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The Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua: Development and Autonomy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Peter Sollis
Peter Sollis
Affiliation:
Peter Sollis is Desk Officer for Central America at, Oxfam, UK.
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Extract

This article discusses the distinct historical phases in the development of the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast region as the essential background to an analysis of the process of autonomy currently unfolding there. It identifies three main periods: English colonial rule; enclave economy when US companies were involved in a number of extractive enterprises; and, finally, control by the Sandinistas who came to power in 1979 after the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship.

The Atlantic Coast has been a forgotten area of study. Only recently, because of the Miskito Indian question, has the academic world and the public at large taken more interest. The tendency nevertheless has been to focus on the treatment of the Miskito population (and especially its temporary relocation from its traditional lands) not only as the most important issue, but as the only issue. While the Miskitos have been a proper cause for concern the Miskito question is only a small aspect of a complex set of social, political, economic and ethnic relations existing on the Atlantic Coast. The Miskitos are but one of six ethnic groups living on the Atlantic Coast.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , October 1989 , pp. 481 - 520
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the many Atlantic Coast people who have contributed to this article by patiently answering questions. The comments from the reviewers are welcomed. Caroline Moser gave valuable comments on an earlier draft and Galio Gurdián has helped me understand better the complexities of the Atlantic Coast. I remain responsible, however, for all errors that remain.

References

1 Sumu is a Miskito word meaning uncivilised indians and was used to describe indigenous peoples who were not Miskito. Conzemius identified five different groups; Conzemius, Eduard, Estudio etnográfico sobre los Indios Miskitos y Sumus (San José, 1984), p. 45.Google Scholar Today, the Sumus are discovering their separate identities with three groups emerging: the Twahkas, north of Bonanza and along the Waspuk River; the Wasakin near Rosita; and the Ulwa in Karawala.

2 There is a tendency to inflate Miskito numbers. For example, Misurasata (an organisation formed in late 1979 to represent the peoples of the Atlantic Coast) claimed in 1981 that the Miskito population was 151,250. See Misurasata, , ‘Informe de la Problemática Indígena con la Revolución Sandinista en Nicaragua’ (mimeo, Managua, 1981), p. 1Google Scholar and below, in this article.

3 The figures used here are taken from Centro de Investigaciones y Documentación de la Atlántica, Costa, Demográfica Costeña: Notas sobre la Historia Demográfica y Población Actual de los Grupos Etnicos de la Costa Atlántica Nicaragüense (Managua, 1982)Google Scholar, considered by this author to be the most reliable estimates.

4 This colonial episode in British history is relatively unknown. Contempoarary recall might have been different if cricket was still played at Bluefields. It was played there until 1891 when a United States merchant called Adlersburg, bored with cricket, introduced baseball.

5 Floyd, Troy, The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for the Mosquitia (Albuquerque, 1967), p. 62.Google Scholar

6 García, Claudia, Los Indios Miskitos de Nicaragua. Un breve análisis de los conflictos interétnicos hasta el siglo XX, University of Stockholm, Institute of Latin American Studies Research Paper No. 41 (1984), p. 5.Google Scholar

7 Indigenous people in Panama and Costa Rica still recall the ferocity of the wars with the Miskitos, and the Panamanian Guayami continue to perceive the Miskito as ‘bogey men’ when warning errant children that ‘the Miskito will come and get you’. Bourgois, Phillipe, ‘The Miskitu of Nicaragua’, Anthropology Today, vol. 2, no. 2 (1988), p. 9.Google Scholar

8 Gordon, Edmundo, ‘History, Identity, Consciousness and Revolution’, in CIDCA/ Development Study Unit, Ethnic Groups and the Nation State (Stockholm, 1987), p. 137.Google Scholar

9 The British attacked the small town of San Juan del Norte in 1848 and, taking umbrage at the Nicaraguan presence there, burnt the Nicaraguan flag.

10 Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de la Reforma Agraria (CIERA), La Mosquitia en la Revolución (Managua, 1981), pp. 46–7.Google Scholar

11 Under the 1860 Treaty of Managua the Miskitos were not prevented from agreeing to absolute incorporation into Nicaragua at a future date. This occurred in 1894 on the basis of ‘certain Indian petitions of doubtful quality’. The Miskito convention concluded between the Government and the Miskitos provided for a measure of self government, exemption from all taxation and military service and for the employment of all revenues produced in the Miskito litoral to the region's own benefit. The British Government protested against the arrangement and the question was disposed of by the Second Treaty of Managua (the Harrison–Altamirano Treaty). This envisaged exemption from taxes of all Creoles and Miskitos born before 1894 and guarantees on property rights gained before 1894. The treaty was never properly implemented and a Foreign Office memo of 1937 refers to many complaints received from the 500 or so British subjects on the Coast over property issues, and demands that the Mosquitia be incorporated back into the Empire.

12 The Creole leadership of the Miskito Reserve resisted Zelaya's forces when they occupied Bluefields in 1894 and the ‘Reincorporation’ was always referred to as the ‘overthrow’. Even in 1925 Creoles still complained to a Government Commission that ‘the Atlantic Coast is a conquered, disaffected province…governed by a hand of iron and obliged to pay tribute… in certain districts [government administrators] are looked upon by the people as their natural enemy, establishing a distrust which extends to any person or thing related to government’. Alfaro, Lizandro Chávez, ‘Identidad y Resistencia del “Criollo’ en Nicaragua”, Ideology and Literature, vol. 17, no. 7 (1983).Google Scholar

13 US Secretary of State Knox, who ordered the intervention, was legal counsel to the US-owned Rosario and Light Mines Company which contributed financially to the exercise and was a major investor in Nicaragua. Black, George, Triumph of the People (London, 1981), p. 8.Google Scholar

14 CIERA, La Mosquitia en la Revolución, p. 79.Google Scholar

15 The Cuyamel Banana Company was purchased by the United Fruit Company in 1929.

16 Helms, Mary, Asang: Adaptation to Cultural Contact in a Miskito Community (Gainesville, Fla., 1971), p. 113.Google Scholar

17 The mine at Bonanza was worked until 1922 by the Eden Mining Company, a subsidiary of the Tonapah Mining Company of Nevada, and from 1905 the mine at Siuna was owned by Thomas Ritter and colleagues from Pittsburg.

18 CIERA, La Mosquitia en la Revolución, p. 158.Google Scholar

19 The hardcore used to build the airstrips and all-weather roads in the Mines Region is said to contain higher grade ores than those currently being mined in Rosita and Siuna.

20 CIERA, La Mosquitia en la Revolución, p. 163.Google Scholar

21 Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar, Indians of the Americas (London, 1984), p. 213.Google Scholar

22 The river port of Alamikamba, which served the mines region, silted up in the 1950s. The port facilities and town infrastructure were moved in their entirety downstream by the mining companies to the new port of Limbaica.

23 Adams, Richard, Notes on Nicaragua: The Atlantic Coast (mimeo, 1979).Google Scholar

24 The concern was expressed that the sale of turtles correlated with less turtle meat available in the villages and in one case, while the outside sale increased 1,500 percent, the consumption of turtle meat decreased by 14%. Nietschman, Bernard, Between Land and Water: The subsistence ecology of the Miskito Indians, Eastern Nicaragua (New York, 1973), p. 199.Google Scholar The extent to which ecological damage was inflicted, however, is difficult to determine precisely because data are lacking. Moreover, the predictions of dire consequences for Miskito nutrition have not been proved partly because the sale of turtle meat brought in cash that could be spent on other food.

25 Cattle, Dorothy, ‘Dietary diversity and nutritional security in a coastal Miskito Indian village, Eastern Nicaragua’, in Helms, Mary W. and Loveland, Franklin O. (eds.), Frontier Adaptations in Lower Central America, Institute for the Study of Man (Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 120–7.Google Scholar

26 When one miner was killed because a piece of concrete fell on his head, the family not only had to collect the body but also to pay for the destroyed helmet and lamp which were company property. A day's pay was also docked from the money owing to the worker because he had failed to complete the shift.

27 As late as the 1960s the Miskito still considered North Americans their special patrons and protectors. Mary Helms writes ‘At the present time enthusiasm for the Americans and their culture is predicated on the attitude that it is the Americans who are concerned with the welfare of the Miskito, replacing the earlier British in this respect. Americans have owned and operated the various lumbering, mining and banana enterprises that have offered the Miskito jobs and cash, villagers explain, and it is the Americans who serve as missionaries.’ Helms, , Asang, pp. 221–2.Google Scholar

28 See Brooks, David C., ‘US Marines, Miskitos and the Hunt for Sandino: the Río Coco Patrol in 1928’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 21, no. 2 (05, 1989), pp. 311–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Interview with Gregory Jackson, May 1988.

30 Freeland, Jane, A Special Place in History: The Atlantic Coast in the Nicaraguan Revolution (London 1988), p. 31.Google Scholar

31 Managua residents had a number of taboos associated with meeting a black on the streets. A black person crossing one's path was considered bad luck and people would grab hold of a lamp post as a good luck token. Interview with Dorothea Wilson, May 1988.

32 Mary Hamlin, Integral programme for leadership formation on the Río Coco 1970–4, final report, mimeo.

33 Denis, Phillip, ‘The Costeños and the Revolution in Nicaragua’, Journal of Inter American Studies and World Affairs, vol. 23, no. 1 (1981), pp. 271–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 The origins of Sukawala are described in Jenkins, Jorge, El desafío indígena en Nicaragua: el caso de los Miskitos (Managua, 1986), pp. 252–6.Google Scholar

35 Bourgois, Philipe, ‘Class, ethnicity and the state among the Miskito Amerindians of Northeastern Nicaragua”, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 28, no. 2 (1981), pp. 22–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Gordon, , ‘History, Identity,…’ p. 145.Google Scholar

37 For a detailed discussion see Ibid., pp. 147–8.

38 The attitude of most Atlantic Coast people can be summed up as ‘Somoza neglected us, but at least he left us alone’.

39 The mistakes of this period are now officially recognised; see for example, Gobierno Región Autónoma Atlántico Norte, La Costa Atlántica y La Autonomía (1986), p. 6.Google Scholar

40 The 1969 Historic Programme of the FSLN is reprinted in Rosset, Peter and Vandermeer, John (eds.), The Nicaraguan Reader: Documents of a Revolution under Fire (New York, 1983), pp. 139–47.Google Scholar

41 The year before the nationalisation of the mines in 1979, according to company records, a total of $18.4 million of minerals were exported; Jenkins, , El desafío indígena en Nicaragua, p. 226.Google Scholar

42 Daniel Ortega addressed the 1980 ALPROM1SU assembly in contradictory terms. On the one hand he emphasised that, being poor and Nicaraguan, a call to class consciousness and national identity were more important than ethnic identity, yet he also called on Indians to reinforce their own cultural heritage by rejecting the use of English words for numbers and the return to Miskito words. See Adams, , Notes on Nicaragua, p. 9.Google Scholar

43 In 1979 the Sisters of Saint Agnes were outraged when it was suggested that their community house in Puerto Cabezas would make a marvellous hospital since there remained only four living there, while it had been built for a community many times greater.

44 The mining concession at Siuna embraced the town itself. This meant not only that the Labour Code was never implemented, but also that the local National Guard Commander was paid a salary by the company. CIERA, La Mosquitia en la Revolución, pp. 171–8.Google Scholar

45 Technicians brought in from Managua, Mexico and Bulgaria were accused of insensitivity to local problems and often could not speak English, the language used in the mines.

46 In 1979, before the revolution, there were nine Chinese-run shops in Waspam for example, seven of which were run by men who had bought wives over from China and who had shunned integration into the community. At a weekly meeting held in Chinese, the prices of agricultural products were fixed and rigidly kept to in the subsequent trading.

47 The transport problem of the Atlantic Coast was recognised by the Ministry of Agrarian Reform. A 1981 integrated transport programme aimed to set up Tiendas Populares along the Rivers Prinzapolka and Bambana both to supply basic foods and to buy the grain harvest. It failed to provide this service partly because the Reagan Administration embargoed the purchase of second-hand World War II landing craft.

48 Jenkins, , El desafío indígena en Nicaragua, pp. 269–74.Google Scholar

49 However, as Adams pointed out, Misurasata explicitly excluded Creoles, Caribs and Chinese people living on the Atlantic Coast, thus contributing to disunity and making a nonsense of its claim to be a voluntary organisation. Adams, , Notes on Nicaragua, p. 9.Google Scholar

50 The ‘General Lines’ of work issued by Misurasata in early 1980 states that: ‘We fight for the genuine integration of our populations into national life. An integration which means development and progress for our communities with the participation of our native people, without the imposition of dominant groups and with the guarantee of the basic rights to our own means of cultural, linguistic, social, religious, economic and political expression.’ Misurasata, , Lineamientos generates Miskitu, Sumu, Rama, Sandinista Aslatakanta. La Unidad Indígena de las tres etnías del Atlántico de Nicaragua (Managua, 1980).Google Scholar Carlos Vilas makes the following observation: ‘…in less than four months [from November 1979 to February 1980], the indigeno-us groups on the Atlantic Coast progressed from having no organisation to having one officially recognised and incorporated into the legislative branch of the state, something which would still take time and effort to obtain for many working class sectors in the rest of the country which had taken a greater part in the struggle against the dictatorship and carried a heavier quantitative weight’. Vilas, Carlos, ‘Revolutionary Change and multi-ethnic Regions: The Sandinista Revolution and the Atlantic Coast’, in CIDCA/Development Study Unit, Ethnic Groups and the Nation State (Stockholm, 1987), p. 78.Google Scholar

51 The concessions gained by Misurasata and the willingness of the government to concede ground needs to be placed in a wider context. In its 1980 Newsletter, Cultural Survival, a US based indigenous rights organisation that would eventually become a vocal critic of the Sandinista government, states: ‘An expensive bilingual component was added to the impoverished nation's literacy campaign. A national Indian organisation has a seat on the Council of State. The government has accepted the Indians' right to their traditional lands and is presently negotiating the limits of that territory. These are rights which most indigenous people in Latin America do not enjoy.’ Quoted in Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar, Indians of the Americas, p. 256.Google Scholar

52 Hale, Charles, ‘Institutional Struggle, Conflict and Reconciliation’, in CIDCA/ Development Study Unit, Ethnic Groups and the Nation State (Stockholm, 1987), p. 107.Google Scholar

53 To assume that some Sandinista cadres were not racist or ethnocentric would be to deny reality. After all, Sandinistas are real people and not super-human.

54 See the Declaration of Principles of the Popular Sandinista Revolution in regards to the Indigenous Communities of the Atlantic Coast, which was issued in August 1981 and reprinted in Ortiz, , Indians of the Americas, pp. 273–4.Google Scholar

55 Vilas, , ‘Revolutionary Change and multi-ethnic regions’, p. 83.Google Scholar

56 Although the removal of non-indigenous people was not part of the written plan, it was Fagoth's interpretation that counted most since he was head of Misurasata at the time and his word was law within the organisation. The author was in Waspam when Fagoth addressed several thousand Miskitos from the River Coco and saw how he dominated the Misurasata organisation and controlled the local populace.

57 The discussion of the legality of the relocation of the Miskitos is found in Watch, Americas, The Miskitos in Nicaragua 1981–84 (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

58 Personal interview, April 1982.

59 By the beginning of 1982 Misurasata had split into two organisations with Brooklyn Rivera leading Misurasata and associating with the ARDE forced led by Eden Pastora. Steadman Fagoth became leader of Misura and continued his association with the forces of the ex-Somoza National Guard.

60 Centro de Investigaciones y Documentación de la Costa Atlántica, , Trabil Nani (Managua, 1984), pp. 52–5.Google Scholar

61 An amnesty was declared on 1 December 1983 for all those from Northern Zelaya convicted of political crimes after November 1981 and over 300 prisoners were released immediately. In December 1984, Miskitos arrested in Southern Zelaya were released. In July 1986 the Moravian Church reported no Miskitos held for political reasons.

62 Hale, , ‘Institutional Struggle, Conflict and Reconciliation’, p. 117.Google Scholar

63 When the sawmill at Sukatpin was burned down by Misura fighters, many people lost their livelihood, but the attitude of some residents was ‘It doesn't matter. This is a government company’, Instituto Histórico CentroAmericano, Ervío (Managua, 1983), vol. 7, p. 37.Google Scholar

64 Personal interview with the project Director, October 1988.

65 Participation at the Multi-ethnic Assembly was broken down as follows:

% in Atlantic Coast

Number% population

North 145 65 J9

South 77 35 41

Creole 41

Garifuna 6

Mestizo 67*

Miskito 93

Rama 2

Sumu 11

* Mestizos from the La Cruz de Río Grande and Tortuguero were prevented from attending because of transport difficulties.

66 The return to normality is a slow and dangerous process. In December 1987, a major contra attack was launched against the mining centres of Siuna, Bonanza and Rosita. On 14 February 1989, 68 men, women and children were kidnapped when washing gold near Rosita and taken to Honduras. At the beginning of March 1989 two Rama, one woman and a man, were killed during a contra attack on the oil palm plantation at Kukra Hill. Others were kidnapped and, although some were rescued by the army, the whole event was a disaster of epic proportions for this ethnic group of less than 1,000.

67 A Sumu leader summed up the situation facing his people: ‘If there are policies that can bring peace to the region, as well as the improvement of certain services, it is also the case that without material resources it has not been possible to achieve economic or social stability. We need to secure production for self-sufficiency, housing, transport, education, clothing and footwear.’

68 The general attitude in Bluefields before the hurricane hit was that it was not going to happen. The Thursday before was bright and sunny for the time of the year and instead of evacuating many felt ‘This is fishing weather, a good day to fish mackerel’. Ortega‘s visit made people think more about the hurricane and there was fullsome praise for the way in which William Ramírez co-ordinated the emergency efforts. Initially his appointment was criticised because he was remembered as the hard-line Minister for the Atlantic Coast at INNICA. Interview with Johnny Hodgson, Autonomy Commission member, December 1988.