditional forms as well as through new forms—but, at first, particularly through the traditional ones. All appeals for the people to participate in the new tasks and processes, mobilization for this participation, design and execution of activities for development, and services go through

dialogue, negotiation, and argumentation between the officials of the new government and the local authority structures. This strategy involves, in the first place, a reproduction of the existing authority structures within a revolutionary framework. This reproduction is

not necessarily total—that is to say, it does not include all those who had positions of authority before the revolutionary triumph—nor is it definitive, but it is a reproduction. For example, structures such as councils of elders, mayors, and rural judges are explicitly maintained, with new names or integrated into new institutions and with new functions. The revolution thus

appears simultaneously as rupture and continuity, and the impact of destabilization and insecurity in the collective psychology of the people is reduced. The alliance with traditional leadership, as such the holders of local legitimacy, legitimates the revolution and compensates in a way for the lack of a legitimacy emanating from a popular insurrrection or from a prolonged

struggle against the oppressive power or foreign domination. It also compensates for the ignorance of the new officials and institutions about the problems of the region, its particularities, its resources. In the second place, this strategy implies betting on the chance that the internal forces of the region, supported by the revolution, will be the ones to revolutionize the people's attitudes, behavior, productive practices, and lifestyles. The development of new educational and employment opportunities in

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS 195

the region and the possibility of widening one’s life experiences can create a Stimulus, particularly among the younger generation and among women, to join in new forms of participation, to make specific demands, and even to begin to question the more traditional authority structures that oppose the increasing social differentiation in the region or are trying to slow it down. In the third place, this is explicitly a long-range strategy—although in reality there are no short-term strategies in developing a revolution. It is a matter of encouraging the process of change; supporting and strengthening those elements of the population that are most apt to carry out change within the region, but never replacing or removing them; opening the revolutionary

institutions present in the region to local styles, languages, and rhythms; adjusting the plans, time frames, modalities, and policies of the revolution to the specific characteristics of the people, their initiatives and resources.

However, the outcomes of this strategy may be mixed. From the revolution’s perspectives, the alliance with local leaders is made only because

of the revolutionary leadership's and cadres' lack of knowledge about the region, its people, and its problems—in the last analysis, because of the weakness or fragility of the roots of the revolution in that part of national territory. Thus, there is inevitably a certain lack of trust, or distancing, by the revolution with respect to these local authorities, or at least a tendency to consider these alliances and allies as a kind of lesser evil. In this situation,

alliances may be seen as temporary, until the revolution can count on its own cadres and resources. In tum, this may strengthen the tendency to be

carried away by the state's inertia, the need to control, to establish relationships of obedience, to think in terms of commands rather than of persuasion; and the participation of local structures may become merely a formal exercise. In this type of strategy, the revolution, emphasizing the need

to control and to produce immediate results, might identify as allies the

people of the region who are the most inclined to accept this way of managing things, which is more legitimate from the perspective of the revolutionary state's needs than from the perspective of the needs of the people of the region. At the same time, a strategy of this type may lead to a crystallization of the local authority structures that establish alliances with the revolutionary government; may give the old leaderships new clothes and new symbols but consolidate their power at the expense of those parts of the population who

are truly interested in carrying out changes in the region. The innovating potential of the more dynamic elements of the region may be checked for the sake of maintaining alliances and the equilibrium of power and of avoiding extremism or provocation.

Finally, the explicitly long-range nature of the strategy may conflict with the need to defend the territory, guarantee the integrity of the nation, and in general combat the counterrevolutionary attacks that are always mounted

196 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

against revolutionary governments by the formerly dominant classes and the colonial or imperialist powers. The need to control, to give an immediate response, and the priority of military solutions put into serious question the viability of a strategy of this type.! Neither of these strategies can be found in its pure state in real life; the revolutionary processes that have confronted situations of this kind have always resorted to some combination of the two. The Sandinista Revolution appealed in the beginning to a strategy that delegated the specific treatment of the topics forming the core of the Costefio ethnic and regional question to an Indian organization, assuming that this organization effectively represented the whole of the population in the region. But there was also a replacement of leaders and a generalized distrust of the preexisting authority structures; revolutionary programs were not modified or adapted to the particularities of

the region. The failure of the strategy delegating functions to MISURASATA, and the more and more urgent needs of the war effort, led revolutionaries to emphasize strategies from above, with a strong military tone resulting from the need to build a strong defense. Later, when the time was ripe, the Sandinista Revolution appealed to a strategy of negotiation,

dialogue, and the integration of local and regional leaders and power structures. At the same time, the development of the revolution and of the war effort modified the nature and identity of these leaders and structures as well as their attitudes and practices and changed the revolutionary approach to the regional and ethnic question. The result, at present, is a greater adaptation

of the revolution to the region and its people, a broader participation by Costefios in the design and execution of revolutionary tasks, and the gradual advance of the peace process.

THE UNEQUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AGENDA One corollary of the unequal development of revolutionary processes is the

unequal development of the revolution's program. The statement seems obvious, put in this way, but the effects are perhaps not so self-evident. The program of a revolutionary movement or party—that is, the aspects

of social reality that are subject to change, the topics dealt with by the revolution, and the way these topics are processed by revolutionary forces—

are not set a priori. The content and scope of a revolution, its nature, are defined by the range of social forces that take part in it and which, by joining

in the process, contribute to it their own demands and expectations on different questions. It is possible, in the abstract, to characterize different types of revolution—-democratic-bourgeois, national liberation, socialist—or

different phases within a given revolution, but the nature of a specific revolutionary process can only be assessed a posteriori, taking into account its agents, its tasks, and its priorities.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS 197

The unequal integration of regions and social groups into the revolutionary process has a direct influence on its configuration. If the peasants do not take part in revolutionary struggles, the rural question will hardly appear at the center of its program; or, if it does indeed appear, it is quite possible that its formulation reflects the interpretation of other social groups rather than the perspective of the people directly involved in the issue.

Only women can posit from a woman's perspective the problem of the subordination of women. The same may be said of all aspects and groups of a society, and the ethnic question is no exception. When, for reasons such as

those discussed in this book, ethnic minorities do not participate in the revolutionary struggle that finally triumphs, the ethnic question either does not form part of the revolutionary program or else is formulated from the perspective of the dominant ethnic groups and is generally subsumed under

other kinds of questions, such as the peasant question or the problem of economic backwardness. A population group must exist as a social force in order for its problems

to be recognized as such within the revolutionary movement. By "social force" I mean the ability gained by a given sector of the population to produce specific effects on the political system and institutions of a society.

It is not sufficient for there to be economic downward mobility, political oppression, social exploitation, and repression for the people undergoing these hardships to become a social force and take up their specific problems before the other actors of the political system and the society as a whole. It is

necessary for there to be a minimal capacity for a collective response— reactions, activities, negotiations, pressures, organization—which allows the group to make itself felt, whether or not this happens at first in conjunction with other forces or with their support. If this does not happen, the group's specific problem either will not form part of the revolution's questioning of

society and the state, or else it will appear as merely an aspect of the questions formulated by others. The ethnic groups of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua began to take form as social forces relatively late in comparison with the peasantry, the working

Class, the urban petty bourgeoisie, the antidictatorial sectors of the bourgeoisie, and other groups. There are reasons why things turned out this way, but being able to identify the causes should not lead us to ignore the results. One of the results was, as has been seen, that these groups’ problems entered into the revolutionary program as part of the mestizo revolutionary vanguard's questioning of the problem of backwardness and of the pillage by 1imperialism of the region's natural resources. This is part of the problem, but it is not the whole problem. Only the Costefio ethnic groups could present the missing aspects—the questions of communal organization; specific modes of use of natural resources; the symbolic dimension of their cultures; mestizo ethnocentrism; lack of access to employment, education, and social prestige.

198 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The ethnic minorities began to develop as a social force in the context of the counterrevolutionary war and as part of that war. The explosion of the ethnic question after the triumph of the revolution gave the different groups a presence and a relative weight in the national and international political arena that they had never before attained. The triumph of the Sandinistas created the conditions for Indians and Creoles to strengthen their identities and effectively launch their specific problems into the political arena of the revolution. This ought not to surprise us. Every socially exploited and politically oppressed group defines its own identity for itself and in relation to other groups by means of its differentiation—and, given certain conditions, its opposition— to the state that summarizes and synthesizes the relations of domination and

subordination. So much the more if what is being sought is to end this Situation once and for all—-not simply to relieve it. What is specific about the Nicaraguan case is that, in a revolutionary state, brought about as the result of an antidictatorial and anti-imperialist struggle supported by a broad democratic and popular alliance, the possibility existed of overcoming the

initial levels of conflict and antagonism and arriving at solutions, after confrontations, mistakes on both sides, and the terrible experience of war.

The image of a social revolution as the breaking of an enormous dike that does away with everything in its path, destroying at a single blow all the old forms and contents to start to build the new, is wrong. Revolutions are not like that, at least when they are true ones. A social revolution is a huge raging sea. It changes the shape of the land through a series of successive waves: the peasantry, the workers, the youth, women, ethnic minorities. It strikes here, leaves deposits there, strikes again. Strike by strike, Verse by verse: Traveler, there is no road, We make the road as we walk.

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NOTE

1. Perhaps a good illustration of this strategy—which I can only briefly

mention here—is the one of Yucatan at the begining of the Mexican revolution. Mainly as a result of the social and political isolation of the Indian peasantry of Yucatén, popular revolutionary mobilization was unlikely in the region. Acknowledging that, General Salvador Alvarado, who arrived from Mexico City in 1915 commanding the military occupation of Yucatan, opted for a strategy of winning over the cooperation of members of the local society not involved in the prerevolutionary regime, although most of them

were without a significant previous involvement in revolutionary politics (Paoli 1984). Yucatecos increasingly assumed positions of responsibility in Alvarado's government, including a number of local leaders who were going to

play decisive roles—such as Felipe Carrillo Puerto—in successive Yucatan revolutionary administrations. Although some authors claim that this strategy of integrating local notables eventually has served in most cases to build a new elite "dissipating the region's revolutionary drive from within" (Joseph 1988:99), it cannot be denied that it has proved to be successful as a means of rooting revolution from outside in the region and advancing the national revolutionary process of state-building there.

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WILSON, N. (1927). "What Should Be Our Influence on Our Congregations Under the Present Political Conditions?" In Proceedings of the Society for Propagating the Gospel, pp. 96-98. WILSON, John (1975). Obra Morava en Nicaragua. San José: Seminario Biblico Latinoamericano.

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Index

ACARIC. See Asociacién de Clubes Corporation

Agricolas del Rio Coco Atlantic Chemical Corporation Acculturation, 60-61, 82, 86 (ATCHEMCO), 58, 76, 111 Africans, 17. See also Blacks; Creoles Autonomous Region of the North Atlantic

Agriculture, 2, 10, 11, 83, 94(nn1, 4); (RAAN), 175 capitalism, 75-76; colonies, 67, 84; Autonomous Region of the South Atlantic

cooperatives, 70-71, 152-153; (RAAS), 175, 182, 187(n21) development, 69-70; employment, 66, Autonomy: armed organizations and, 172-

72, 97; exports, 61-62, 111-112; land, 173; commissions, 171-172; 8, 66-67, 72—74, 80; reform, 112-113, development, 183-184; law, 174-180, 114(table), 130; war and, 181-182 186(n20); regional, 170-171, 174-175

Alberti Seafoods, 76 Autonomy Statute for the Regions of the Alianza para el Progreso de Miskitos y Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, 175 Sumus (ALPROMISV), 89, 93, 94— Avance, El, 49

95(n9), 119-120;growth, 89-91 Awas Tara maneuvers, 148 Alianza Revolucionaria Democratica

(ARDE), 145 Banana production, 11, 18, 29, 30, 45, 62;

Alliance for Progress, 62 decline, 49-50; U.S. interests, 46-47, Alliance for Progress of Miskitos and 49 Sumus. See Alianza para el Progreso de Barra del Rio Grande, 7, 86

Miskitos y Sumus Bay Islands, 27 Alparis, Admiral, 19 Belize, 20, 22 ALPROMISU. See Alianza para el Progreso Biblical Institute of Bilwaskarma, 87 de Miskitos y Sumus Bilwi, 46 Amnesty: Costefios, 155, 161 Black River, 20, 21

AMPRONAC. See Women's Association Blacks, 20, 49, 55(n11); nationalism, 92-

Confronting the National Problems 93. See also Africans; Creoles

Anthropology, 104 Bland6én, Pedro, 50

Anticommunism, 137-138 Bluefields, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 20, 31, 32, 50, ARDE. See Alianza Revolucionaria 57-58(nn21, 22), 87, 109, 138,

Democratica 141(n24), 161, 181; agriculture, 30, 46;

Armed forces. See Military armed forces, 41-42; British influence,

Asla, 163 21, 23, 24; capitalism, 85-86;

Asociacion de Clubes Agricolas del Rio missionaries, 33, 35; trade, 7, 86;

Coco (ACARIC), 70, 87 unions, 93-94

Association of Farm Clubs on the River Bluefields-Rama Banana Company, 46

Coco. See Asociacié6n de Clubes Bluefields Steamship Company, 46

Agricolas del Rio Coco Boaco, 66, 109

ATC. See Farm Workers’ Association Bocana de Paiwas, 109 ATCHEMCO. See Atlantic Chemical Bonanza, 4, 7, 47, 166 211

212. INDEX

Bonanza Mine, 77 Coffee production, 9, 37 Borge, Tomas, 186(n17) Coleman, Osorno, 167

Bosawas Forest Reserve project, 130 Colomer, Fernando, 160

Bourgeoisie, 102, 115 Colonization, 53; agrarian, 65-67, 84; Bragman's Bluff Lumber Company, 9-10, British, 13-15, 16, 17, 20-21; Spanish,

45-46, 48, 50, 57(n18) 15-17

Bregenzer, Karl, 35, 50, 58~-59(n33) Comision para el Desarrollo de la Costa Briton, Colville. See Castilla, Carlos de Atlantica (CODECA), 67-68 Comité de Accién Social de la Iglesia

Cacao production, 152 Morava (CASIM), 70, 87-88, 91 Calero, Adolfo, 163 Comité Ecuménico para el Desarrollo Campbell, Norman, 132, 144 (CEPAD), 91, 164

Canada, 47, 77 Commissaries, 48

Cape Gracias a Dios, 7, 17, 21, 40, 74, 81 Commission for the Development of the

Capital flight, 114, 137 Atlantic Coast. See Comisién para el

Capitalism, 52, 97, 98, 101; agricultural, Desarrollo de la Costa Atlantica 74-75; and development, 78-79, 113- Committee for Social Action of the 114; ethnic groups, 6—7; exploitation, Moravian Church. See Comité de Accién

9-10; foreign companies, 11-12; Social de la Iglesia Morava

peripheral, 8-9 Communism, 139(n6), 141(n20) Caribbean Commercial Corporation, 182 Community Councils, 174 “Carib War," 5 Companies, 50, 51, 58(n29), 62; control Carrion, Luis, 160, 186(n17) by, 48-49; foreign, 7, 9-11, 36, 43, CASIM. See Comité de Accién Social de la 58(n27), 103; police forces, 48-49

Iglesia Morava Confederacién Indigena Nacional, 124

Castilla, Carlos de, 19 Confederation of Workers’ Unions of the Catholic Church, 53—54, 57(n17), 66-67, Atlantic Coast, 124

86, 88 Conservative Democratic party (PCD), 169

Cattle production, 9, 66, 73-74 Constitution, 43, 175

Cease-fire negotiations, 162-163, 166— Consumer goods, 35, 115, 139-140(n11)

167. See also Peace negotiations Cooperatives: agricultural, 70-71, 80 Central American Common Market, 62, 78 Corn Island, 5, 20, 22, 23, 32, 42, 85, 86

Central American Federation, 22~23 Cormin, Henry, 20 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 129, Costa Rica, 5, 142, 149

185(n11) Costefios, 82, 96, 139(n9), 155, 181; Desarrollo 60-61; autonomy, 140(n12), 170-171;

CEPAD. See Comité Ecuménico para el anticommunism, 137-138; assimilation,

Chatfield, Frederick, 27 FSLN, 117-119; identity, 52-53, 107, Children of the Mother Earth. See Yapti 120-121, 125-126, 128; Moravian

Tasbaya Masrika Church, 53-54; representation, 136-

Chinese, 7, 48, 49, 137 137; revolution, 107~108, 115. See also Chontales, 66, 67, 109 Creoles; Garifunas; Miskitos; Ramas; Churches, 164—165. See also Catholic Sumas

Church; Moravian Church Costefio Student Movement. See CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Movimiento Estudiantil Costefio

Clarence, Henry, 38, 41, 42 Cotton production, 23, 61-62, 97 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 26 Counterrevolution, 142, 144, 158, 182, Coco River, 48, 67, 89, 99, 181, 184~ 195-196; activity, 145, 146-147; 185(n7); agriculture, 70, 74; education, kidnapping, 147-148; military training, 81-82; rice production, 11, 84~85 145-146; resettlement, 149-— 155, 162, CODECA. See Comisién para el Desarrollo 163-164, 165, 167; U.S. influence,

de la Costa Atlantica 148-149. See also Revolution

INDEX 213 Creoles, 3, 5, 7, 15, 40, 42, 48, 50, 53, Miskitos, 133-134; modernization, 62—

136, 139-140(n11), 155, 173; 63;U.S. interests, 29-30; village, 84—

education, 57-58(n22), 82, 93: 85, 93

ideology, 137-138; Moravian Church, Ecumenical Committee for Development.

33, 87, 88; nationalism, 92-93; See Comité Ecuménico para el Desarrollo political power, 32, 39; social status, Education, 40, 57—58(n22), 86, 93, 173;

25, 82, 136-137 language, 122, 174, 175; literacy

Cruz, Arturo, 163, 185(n11) campaign, 111, 123; public, 81-82 Cuadra, Pablo Antonio, 102 Ejército Defensor de la Soberanifa Nacional,

Cuba, 137-138, 141(n24) 50

Cukra Development Company, 47 Elections, 169, 174 Cultural revival movements, 133; Indians, El Recreo, 61

134-135 El Tortuguero, 181

Cultural Survival, 124, 129 Emery Company, 43 Cunningham, Mirna, 156, 185(n13) Employment, 57(nn18, 19), 93, 98, 138-

Cuthbert, J. W., 34, 38 139(n1); agricultural, 66, 72; foreign Cuyamel Company, 10, 47 capital, 9-10; foreign companies,

57(nn18, 19); lumber industry, 76-77

Dallas-Clarendon Treaty, 27 Empresa Nicaragiiense de Abastecimientos

Debts, 32, 55(n11), 84, 158 (ENABAS), 111, 116, 152

Declaration of the Principles of the Popular ENABAS. See Empresa Nicaragiiense de

Sandinista Revolution on the Indian Abastecimientos

Communities of the Atlantic Coast, Enterprises: export production, 44—45;

107—108, 122 state-owned, 115-116

Declaration on the Islands of San Andres, EPS. See Sandinista People's Army Providencia, and Adjacent Territories, Escondido River, 47

106-107 Espaniolina, 4

Defense, 142, 164, 177, 179 Esquipulas II accords, 165

Deitrick Company, 43 Esteli, 150

Democratic Cargo Workers’ Union of Estrada, Juan José, 43 Puerto Cabezas. See Sindicato Ethnic groups, 2, 85, 179; capitalism, 6— Democratico de Estibadores de Carga de 7;development, 80-81; government,

Puerto Cabezas 155-157; identity, 52, 53, 115, 120-

Democratic Revolutionary Alliance. See _ 121, 134-135, 146-147; ideology, Alianza Revolucionaria Democratica 130-138; mobilization, 89-93; political

Depression, 49 views, 126-127, 167-170; population

Development, 173; capitalistic, 11-12, distribution, 3-6; revolutionary

85-86; economic growth, 76-78; integration, 105-106, 145; selfexploitation, 78-80; projects, 69-70; determination, 160—161;social regional, 182-184; revolutionary, 108-— differentiation, 190-192; as social force, 110, 188-189, 191-196; strategy, 113- 197-198. See also various groups

115; unequal, 196-198 Executive Council, 31

Diego, Wycliffe, 144, 167 Exports, 101; agricultural, 61-62, 111-

Dolores, Ronas, 145 112; decline, 50, 83; gold, 48, 51; production, 44-46, 94(n1) Economy, 37, 48, 55(n11), 94(n7), 101,

137, 173, 181, 182; colonial, 13-17; Fagoth, Steadman, 132, 144, 145, 163, crisis, 83-84; development, 76—78, 85- 167 86, 97, 103, 104, 166-167; enclave, Falconbridge, 77 36, 44-51, 98; foreign dependency, 9- Falcon View, 148 11, 53, 57(n188); ideology, 104-105; Farm Workers' Association (ATC), 121,

Indian, 127-128; investment, 110-111; 157

214 INDEX FAUCAN. See Fuerzas Armadas Unidas dela Great Britain, 9, 18, 41, 43; colonialism,

Costa Atlantica 13-15, 16, 17, 20-21, 53; influence,

FDN. See Fuerza Democratica Nicaragiiense 21-22, 23-24; treaties, 27-28; and Federacién Indigena de Communidades del United States, 26-27

Pacifico, 124 Greytown, 22, 27, 28

Financial system, 114 Gurdian Lépez, Galio, 186(n17) Fishing, 68-69, 76, 84, 85, 86, 116, 137

Fonseca, Carlos, 104-105 Harrison-Altamirano Treaty, 64 Forestry, 63-64. See also Lumber industry Health, 8, 82, 111, 112(table), 122, 176—

Francia Sirpi, 147 177 Frederick, Agnes Ana, 27 Hodgson, Robert, 20-21, 93

Frederick, George Augustus, 20, 22, 23, Honduras, 27, 38, 67, 142; Miskito

24, 27, 29 Indians, 4, 5, 165; resettlement, 147, 55(n6) Hooker, Ray, 54(n2), 145, 186(n17)

Frederick, Robert Charles, 22, 23, 24, 54- 148

Free ports, 28, 27, 31 Hoppington, Marcos, 144 Frente Sandinista de Liberacién Nacional

(FSLN), 52-53, 101, 116, 156, 169; IAN. See Instituto Agrario Nicaragiiense Costefios, 117-119; focus, 97-98; IDB. See International Development Bank goals, 104-105, 107; ideology, 102-— Ideology: Creole, 137-138; ethnic, 130104; and MISURASATA, 126-127 138; indigenist, 129-130; mestizo,

Fruta de Pan, 4 101-102

FSLN. See Frente Sandinista de Liberacién Illiteracy, 7, 8. See also Literacy

Nacional Immigration, 49, 62

Fuerza Democratica Nicaragiiense (FDN), Imports, 93

145, 146, 147, 149, 163, 167 INCEI. See National Institute of Foreign Fuerzas Armadas Unidas de la Costa and Domestic Commerce

Atlantica (FAUCAN), 167 Indian Autonomy Militias (MIA), 164, 179 Fundacion Nicaragiiense de Desarrollo Indian Federation of the Communities of

(FUNDE), 70-71 the Pacific Region. See Federacién

FUNDE. See Fundacion Nicaragiiense de Indigena de Communidades del Pacifico

Desarrollo Indians, 10, 30, 50, 55(n11), 80, 99, 106, 121; autonomy, 38-39, 166-167;

Garifunas, 3, 5-6, 21, 93, 173 colonization, 14-16; economy, 48, Garret y Arlovi, Fr. Benito, 16 127-128; European influence, 17—18;

Garvey, Marcus, 93 FSLN, 118-119; identity, 53, 85; General Council, 31 158; land, 9, 58(n23), 64, 76-77, 112-

Garveyism, 93 ideology, 129-130; kidnappings, 147,

General Guidelines of MISURASATA, 122 113; political influence, 32-33; rights, General Law on the Exploitation of Natural 124-125. See also various groups, tribes

Wealth, 68 Industrialization, 47, 65, 97

George II, 19 Industrias Forestales de Centroamérica Gold production, 29, 47, 48, 51, 139(n10) Sociedad Anédnima INFOCASA), 76

Gonzalez, José, 162, 185(n13) INFOCASA. See Industrias Forestales de Government, 63, 79, 81, 109-110; Centroamérica Sociedad Anénima control, 98~99; ethnic groups, 155— INFONAC. See Instituto de Fomento

159; Moravian Church, 33-34; Nacional

Mosquitia, 40-41; Mosquito Infrastructure, 69, 111 Reservation, 30-33; regional autonomy, INNICA. See Nicaraguan Institute for the

155, 172, 174-177, 189-190, 193-195 Atlantic Coast

Granada, 30 INPESCA. See Nicaraguan Institute of

Gran Cayman, 86 Fishing

INDEX 215 INRA. See Nicaraguan Institute of Agrarian 55(nn6, 7)

Reform Language, 81, 82, 111, 123; education,

Institute for National Development. See 174, 175; nationalization, 61, 108, 122

Instituto de Fomento Nacional Las Segovias Mine, 47 Institute for Natural Resources and the Lau, Eldo, 186(n13) Environment (IRENA), 110, 115, 116, Lau, Hazel, 129, 132, 144, 145, 186(n17)

123 Law. See Legislation

Instituto Agrario Nicaragiiense (IAN), 64, Law for the Conservation and Protection of

71, 80, 116; projects, 65-67, 74 the Forest Resources of the Country, 69 Instituto de Fomento Nacional (INFONAC), Leadership, 181; emergence, 168-169;

63-65, 116 Miskitos, 126, 170; MISURASATA, Insurgency, 42 117-118, 131-132, 133, 136, 137, International Development Bank (IDB), 66 141(n20), 144-145, 170; Moravian

Investment, 182, 183; agricultural, 111- Church, 88-89 112; economic, 110-111; foreign, 36, Legislation: autonomy, 172, 174, 17543, 63, 78-79, 94(n5); mining, 47-48; 179, 186(n20); Mosquito Reservation,

United States, 29-30, 49 31-32; natural resources, 68-69

IRENA. See Institute for Natural Resources Levantamiento Indigena Montan-Rio

and the Environment Oriental de Nicaragua (Proyecto LIMON), 95(n10)

Jamaica, 39, 54(n3), 85-86 Libera] Independent party (PLI), 169

Japan, 43 Liberal Nationalist party, 66-67

Jeremy I, 18 Liberal party, 38

Jinotega, 67, 109, 150, 154, 157, 158 Liberal Revolution, 49, 50, 57(n17), 88 "Jorge Salazar" Regional Commando, Literacy, 111, 123

146 Living conditions, 8, 50, 71, 108, 136

Judicial system, 31 Logtown, 50

Longshoremen's Union of Puerto Cabezas.

Kaly, Stanislaus, 54—55(n6) See Sindicato de Estabadores y Muelleros

Karata, 71 de Puerto Cabezas

Karawala, 46 Lépez Campos, Julio, 185(n13)

Kelly, Joseph, 87 Lumber industry, 9-10, 11, 21, 22, King, Martin Luther, Jr., 93 57(n19), 83, 123, 152, 185(n8);

KISAN. See Kus Indianka Asla Nicaragua ra extraction, 45—46; Indian land, 76—77;

KISAN for Peace, Justice, and Autonomy, U.S. interests, 43, 49 167

Kukra Hill, 61, 86 McClean, Orlando, 185(n13) Kus Indianka Asla Nicaragua ra (KISAN), MacDonald, Alexander, 23

163-164, 167, 173, 186(n14) Madriz, 150

Magistrates Court, 31

Labor, 29, 34, 36, 48, 51, 58(n29), 62, Mahogany industry, 21, 22, 55(n10) 97; forced, 9, 23; foreign companies, Managua, 30 11-12; hierarchy, 7-8; matrilocality, Marshall Point, 71 11, 12(n5); MISURASATA, 122-123 Martial law, 40, 41

Lacayo, Carlos Alberto, 38 Martin, Delano, 144

La Cruz del Rio Grande, 8, 74 Masanto de Downs, Hertha, 90

La Luz Mine, 50, 77 Matagalpa, 67, 109, 150, 158 Land, 31, 46, 65, 79, 80, 89, 94(n1), 98, Matrilocality, 11, 12(n5) 124, 128; agricultural, 8, 67, 72-74, MDN. See Nicaraguan Democratic 130; claims, 112—113; communal, 128, Movement 140-141(n18), 176, 178; Indian, 9, MEC. See Movimiento Estudiantil Costefio 58(n23), 76-77; title, 24, 43-44, 54— Mengol, 58(n27)

216 INDEX

Merchants, 37 126; U.S. influence, 128-129, 130-131, Mestizos, 3, 6, 7, 40, 43, 52, 75, 82, 143, 162 159, 173; identity, 101-102 Miskitu Asia Takanka Nicaragua

MIA. See Indian Autonomy Militias (MISATAN), 142, 164, 168, 185(n8);

Middle class, 102, 115 goals, 157-158; organization, 158-159 MIDINRA. See Ministry-of Agricultural Missionaries, 24, 33, 34, 55(n8). See alse

Development and Agrarian Reform Moravian Church Migration, 62, 66. See also Immigration MISURA. See Miskitos, Sumus, and Ramas

Miguel, Lloyd, 186(n13) MISURASATA. See Miskitos, Sumus, Military, 152, 158, 166, 185(n11); Ramas, and Sandinistas Working

counterrevolutionary, 145-146; Together

mobilization, 41~42; United States, 43, MM. See Mujeres de MISURASATA

50, 148-149 Modernization, 37, 52, 104; economy, 62-

Mining, 45, 49, 62, 69, 83, 111, 138- 63; legislation, 68-69 139(nn1, 10); employment, 57(n19), Monarchy, 23; establishment, 24-25;

77; foreign interests, 47-48 Miskito, 18-19, 21, 22

Ministry of Agricultural Development and Monroe Doctrine, 24, 26 Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA), 111, 158 Moravian Church, 24, 50, 56(nn13, 15, Ministry of Agriculture and Cattle Raising, 16), 99, 132, 136, 151; agricultural

71 policy, 66-67, 70; and government, 33-

Ministry of Education, 123 34; leadership, 88-89; nativization, 86— MISATAN. See Miskitu Asia Takanka 89, 92; political power, 53-54, 56—

Nicaragua $7(n7); politics, 35-36; schools, 40,

Miskito Patriotic League, 42 43; services, 116-117; social action, Miskitos, 3, 7, 23, 25, 26, 44, 50, 53, 87-88, 134

54(n3), 130, 139(n2), 184-185(nn2, 7); Moravian School of Bluefields, 87

agricultural land, 67, 83; autonomy, Morrito, 66 160, 173; British influence, 15, 20-21, Mosquitia, 23, 38; annexation, 42-43; 22; economy, 85, 111; forestry, 63-64; British, 21, 25; government, 40-41; government, 40-41, 42; ideology, 119- Indian groups, 18, 19

120; identity, 134-136; internal Mosquito Coast, 14, 52; British influence, conflicts, 19-20; leadershp, 126, 170; 20-22 Moravian Church, 34, 86, 87, 89, 134; Mosquito Convention, 40-41 organizations, 90, 91, 142, 159; Mosquito Kingdom, 9, 22~—23, 24-25 political power, 21, 22, 27-28, 29; Mosquito Reserve, 38; government, 30—political system, 18-19; population, 4— 33; Moravian Church, 33-36 5; repatriation, 166, 168; resettlement, Movimiento Estudiantil Costefio (MEC), 149-155; reunification, 157—158: trade, 90, 91, 120,

17-18; treaties, 28, 29 Muelle de los Bueyes, 109 Miskitos, Sumus, and Ramas (MISURA), Mujeres de MISURASATA, 124

142, 145, 147, 149, 161, 162, 173, Multiethnic Assembly, 175 184(n2); and MISURASATA, 160, 163 Municipal Consitution, 30 Miskitos, Sumus, Ramas, and Sandinistas Musawas, 56(nn13, 14), 70 Working Together (MISURASATA),

54(n2), 106, 119, 134, 140(nn13, 16), National Association of Sumu Villages. See

142, 157, 163, 168, 173, 177, 196; Sumu Kalpapakna Wahaini Lani activism, 143-144, 148, 149: demands, National Autonomy Commission, 171,

121-126, 159-161; FSLN, 126-127; 186(n17) leadership, 117-118, 131-132, 133, National Development Bank, 166 136, 137, 141(n20), 144-145, 170; National Guard, 49, 98, 139(n2) membership, 146, 147; organizations, National Indian Confederation. See 123-124; political demands, 121, 125- Confederacion Indigena Nacional

INDEX 217 National Institute of Foreign and Domestic | Obando y Bravo, Miguel, 161, 162

Commerce (INCEI), 116 Oil industry, 77-78

Nationalism: black, 88, 92—93 OPROCO. See Organizacién para el Nationalization, 110, 111, 114, 116; Progreso de la Costa Atlantic Coast, 102-103; companies, Organizacién para el Progreso de la Costa

49, 41; cultural, 60-61 (OPROCO), 92

National Literacy Campaign in [Native] Organization for the Progress of the Coast.

Languages, 111, 143 See Organizacién para el Progreso de la

National Literacy Crusade, 123, 128 Costa

National Reconstruction Government Junta, Orinoco, 71

103, 123-124 Ortega, Daniel, 159

National Reconstruction Government

Program, 103, 156 : Pantin, Eduardo, 162, 163, 186(n14) National Title Program. See Programa Partido Liberal Nacionalista, 66—67

Nacional de Titulacién Pastora, Edén, 145

Natural resources, 65, 96, 110, 139(n8); Patriotic Military Service Law, 158 autonomy, 171-172, 176; development, Patterson, C., 34, 38

115, 122; legislation, 68-69; PCD. See Conservative Democratic party preservation, 63-64; revolutionary Peace and Autonomy Commissions, 165—

policy, 107-108 166

Neocolonialism, 13, 53 Pearl Lagoon, 5, 6, 20, 21, 32, 35, 42,

Neptune Mining, 77 161; economy, 70, 84, 85, 86

Nicaragua: foreign intervention, 26-27; Peace negotiations, 164-165, 185(n11). sovereignty, 28, 38-40, 41, 55(n10), See also Cease-fire negotiations

106—107; treaties, 27-28 Permanent Forest Reserves, 64

Nicaraguan Agrarian Institute. See Instituto Petroleum industry. See Oil industry

Agrario Nicaragiiense Pfeiffer, Pastor, 33

Nicaraguan Bishop's Conference, 150- Pilot Progam for Basic Education on the

151 Coco River. See Proyecto Piloto de

Nicaraguan Democratic Force. See Fuerza Educaci6n Fundamental del Rio Coco

Democratica Nicaragtiense Pirates, 17

Nicaraguan Democratic Movement (MDN), Pitt, William, 20

129, 141(n22) Plantain production, 18

Nicaraguan Development Foundation. See Plata River, 71 Fundacién Nicaragiiense de Desarrollo PLI. See Liberal Independent party Nicaraguan Institute for the Atlantic Coast Police forces, 48-49

(INNICA), 108-109, 123, 151 Pollution, 59(n34) Nicaraguan Institute of Agrarian Reform Population, 7-8, 15, 32-33

(INRA), 116 Population growth, 2, 3, 72

Nicaraguan Institute of Fishing (INPESCA), Poverty, 7, 8

110, 116 Prensa, La, 102

Nicaraguan Long Leaf Pine Lumber PRICA. See Proyecto Rigoberto Cabezas

Company (NIPCO), 76 Principles and Policies for the Exercise of

Nicaraguan Republic, 23 the Autonomy Rights of the Indian

NIPCO. See Nicaraguan Long Leaf Pine People and Communities of the Atlantic

Lumber Company Coast of Nicaragua, 171

Nolan, 46 Prinzapolka, 42, 50, 74, 147, 166, 181 Northern Forest Project. See Proyecto Prinzapolka River, 46

Forestal del Norte Productora Forestal del Noreste de Nueva Guinea, 71 Nicaragua S.A. (PROFONICSA), 112,

Nueva Segovia, 67, 150 152-153

Nufiez Soto, Orlando, 186(n17) Professionals, 89-90, 157

218 INDEX Professionals’ Association of the Atlantic Costefio participation, 100-101; and

Coast, 157 development, 108-109, 188-189, 191-

PROFONICSA. See Productora Forestal del 198; government control, 189-190. See

Noreste de Nicaragua S.A. also Counterrevolution; Sandinista Programa Nacional de Titulacién, 67 Revolution

Property. See Land Reyes, Juan Pablo, 42

Providence Island, 20 Reymundo, Welcome, 185(n13) Providence Island Company, 5, 17 Rice production, 11, 50, 84 Proyecto Forestal del Norte, 63, 64 Rio Grande, 42 Proyecto LIMON. See Levantamiento Rio Grande de Matagalpa, 46, 47, 84, 85

Indigena Montan-Rio Oriental de Rio San Juan, 1, 8, 66, 67, 150

Nicaragua Rivera, Brooklin, 129, 132, 144, 162,

Proyecto Piloto de Educaciédn Fundamental 163, 167, 177, 185(n10); demands,

del Rio Coco, 81-82 159-160

66 Roatan, 5-6, 21

Proyecto Rigoberto Cabezas (PRICA), 65- —- Rivera de Vallejos, Alba, 90

Proyecto Siuna, 67 Robelo, Alfonso, 129, 145, 163, 185(n11) Puerto Cabezas, 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 89, 93, Robinson, Lowry, 20, 22 109, 166, 181; economy, 7, 46, 48, 50, Rojas, Armando, 145

$7(n18), 74 Rosales, Antenor, 185(n13) Rosario Mining Resources, 77, 139(n10)

Quince de Septiembre, 144 Rosita, 4, 7, 47, 109, 166 Rosita Mine, 77

North Atlantic 62

RAAN. See Autonomous Region of the Rubber production, 29, 48, 51, 55(n19), RAAS. See Autonomous Region of the Rubber Reserve Corporation, 48

South Atlantic Rural sector, 7—8, 92, 97

Railroads, 25—26, 43

Rama, 6, 7-8, 30, 65, 74, 109 Salgado, Juan, 185(n13)

Rama Cay, 3—4 Sambos, 19

Ramas, 3—4, 7, 53, 93, 126, 170, 173 San Andrés Island, 20, 22 Recession: modernization, 62-63 Sandinista National Liberation Front. See

Red Christmas, 155 Frente Sandinista de Liberacién Nacional Reforestation, 63-64 Sandinista People’s Army (EPS), 143-144, Reform, 38; agrarian, 65-67, 80, 112- 149, 150, 179, 180

113, 114(table), 130 Sandinista People's Militias, 149

Refugees, 181; in Honduras, 4, 5; Sandinista Revolution, 90, 115, 149, 196; repatriation, 165, 166, 167, 168, 173 goals, 96, 102-104, 105 Regional Multiethnic Assembly, 174 Sandinistas, 50, 58~-59(n33), 80, 90, 101

Region I, 150 Sandino, General, 49, 50, 52, 101

Region V, 1, 109 sandy Bay, 17, 147

Region VI, 109, 150, 158 Sandy Bay Sirpi, 84, 85

Reincorporation, 30, 32; impacts, 37—44, San Isidro cooperative, 71

102—103 Sanitation, 8

"Reincorporation of the Atlantic Coast, San Juan del Norte, 21, 22, 28; British

The,” 102-103 occupation, 25-26; seizure, 23, 25

Religion, 34—35, 133-134. See also Schlaefer, Salvador, 147 Catholic Church; Moravian Church Shogreen, Andy, 164 Resettlement: Miskito villages, 149-155, Shepherd, Mary, 23

158, 163 Shepherd, Peter, 23, 54—55(n6)

Reurig, Superintendent, 33 Shepherd, Samuel, 23, 54—55(n6) Revolution, 50, 102, 198-199(n1): SICC. See Southern Indigenous and Creole

INDEX 219

Communities Tasbapauni, 71

Sindicato de Estabadores y Muelleros de Tasba Pri, 149, 150, 151-152, 153, 157,

Puerto Cabezas, 94 163

Sindicato Democrdatico de Estibadores de Tasba Raya, 66-67, 71, 152

Carga de Puerto Cabezas, 94 Taxation, 40, 42, 140(n16), 176 Sindicato de Muelleros Portuarios y Oficios |Technocrats, 63-64

Varios de Puerto Cabezas, 94 Territory: sovereignty, 106-107, 111, Sisin, 70 | 125, 142, 160, 164, 174

Siuna, 4, 7, 47, 50, 71, 77 Terrorism, 165

Slave trade, 15, 23, 54(n3); Africans, 17, Trade, 7, 17, 31, 49, 56(n15), 93, 114;

20; British, 20, 21; Miskitos, 18, Miskitos, 17-18, 21-22; Mosquito

54(n3) Coast, 21, 22-23; United States, 29-30, Slilmalila, 147 83, 86 Social services, 116-117, 149 Transisthmic travel, 25-26 Social status, 53, 135, 136, 190-191 Transportation, 1, 37, 46 Somoza Garcia, Anastasio, 47, 60-61 Treaties: Miskito territory, 29, 41-43, 44;

Somoza regimes, 9, 68, 82, 94; sovereignty, 27-28; U.S.—British, 26ALPROMISU, 90, 91; economic control, 27

78-79, 98; integration, 60-61 Treaty of Managua, 27-28, 39 Southern Indigenous and Creole Tuapi, 35 Communities (SICC), 92, 93, 137, 157, Tuno industry, 77 168

Spain, 14, 15-17, 21 Unemployment, 83, 97 Special Law on Fishing, 68-69 UN High Commissioner on Refugees, 158 Special Law on the Exploration and Unidad Nicaragiiense de Oposiciédn (UNO),

Exploitation of Mines and Quarries, 69 163 Special Zone I, 1, 109, 111, 112, 150, Union of Coast Indians in Nicaragua. See

155, 164 Kus Indianka Asla Nicaragua ra

Special Zone HI, 1, 109, 112, 150, 155, Union of Port Workers and Other Trades of

156, 173, 174 Puerto Cabezas. See Sindicato de

Special Zone HI, 1, 150 Muelleros Portuarios y Oficios Varios de Standard Fruit Company, 9-10, 45-46, 48; Puerto Cabezas

banana production, 46-47 Union of the Nicaraguan Opposition. See

Students, 90, 100, 102 Unidad Nicaragiiense de Oposicién Sugar production, 17, 20, 86 Unions, 93-94, 124

Sukatpin, 147 United Armed Forces of the Atlantic Coast. SUKAWALA. See Sumu Kalpapakna See Fuerzas Armadas Unidas de la Costa ©

Wahaini Lani Atlantica

Sumubila, 147, 153, 157 United Fruit Company, 46, 47 Sumu Kalpapakna Wahaini Lani United States, 36, 70, 104, 148, 149, 167; (SUKAWALA), 91-92, 95(n10), 126, companies, 9-10, 43, 45-47, 62, 76,

142, 157, 159, 169 77; counterrevolution, 144, 163-164,

Sumus, 3, 4, 7, 46, 50, 53, 57(n19), 83, 165, 185(n11); fishing, 76, 84; and 142, 147, 155, 160; autonomy, 55— Great Britain, 26-27; influence, 24, 25, 56(n12), 173; community organization, 26; investment, 29~30, 63; lumber 91-92; economy, 85, 111; land titles, companies, 45-46; military, 42, 50; 44, 64; politics, 126, 169; resettlement, MISURASATA, 128-129, 130-131,

56(nn13, 14), 150 143; Mosquitia, 25-26;

Supreme Court, 31 neocolonialism, 13, 53; political Supreme Court of Justice, 179 influence, 142, 162; trade, 83, 86

United States Agency for International

Taguzgalpa. See Mosquito Coast Development, 63, 128-129

220 INDEX UNO. See Unidad Nicaragiiense de Wilfred, Elias, 185(n13)

Oposicion William Clarence, 24

Urban sector, 3 Wilson, John, 150-151, 184(n3) USAID. See United States Agency for Wilson, Rayli, 169

International Development Women's Association Confronting the National Problems (AMPRONAC), 120

Vanegas, Uriel, 166 Wood cutting. See Lumber industry

Vegetation, 1-2 Working class, 9-10 Venture Limited, 77 World War II, 51

Villages, 166; government control, 98-99, Wounta-Haulover, 35

130, 161; land claims, 111-112, 124; Wrigley's, 77 resettlement, 149-155, 163

Villa Sandino, 66 Yapti Tasba, 177

Villa Somoza, 66 Yapti Tasbaya Masrika (YATAMA), 167, 173

Waddell's Prinzapolka, 58(n27) YATAMA. See Yapti Tasbaya Masrika

Walker, Patrick, 23-24, 25, 33 Yulu, 162, 166, 169

Wasakin, 4 Yulu accords, 165 Wasla, 70

Waspam, 7, 48, 74, 81, 93 Zelaya, 1, 8, 10, 41, 43, 67, 77, 92,

Wawa accords, 165 94(n7), 109, 113, 150, 157, 169: Webster-Crampton Agreement, 26 agriculture, 70-71, 73(table), 75-76. Wiggins, Armstrong, 132 population, 7, 72

Wihta, 32 Zelaya, José Santos, 9, 30, 38, 41, 43

About the Book and the Author

Shortly after the Sandanista victory of July 1979, the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua gained enormous international notoriety because of violent conflicts between the new government and the people of the Coast region. Today, asserts Carlos Vilas, it may be the region of Nicaragua in which the peace process has advanced furthest.

Exploring the origins of Nicaragua's internal conflicts, Vilas identifies and discusses the ways in which the Coast has been conceptualized, both before and after the revolution, by the groups that act within the Nicaraguan state.

He analyzes the social bases of those groups, characterizes the policies inspired by their differing viewpoints, and considers the changes that have been made in both state and region and the tensions, contradictions, and reactions those changes have produced. This historical approach allows a comparison of the Somoza government of the 1950s—1970s and the present regime, as well as of the costefio responses to them.

Vilas analyzes the tensions between the Coast's ethnic groups (Miskito, Sumu, Rama, Creole, and Garifuna) and the mestizo central revolutionary government as an accumulation of confronting territorial, socioeconomic, and

ethnic ingredients—culminating in the confrontation of the state's goal to impose its authority on the Coast and the costenos' goal to preserve their own identity and authority structures. He does not, however, ignore the role of intervening external actors. Although not discounting the continuing areas of conflict between the central government and the region, Vilas is optimistic about the outcome in general of Nicaragua's development process and, specifically, of the creation of an

autonomous government, supported by indigenous ethnic groups, in the Coast region.

Carlos M. Vilas, born in Argentina, has lived in Central America and the Caribbean since 1976 and in Nicaragua since 1980. His book Perfiles de la Revolucion Sandinista (1984) was awarded the Casa de las Americas Prize; the English translation, The Sandinista Revolution (1986), has become a basic reference on the issue. Dr. Vilas is an advisor to the Nicaraguan government and since 1984 has been affiliated with CIDCA, a research and development institution dealing with Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast.

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