Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T07:28:22.142Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Competing Claims on Disputed Lands: The Complexity of Resource Tenure in the Nicaraguan Interior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Anja Nygren
Anja Nygren*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-Columbia
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This essay analyzes the complexity and contradiction of resource-tenure regimes on tropical forest frontiers by drawing on a case study carried out in the department of Río San Juan, southeastern Nicaragua. The main attention is given to competing claims over productive resources and to contradictory relationships between the diverse modalities of resource control. The resource struggles emerging in Río San Juan are analyzed in the context of larger political-economic and socio-legal processes to understand the wider relations of politics and power that affect local resource access. The main goal is to reveal how control over resources is defined and contested in the everyday reality of legal pluralism where multiple legal orders intersect in people's lives, and where the conflicts over whose law applies, and who gets what resources and why, have increasing significance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , 2004 , pp. 123 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

This essay draws on research financed by the Academy of Finland. I am grateful to the people of Río San Juan and to the many ministries, development institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Nicaragua that cooperated with my field research. I am also grateful to the Universidad Centroamericana and the School of Natural Resources at the University of Missouri-Columbia for providing logistic support. Sandy Rikoon and the anonymous reviewers of this journal provided helpful comments on previous versions of this essay. Of course, I remain solely responsible for any errors of facts or interpretation.

References

ABU-LUGHOD, DEENA I. 2000 “Failed Buyout: Land Rights for Contra Veterans in Postwar Nicaragua.” Latin American Perspectives 27, no. 3:32–62.Google Scholar
ALCALDIA DEL CASTILLO 1996 Plan de ordenamiento territorial del Municipio El Castillo. Mimeograph.Google Scholar
ALSTON, LEE J., LIBECAP, GARY D., AND MULLER, BERNANDO 1999 Titles, Conflicts, and Land Use: The Development of Property Rights and Land Refrom on the Brazilian Amazon Frontier. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ARMONY, ARIEL C. 1997 “The Former Contras.” In Nicaragua without Illusions, edited by Walker, Thomas W., 203–18. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books.Google Scholar
BABB, FLORENCE E. 2001 After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua. Austin: University of Texas Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BENDA-BECKMANN, FRANZ VON 1997 “Citizens, Strangers and Indigenous People: Multiple Constructions and Consequences of Rights, Resources and People.” Law and Anthropology 9:1–42.Google Scholar
BRANFORD, SUE, AND GLOCK, ORIEL 1985 The Last Frontier: Fighting over Land in the Amazon. London: Zed Press.Google Scholar
BROCKETT, CHARLES D. 1998 Land, Power, and Poverty: Agrarian Transformation and Political Conflict in Central America. 2d ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
CALDEIRA, TERESA P., AND HOLSTON, JAMES 1999 “Democracy and Violence in Brazil.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4:691–729.Google Scholar
CHIBA, MASAJI 1998 “Other Phases of Legal Pluralism in the Contemporary World.” Ratio Juris 11, no. 3:228–45.Google Scholar
CLARK, CHARLES 2000 “Land Tenure Delegitimation and Social Mobility in Tropical Peten, Guatemala.” Human Organization 59, no. 4:419–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CLEARY, DAVID 1993 “After the Frontier: Problems with Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian Amazon.” Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 2:331–49.Google Scholar
COUTIN, SUSAN 1995 “Ethnographies of Violence: Law, Dissidence, and the State.” Law and Society Review 29, no. 3:517–39.Google Scholar
COUTIN, SUSAN 2000 Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants' Struggle for U.S. Residency. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
DANIDA, DANISH INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE 1998 Documento de Proyecto Manejo Sostenible de la Zona de Amortiguamiento, Nicaragua. Mimeograph.Google Scholar
DANIDA, DANISH INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE 2000 Estudio socio-económico del Municipio del Castillo. Mimeograph.Google Scholar
DODSON, MICHAEL, AND O'SHAUGHNESSY, LAURA NUZZI 1990 Nicaragua's Other Revolution: Religious Faith and Political Struggle. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
EDELMAN, MARC 1999 Peasants against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ENRÍQUEZ, LAURA 1997 Agrarian Reform and Class Consciousness in Nicaragua. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida.Google Scholar
FABER, DANIEL 1993 Environment under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Central America. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
FEDER, GERSHON, AND NISHIO, AKIHIKO 1999 “The Benefits of Land Registration and Titling: Economic and Social Perspectives.” Land Use Policy 15, no. 1:25–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
GIROT, PASCAL, LAFORGE, MICHEL, TORREALBA, PABLO, PASOS, RUBEN, AND KAIMOWITZ, DAVID n.d. El último despale: la frontera agrícola centroamericana. San José: Garnier Relaciones Públicas.Google Scholar
GIROT, PASCAL O., AND NIETSCHMANN, BERNARD Q. 1992 “Río San Juan: The Geopolitics and Ecopolitics of the Río San Juan.” National Geographic Research and Exploration 8, no. 1:52–63.Google Scholar
GOLDSTEIN, DANIEL M. 2003 “In Our Own Hands: Lynching, Justice and the Law in Bolivia.” American Ethnologist 30, no. 1:22–43.Google Scholar
GOVERNMENT OF NICARAGUA 2001 A Strengthened Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy. Mimeograph.Google Scholar
GRIFFITHS, JOHN 1986 “What is Legal Pluralism?” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 24:1–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
GUTIÉRREZ SANIN, FRANCISCO 2001 “The Courtroom and the Bivouac: Reflections on Law and Violence in Colombia.” Latin American Perspectives 28, no. 1:56–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HARRIS, OLIVIA, ED. 1996 Introduction to Inside and Outside the Law: Anthropological Studies of Authority and Ambiguity, 1–15. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
HECKADON-MORENO, STANLEY 1984 “Panama's Expanding Cattle Front: The Santeño Campesinos and the Colonization of the Forests.” Ph.D. diss., University of Essex.Google Scholar
HIRSCH, SUSAN F., AND LAZARUS-BLACK, MINDIE, EDS. 1994 Contested States: Law, Hegemony and Resistance. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
HOLSTON, JAMES 1991 “The Misrule of Law: Land and Usurpation in Brazil.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 4:695–725.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
IRENA, INSTITUTO DE RECURSOS NATURALES 1992 Plan de acción forestal: documento base. Managua: IRENA.Google Scholar
JANSEN, KEES, AND ROQUAS, ESTHER 1998 “Modernizing Insecurity: The Land Titling Project in Honduras.” Development and Change 29, no. 1:81–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
JONAKIN, JON 1997 “Agrarian Policy.” In Nicaragua without Illusions, edited by Walker, Thomas W., 97–113. Wilmington: SR Books.Google Scholar
JONAKIN, JON, AND ENRÍQUEZ, LAURA 1999 “The Non-Traditional Financial Sector in Nicaragua: A Response to Rural Credit Market exclusion.” Development Policy Review 17:141–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
JONES, JEFFREY R. 1990 Colonization and Environment: Land Settlement Projects in Central America. Tokyo, Japan: The United Nations University Press.Google Scholar
KAY, CRISTOBAL 2001 “Rural Violence in Latin America.” Third World Quarterly 22, no. 5:741–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LARSON, ANNE, AND BARAHONA, TUPAC 1999 El Castillo: La colonización y las empresas madereras en una zona de amortiguamiento. Managua: Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)/Nitlapan/Protierra.Google Scholar
LISANSKY, JUDITH 1990 Migrants to Amazonia: Spontaneous Colonization in the Brazilian Frontier. London: Westview Press.Google Scholar
LUCIAK, ILJA 2000 “Democracy and its Discontents: Life in Post-Conflict Central America.” Development 43, no. 3:43–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MERRY, SALLY ENGLE 1998 “Global Human Rights and Local Social Movements in a Legally Plural World.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 12, no. 2:247–71.Google Scholar
MERRY, SALLY ENGLE 2000 “Crossing Boundaries: Ethnography in the Twenty-First Century.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 23, no. 2:127–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MESZAROS, GEORGE 2000 “Taking the Land into their Hands: The Landless Workers' Movement and the Brazilian State.” Journal of Law and Society 27, no. 4:517–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
NAGEL, BEVERLY 1999 “Unleashing the Fury: The Cultural Discourse of Rural Violence and Land Rights in Paraguay.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1:148–81.Google Scholar
NETTING, ROBERT 1993 Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford, Calif.: Standford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
NEUMANN, RODERICK P. 2000 “Land, Justice, and the Politics of Conservation in Tanzania.” In People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation, edited by Zerner, Charles, 21–51. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
NYGREN, ANJA 2000 “Environmental Narratives on Protection and Production: Nature-Based Conflicts in Río San Juan, Nicaragua.” Development and Change 31, no. 4:807–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
NYGREN, ANJA 2003 “Violent Conflicts and Threatened Lives: Nicaraguan Experiences of Wartime Displacement and Postwar Distress.” Journal of Latin American Studies 35, no. 2:367–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
OFFEN, KARL 1992 Productos forestales no maderables y su manejo campesino en la zona de amortiguamiento, Sí-A-Paz. Mimeograph.Google Scholar
ORTEGA, MARVIN, AND ACAVEDO, PEDRO 1991 “Nicaraguan Repatriation from Honduras and Costa Rica.” In Repatriation under Conflict in Central America, edited by Larkin, Mary A., Cuny, Frederick C., and Stein, Barry N., 11–54. Dallas, Tex.: The Intertect Institute.Google Scholar
PEARCE, JENNY 1998 “From Civil War to ‘Civil Society’: Has the End of the Cold War Brought Peace to Central America?” International Affairs 74, no. 3:587–615.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
PINHEIRO, PAULO SÉRGIO 1999 “The Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America.” In The Un(rule) of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America, edited by Méndez, Juan E., O'Donnel, Guillermo, and Pinheiro, Paulo S., 1–15. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
POLAKOFF, ERICA, AND RAMEE, PIERRE LA 1997 “Grass-roots Organizations.” In Nicaragua without Illusions, edited by Walker, Thomas W., 185–201. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books.Google Scholar
PREVOST, GARY 1996 “The Nicaraguan Revolution: Six Years after the Sandinista Electoral Defeat.” Third World Quarterly 17, no. 2:307–27.Google Scholar
RABELLA, JOAQUIN 1995 Aproximación a la historia de Río San Juan (1500-1995). Managua: Solidaridad Internacional.Google Scholar
RUBEN, RUERD, AND BASTIANSEN, JOHAN 2000 “Introduction.” In Rural Development in Central America: Markets, Livelihoods and Local Governance, edited by Ruben, Ruerd and Bastiaensen, Johan, 1–17. New York: St. Martin's Press.Google Scholar
SALAS VÍQUEZ, JOSÉ ANTONIO 1985 “La búsqueda de soluciones al problema de la excasez de tierra en la frontera agricola: aproximación al estudio del reformismo agrario en Costa Rica.” Revista de Historia, número especial: 97–149.Google Scholar
SARAT, AUSTIN, AND KEARNS, THOMAS R. 1996 “Legal Justice and Injustice: Toward a situated perspective.” In Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory, edited by Sarat, Austin and Kearns, Thomas R., 1–34. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
SCHMINK, MARIANNE, AND WOOD, CHARLES H. 1992 Contested Frontiers in Amazonia. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
SELIGSON, MITCHELL A. 1995 “Thirty Years of Transformation of the Agrarian Structure of El Salvador, 1961–1991.” LARR 30, no. 3:43–74.Google Scholar
SNV, SERVICIO HOLANDÉS DE COOPERACIÓN TÉCNICA Y SOCIAL 1992 Programa de desarrollo agropecuario en Río San Juan, Nicaragua. Mimeograph.Google Scholar
SPALDING, ROSE J. 1999 “From Low-Intensity War to Low-Intensity Peace: The Nicaraguan Peace Process.” In Comparative Peace Processes in Latin America, edited by Arnson, Cynthia J., 31–64. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
STONICH, SUSAN 1993 I am Destroying the Land! The Political Ecology of Poverty and Environmental Destruction in Honduras. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
THIESENHUSEN, WILLIAM C. 1995 Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
UTTING, PETER 1993 Trees, People and Power: Social Dimensions of Deforestation and Forest Protection in Central America. London: Earthscan.Google Scholar
VEGACRUZ, CARLOS 1995 Inventario de programas y proyectos existentes. Mimeograph.Google Scholar
WALKER, THOMAS W. 1997 “Introduction: Historical Setting and Important Issues.” In Nicaragua without Illusions, edited by Walker, Thomas W., 1–19. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books.Google Scholar
WALKER, THOMAS W. 2000 “Nicaragua: Transition through Revolution.” In Repression, Resistance, and Democratic Transition in Latin America, edited by Walker, Thomas W. and Armony, Ariel G., 67–88. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books.Google Scholar
WILSHUSEN, PETER R., BRECHIN, STEVEN R., FORTWANGLER, CRYSTAL L., AND WEST, PATRICK C. 2002 “Reinventing a Square Wheel: Critique of a Resurgent Protection Paradigm in International Biodiversity Conservation.” Society and Natural Resources 15, no. 1:17–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
WORLD BANK 2001 World Development Indicators. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar