A Brief History of Autonomy
Nicaragua's Caribbean coast is sparsely populated and has very few road connections.
The Glory Days of the Mosquito Kingdom (1710-1860)
Well-insulated by dense tracts of rainforest, the Caribbean Coast always posed challenges to the 16th century Spanish conquistadores, who after subjugating the Pacific territories of Nicaragua, failed to make much headway on the eastern sea-board. Crucially, the region’s inhospitable natural setting was matched by an equally inhospitable indigenous population of Miskito, Mayagna (also known as Sumo) and Rama Indians. Their resistance to occupation was fierce, and indigenous attitudes towards Spanish-speakers have not changed much since then.
Ultimately, it was the English who made the first colonial foothold. In the late 17th century, a Miskito delegation journeyed to Jamaica to seek help from the British, who were already in regular contact with coastal communities (pirates and traders had been landing on Caribbean shores for some years). In 1710, a treaty was signed between the Miskito and the British forging a new protectorate known as the Mosquitia, or more grandiosely, the Miskito Kingdom.
Over the ensuing decades, British merchants arrived from Jamaica, bringing black slaves and labourers for their incipient commercial projects. The British also supplied ample tactical support and weapons to the Miskitos (their name is believed to be derived from the word ‘musket’), and regularly ran raids on Spanish settlements further inland. In addition to fighting off the Spanish, the Miskitos used their superior European fire-power to subjugate other tribes in the area. Soon they were the most dominant ethnic group on the Caribbean Coast, although their blood-lines readily mixed with those of blacks and whites. English became the ‘lingua franca’.
The Miskito Kingdom was ruled indirectly by a line of hereditary Miskito kings, who were all educated in Britain and loyal to the British crown. It is doubtful that they wielded much real power, but served an important symbolic role in the community. The most illustrious of the Miskito kings (sadly, some of them were insatiable drunks) was George Augustus Frederick, who ruled 1845-1864. He was reportedly a fine shot and canoe-man, as well as a lover of English poetry. His portrait can be seen in Bluefields’ BICU cultural museum, where he is shown handsomely attired in British finery. The highly lauded George Augustus was to be the last of the Miskito kings.
The First Autonomy of the Mosquito Reserve (1860-1893)
In 1838, Nicaragua gained independence from Spain, and 22 years later, signed the 1860 Managua treaty with Great Britain. This document effectively closed 150 years of British involvement in the Caribbean Coast. Part of the agreement for their withdrawal stipulated the creation of an autonomous Mosquito Reserve, which would not be subject to export taxes and would retain all rights to its resources. The short-lived era of the Mosquito Reserve is today often referred to as the ‘First Autonomy’ by Miskito elders.
The power vacuum left by the British, in reality, was filled by North American commercial interests. Logging camps and banana plantations were established throughout the region, in which many black Creoles found employment. Indigenous peoples, meanwhile, tended to get work as servants in the houses of rich white entrepreneurs. As commerce flourished, the port of Bluefields boomed. Steamships regularly arrived from New Orleans. Luxury American goods flooded the market. And although work was carried out in harsh conditions, many Costeños would look back on the era with a certain nostalgia.
Around the same time, Moravian missionaries began arriving en-masse, first from Germany, later from the United States. They are widely accredited with improving the living conditions of many Indians, and managed to convert nearly the entire Miskito population within half a century. They built schools and hospitals, improved sanitation and generally set about ‘civilising’ the ‘savages’. Some argue that cultural genocide, too, was among their accomplishments, and no group has been more successful in advancing feelings of shame and inferiority among the Indians than these religious zealots. Nonetheless, it is Moravian churches that today dot the landscape of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, not Catholic.
‘The Reincorporation of the Mosquitia’ (1894-1978)
The dubious term ‘reincorporation of the Mosquitia’ is used by Nicaragua’s school books to describe the harsh military take-over of the Caribbean by President Zelaya, who in nation-building zeal, sought to stamp his authority on the region once and for all. On February 11th 1894, General Cabezas, under the President’s orders, swept into Bluefields, raised the national flag, instigated Marshall law and declared the former Mosquitia part of the sovereign state of Nicaragua.
Horrified by this turn of events, the locals dispatched numerous petitions to Britain and begged help. No answer came. Eventually taking matters into their own hands, they over-ran the local garrison, declared independence and appealed to the United States for support. Some weeks later a ship bearing US marines arrived, although disappointingly, they had come to crush the rebellion on behalf of Zelaya. Some 150 rebels were granted asylum in Jamaica, but the remainder resigned themselves to life under the ‘Spanish’.
Now conquered, the Mosquito Reserve was promptly renamed the Department of Zelaya, and in honour of the commanding general, the Miskito port of Bilwi was rebranded Puerto Cabezas. At the same time, Miskito elders signed a treaty declaring their gratitude to the Nicaraguan President for granting their ‘freedom’. These humiliations were merely the start. For nearly a century, successive Managua-based governments – including the notorious Somoza dictatorship in its various guises – systematically exploited the coasts resources, which included precious woods, gold, silver and seafood. English was banned in schools and vast concessions granted to foreign companies, which often encroached deep into indigenous ancestral lands. Very little wealth was reinvested into the region.
By the 1930s, the Caribbean Coast was already in deep decline. Stock market ills had forced many foreign-owned companies into liquidation, soil diseases ravaged the plantations, mines lay depleted and foreign freight ships became infrequent. Crime and corruption flourished in the region’s few urban centres. Elsewhere, the coast dwindled in poverty and people returned to the simple ways of life that had sustained their ancestors for generations – fishing and subsistence farming. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the coast’s isolation deepened, but this allowed its inhabitants to retain their cultures, identities and traditions apart from the Spanish-speaking Pacific.
Sandinistas and Contras (1979-1986)
The Sandinista revolution of 1979 barely impacted the Caribbean Coast, where many regarded the overthrow of the Somoza regime as simply another chapter of in-fighting among their Spanish-speaking cousins. But on November 11th of the same year, a convention was held in Puerto Cabezas in which the Sandinistas laid out the plans for the region and urged locals to join their cause.
Unfortunately for them, their overtures were met with icy resistance. Since the 1960s, a pan-indigenous movement had been gaining momentum around the world, in which the ‘4th world’ concerns of indigenous peoples were regarded as a distinct from the ethnic mainstream. The Miskito craved autonomy and did not wish to ally with socialist parties from the Pacific. Nonetheless, a delicate alliance was eventually forged between the victorious Sandinistas and the various groups of the coast. It was called MISURASATA, which is a Miskito acronym for ‘Miskito, Sumo, Rama, Sandinista, all together’. During these talks, the Miskito leader Steadman Fagoth emerged as an official representative of the group.
The Sandinistas proceeded to handle the Caribbean Coast with all the insensitivity of their predecessors. They confiscated farms and businesses, including many foreign-owned companies (for this reason, Nicaragua is today still considered an unsafe investment), imposed a raft of new commercial regulations, established state-sponsored co-operatives and dictated what crops should be grown where. All produce was to be sold to the government at fixed prices. In their blind drive to establish soviet-style structures, they neglected to see that a kind of pure socialism had already existed in the Miskito heartland for many centuries. Thus began their bungling.
Within a year, trouble was brewing. In Puerto Cabezas, general strikes brought the local economy to a standstill. In Bluefields, locals began loudly protesting the arrival of teachers from Cuba, whom they accused of indoctrinating their children with socialist ideas. For decades, the Caribbean coast had been receiving anti-Communist news broadcasts from the United States and Costa Rica, and thanks to their long history of commercial involvement with the north, was firmly pro-American in sentiment. The Bluefields protests were soon brutally suppressed by armed police. Many protestors were forced to grovel at the feet of the Cuban teachers. Meanwhile, some of Somoza’s former national guardsmen, now in exile in Miami, began declaring a counter-revolution.
By February 1981, the Sandinistas had grown distinctly uneasy about the political whisperings on the coast. They arrested thirty Miskito leaders on charges of plotting treason – an act that sparked waves of protests. The regime responded with a crackdown, and following the deaths of four Miskitos in Prinzapolka, dark rumours of a Cuban-backed terror campaign began circulating. Meanwhile, all but one of the arrested leaders was released after two weeks detention. MISURASATA leader Steadman Fagoth remained in jail for two months, released on the promise that he would leave Nicaragua and relocate to the Soviet Union. Fagoth broke his promise, instead joining the embryonic counter-revolutionary ‘Contra’ movement.
Soon after, in August 1981, stormy meetings led to the banning of MISURASATA and the emergence of a charismatic new Miskito leader; Brooklyn Rivera. But the rapidly deteriorating political situation was already causing many Miskito communities to flee into neighbouring Honduras. Soon rebel groups began forming and ran raiding parties across the border, most famously in the ‘Red Christmas Campaign’ of November 1981.
By early 1982, the Sandinistas could tolerate their insolence no more. In a brutal forced relocation campaign, they herded up entire Miskito communities, burnt down villages, destroyed crops and slaughtered livestock. Their aim was the wholesale clearance of the Rio Coco – a vast meandering waterway that marks both the Honduran border and the spiritual heart of the Miskito world. Whilst their campaign was a strategic success (they effectively cut-off the rebels from a base of support), their actions embittered an entire generation of Indians. More than this, the CIA – who were the intellectual authors and financial backers of the Contra movement – now had fertile ground for new recruits. Agents began circulating among Miskito refugee camps in Honduras, acquiring new soldiers for their cause.
Among their allies was Steadman Fagoth, who happily accepted CIA funds to help finance his activities. Brooklyn Rivera, however, refused to join forces with the Contras, who he regarded as savage brutes. Instead, he partnered with Alfonso Robelo and Edén Pastora, and forged the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance. In the ensuing Contra war of the mid-80s, abduction, torture and murder were common tactics of both sides. However, insurgents on the coast never numbered more than a few thousand and possessed highly inferior weaponry compared to the Sandinistas (tales of brave Indian attacks with bows and arrows can still be recalled in Miskito villages).
Victory was a high improbability and the damages to indigenous communities were great. In early 1982, the Mayagna fled to Honduras following a Sandinista invasion of their capital, Musawas. Having arrived in refugee camps, they were soon cajoled and threatened into joining the Contra movement. The Rama, meanwhile, who have only ever numbered a few thousand, found their home of Rama Cay bombed to near oblivion in 1984 after a group of Indian rebels landed there and drew Sandinista attention.
Peace in the region came slowly. In May 1984, the Sandinistas opened talks with Rivera but these soon collapsed. In 1985, power over Zelaya was handed over to the smooth-talking Minister of Interior, Tomás Borge, and this was to prove the turning point. One by one, he began assessing and meeting the needs of indigenous communities. More than this, he made a tempting to offer to Miskito commanders, allowing them to return home to prestigious positions in their villages if only they would lay down their arms. Many accepted.
Then, in July 1985, Borge consolidated his ‘hearts and minds’ campaign by allowing refugees to return to their homeland on the Rio Coco. At the same time, he began paying compensation to families who had lost members during the forced relocation of 1982. His strategy was to cut off the Miskito people from their political leaders, and to that end, he was largely successful. Most critical for peace, however, was a new autonomy commission established to research the potential for a newly ordered semi-autonomous territory. In 1986, a multi-ethnic assembly convened to hammer out an agreement on vital issues such as land reform and political structure. A draft Autonomy Law was drawn up and ratified a year later, heralding a bold new dawn for the Caribbean coast.
The Autonomous Atlantic Regions (1987 – present)
The 1987 Autonomy Law, passed by the Sandinistas, finally recognised the Caribbean Coast’s ‘otherness’, including its distinct rights to resources and ancestral lands – on paper at least. During the Contra War, Zelaya province had been renamed Special Zones 1 and 2, and now these titles were discarded for new ones: The Northern and Southern Autonomous Atlantic Regions (RAAN and RAAS). The Autonomy Law was progressive in scope, promising the promotion of local cultures, consultation in the planning of national programmes in the region, and most importantly, protection of communal lands, which cannot be bought, sold or seized.
In recent years, the region has seen a resurgence of indigenous politics, thanks to the formation of an official Miskito party in 1988, Yatama, who frequently win elections in the Northern Autonomous Region. However, attitudes of the Managua-based power elite have arguably changed little since the annexation of the territory in 1894. The Caribbean Coast is still widely regarded as a troublesome province whose only value lies in its strategic Atlantic positioning, its abundant forests, seafood, water, vast unpopulated spaces and other natural resources.
To that end, the government has been encouraging its contra refugees and other discontented poor to head east. Since the 1990s, an ever-advancing and wholly unsustainable agrarian frontier has been the engine for various criminal industries, including unsanctioned deforestation, large-scale land theft, and more recently, people-trafficking. Many Costeños allege that Managua-based politicians are directly involved in these illegal activities.
Thus the Autonomy Law, whilst grand in vision, lacked suitable enabling structures to protect the lands and resources coast people have been guarding for centuries. The situation was remedied in 2003, when the Interamerican Court of Human Rights ruled against the government in a case between the community of Anwas-Tingni and the State of Nicaragua, who had illegally granted lumber concessions in communally-owned lands.
The result was Law 445, also known as the Demarcation Law, which seeks to clear up the issue of land ownership once and for all. The Caribbean Coast is now deeply involved with the technical process of territorial demarcation, although various conflicts and challenges have arisen in its course. These include a lack of resources to carry out the work, vociferous protests from illegally settled mestizos, general confusion in the land registry, vast bureaucracy, and sadly, deliberate meddling by political interests. The process has intensified in recent years thanks to an alliance between the Sandinistas and Yatama party, but the long-held dream of coast autonomy is still a long way off.
Click here to learn more about Law 445
Sources:
Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua, by Stephen Kinzer.
The Sumu Indians of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast – Defining our Own Reality, an article published by Revista Envio
Autonomy and the Miskito Indian Community of Nicaragua, an article by Penelope Andrews
Tue, Jul 13, 2010
Caribbean Coast, History & Politics, Nicaragua