FROM BRITISH COLONIALISM
TO REVOLUTIONARY
DEVELOPMENTALISM
The “re-birth” of autonomy in
Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast
Luciano Baracco*
Abstract
This article discusses the emergence of demands for regional autonomy amongst the Miskitu
inhabitants of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast during the 1980s and concludes that the provenance
of such demands should not be located in the historical precedents of the Kingdom of Mosquitia
(1687–1860) and the Mosquito Reservation (1860–1894). Instead, its origins will be seen to lie
in the impact of the developmentalist policies adopted by the Sandinista government that came
to power in 1979 through a popular insurrection in Pacific Nicaragua. The article concludes that
the contemporary autonomy process in Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast is an inherently modern
phenomenon and remains inimitable to historical forms of localized government in the region.
Keywords
Nicaragua, Caribbean Coast, Kingdom of Mosquitia, autonomy
*Assistant Professor in Political Science and International Relations / Independent Scholar, United Kingdom.
Email: [email protected]
From British colonialism to revolutionary developmentalism
Introduction
Regional autonomy in Nicaragua’s Caribbean
Coast was formally instituted by the inclusion
of an Autonomy Statute in Nicaragua’s 1987
constitution, becoming a functioning although
highly contested reality in 1990 with the election
of the first Regional Autonomous Councils. This
was the culmination of a series of events, including protracted armed struggle waged against
the national government led by the Marxistinspired Sandinista National Liberation Front
which led to the adoption of regional autonomy
as part of a wider conflict resolution process.
The coastal population, commonly referred to
as Costeños, legitimized autonomy by reference
to the historical precedents of the Kingdom of
Mosquitia and the Mosquito Reservation, created with the coronation of the first Miskitu
king by the British in 1687 and ended by the forcible Reincorporación (Reincorporation) of the
Caribbean Coast region into Nicaragua in 1894.
Both these entities held a particular importance
amongst the Miskitu, the largest indigenous
group living in the Caribbean Coast region,
who have drawn upon them to justify their
contemporary claims for indigenous rights and
autonomy from the national Nicaraguan state.
However, an examination of these historical
forms of government has provided competing
interpretations of their nature, function and
purpose (Dennis & Olien, 1984; Helms, 1986).
While the Caribbean Coast remained outside
the administrative-political apparatus of the
national state until 1894, a number of scholars
have challenged the portrayal of this state of
affairs as constituting indigenous autonomy
given that the entities which formally governed
the region were dominated by non-indigenous
interests.
Building on such observations, this article
asserts the novelty of today’s autonomy process despite the manifold attempts to provide
it with a legitimizing antiquity through references to historical precedents of regional
government. Firstly, it identifies autonomy’s
relatively recent historical provenance in the
Miskitu’s reaction against the threats posed by
the developmentalism of the Sandinista revolution (1979–1990) to non-commercialized
communitarian practices which formed the
mainstay of the Miskitu’s indigenous identity.
Secondly, this paper will disclose the ways in
which the Miskitu adopted and adapted many
of the legal-rational techniques of organization and knowledge production borne by the
national state in the articulation of their own
claims to difference and autonomy. Historical
forms of localized government will be seen as
posing a stark contrast with today’s autonomy
process which the region’s indigenous peoples
have been active agents in initiating, defining,
and governing. Despite the attempts to locate
the historical provenance of this process in the
traditions of the Kingdom of Mosquitia and the
Mosquito Reservation, the roots of the autonomous regime will be shown to lie instead in the
social dislocation wrought by Sandinista developmentalism and the nature of the Miskitu’s
reaction against it that transformed them into
a self-conscious ethnic community capable of
bearing its own political project for the first
time in history.
The Kingdom of Mosquitia
Contact between the coast’s inhabitants and
Europeans began during the early 17th century
with encounters with pirates and Protestant
colonizers (Helms, 1986, p. 508; Oertzen,
Rossback, & Wünderich, 1990, p. 18) who
recruited the indigenous inhabitants to their
raiding activities against Spanish galleons in
the Caribbean. British colonizers also brought
significant numbers of African slaves to the
region who, by shipwreck or escape, settled on
the coast and integrated into the existing population. The Miskitu Indians turned their good
relations with the British to their advantage,
dominating neighbouring populations against
whom they conducted slave raiding parties to
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feed demand from British sugar plantations in
Jamaica. The Miskitu also successfully repelled
Spanish colonizing expeditions into the region
with the aid of British muskets (Dennis & Olien,
1984, p. 722).
For Helms (1971), contact with Europeans
transformed the Miskitu into a “colonial tribe”
whose distinctive identity emerged as a direct
consequence of this encounter (Helms, 1971,
p. 228). Although chieftain positions appear
to have been well established amongst the
indigenous population, it was the British who
introduced the title of king (Oertzen et al.,
1990, p. 19). Questions have been raised as
to whether the title denoted the exercise of an
office of ultimate authority, as in the European
sense of the term, or whether it held no distinctive status amongst traditional patterns of
leadership but instead represented a designation
of purely external origin. The latter characterization has often led the Kingdom of Mosquitia
to be portrayed as nothing more than a puppet of British interests with no autochthonous
provenance in the region; a characterization
deliberately fostered by the United States (US)
chargé d’affaires, Ephraim George Squier, to
undermine British influence in the region as
the US sought to secure exclusive rights over
a proposed interoceanic canal route starting
at Greytown/San Juan del Norte (Dennis &
Olien, 1984, p. 725). In 1855, writing under
the pseudonym of Samuel Bard, Squier presents
King Robert Charles Frederic and the Miskitu
in general as having no concept of government
(Olien, 1985, pp. 118–119).
Arguing against this view, Dennis and Olien
(1984) suggest that Miskitu kingship should
be seen as an “office” which exercised authority based on the legitimacy it enjoyed within
Miskitu society. Citing examples of Miskitu
communities engaging in communal labour
and giving tribute on the command of the king,
and the king’s role in the administration of justice, the authors provide a sketch of an office
invested with authority which most Miskitu
appeared to have accepted as legitimate (Dennis
& Olien, 1984, p. 730). Furthermore, they
point out that despite British attempts to influence the succession, kingship was characterized
by an unbroken familial line until the abolition
of the Mosquito Reservation in 1894.
This approach tends to misunderstand and
exaggerate both the role of the king in Miskitu
affairs and the degree of his independence from
British authorities. Helms (1986) suggests that
the king’s role in the administration of justice
in various Miskitu villages related to his status
as an outsider in disputes which communal
councils found difficult to resolve rather than
the authority of his office (Helms, 1986, p. 520).
In the case of a death sentence passed by the
king cited by Dennis and Olien as an example
of his authority, Helms points out that this
was the outcome of pressure exerted by British
officials present at the trial given the crime
involved the murder of British citizens. The
communal labour and tribute commanded by
the king was more likely the result of threats and
coercion, and even if authority did play a part
in such activities this was no different than the
authority exercised by village headmen (Helms,
1986, p. 518). Dennis and Olien’s (1984) point
concerning the stable hereditary succession of
the kingship for almost 250 years might at first
sight challenge accusations that the king was a
hand-picked puppet of the British, yet this could
well be attributed to Britain’s preference for
stability; a policy that permitted the practice of
primogeniture favoured by the Miskitu (Helms,
1986, pp. 514–515).
More substantially, Helms concludes that
while the term “king” was certainly used to
denote a particular individual, they never
reigned over a region-wide hierarchical political
entity. Their power was localized and limited,
and competed with other figures of similar
standing, such as “admirals”, “generals” and
“governors”; all of whom, like the king himself, gained importance within their localized
sphere through contacts with colonial powers.
Relations between these “rivalrous Big Men”
were often violent and there is no evidence that
From British colonialism to revolutionary developmentalism
the king exercised authority over them (Helms,
1986, pp. 512–513). These Big Men owed their
influence to their role as intermediaries between
colonial actors and the local indigenous population. As such, there is little to suggest that these
regional patterns of power exercising had their
provenance in pre-contact indigenous societies;
a point that is reinforced by the fact that no
indigenous terms existed to signify these titles,
with only English titles recorded (Helms, 1986,
p. 511).
The patterns of social organization prevailing amongst the indigenous groups of the region
before the encounter with European colonialism could not sustain a hierarchical state-like
political structure. A lack of social differentiation existed based on the ready access to
the means of subsistence which guaranteed
physical reproduction, yet failed to generate
sufficient surpluses to produce inequalities
or centralized political institutions (Gabbert,
2002, p. 2). Living in acephalous, kin-based
subsistence communities which were relatively
isolated from one another, those leadership
positions that did emerge tended to be ephemeral and based on military prowess (Gabbert,
2002, p. 3). This situation changed radically
with European contact. Not only did relations
with the British empower certain indigenous
groups over others, they also commercialized
foodstuffs and existing forms of slavery by
introducing regional trading networks between
the local inhabitants and the British that permitted the emergence of what Helms refers to as Big
Men who mediated between their group and the
British from which the generals, admirals and
kings accrued significant fortunes used to build
personal allegiances amongst their extended kin
group (Gabbert, 2002, p. 6).
Britain officially ceded the Mosquito Coast
to Spain in the Treaty of Versailles (1783),
evacuating its colonists and their slaves to Belize
in 1787. Yet neither Spain nor the new Central
American republic formed in 1821 consolidated
their rule over the region. The absence of any
colonial power led to a significant reduction
in trade and the demise of regional Big Men
who were gradually replaced by a new local
elite made up of descendants of African slaves
later known as Creoles (Gabbert, 2011, p. 14).
In 1844, under pressure from British colonists
in Belize, and drawn by geo-strategic interests
in a potential interoceanic canal route, Britain
established a protectorate over the region,
claiming its actions were sanctioned by the
sovereign regional authority of the Miskitu king
(Gabbert, 2011, p. 15). Britain’s portrayal of
the Kingdom of Mosquito raised its legal status
to a legitimate diplomatic actor in possession
of the same rights as other international actors
(states) to engage in diplomacy (Oertzen et al.,
1990, pp. 24–25). Attempts to justify this status
were made by the British consul Patrick Walker,
who instituted a formalized system of government by establishing a Mosquitia Council of
State in 1846 with the king as its figurehead
(Oertzen et al., 1990, p. 106).
Despite the transformation of the king from
a regional Big Man to the head of a “state”,
documentary evidence shows that the new
government was a thoroughly non-indigenous
body, being dominated by British colonists,
Moravian missionaries, and Creoles (Oertzen
et al., 1990, pp. 32–33, 106–108). Although
the king symbolized the legitimacy of the new
government, the indigenous population’s participation in decision-making was virtually
nil. The Council of State itself exemplified this
state of affairs, with the king being the only
Indian present at its founding (Gabbert, 2011,
p. 22). Beyond Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, and
the Corn Islands, the Council’s deliberations
mattered little, with most indigenous communities practising traditional forms of village-level
social organization (Oertzen et al., 1990, p. 38).
Indeed, a number of scholars have pointed out
that the indigenous character of the kingship
began to be questioned by Miskitu communities north of Puerto Cabezas-Bilwi during
this period. After the death of King Robert
Charles Frederick in 1842, his successor,
George Augustus Frederick, took up residence
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378
in the Creole town of Bluefields. Speaking perfect English owing to an English education in
Jamaica, living far away from his predecessors’
heartland of Cabo Gracias a Dios, and having
been under the regency of a British colonist
before his coming of age, George Augustus
Frederick signifies a geographical and cultural
estrangement of the kingship from large segments of the Miskitu population (Gabbert,
2011, p. 22).
Summarizing the evolution of the Kingdom
of Mosquitia and the composition of its governing institutions, the influence of the British can
be seen as of fundamental importance. Localized
leadership positions, including the kingship,
appear to have their origins in the colonial
encounter, with the status of the kingship and
the creation of the kingdom’s governing institutions being tied to British efforts to legitimize
its own hegemonic pretentions over this strategically important region. Local participation
in the government of the region was limited to
a non-indigenous Creole elite, with the British
consul remaining the “éminence grise” (Oertzen
et al., 1990, pp. 32–33, 106–108). The available historical evidence suggests that Miskitu
participation in the kingdom’s governmental
institutions formed after 1844 remained negligible, with the Miskitu having little input
in the process of government while Miskitu
communities showed scant awareness of, or
adhesion to, its laws.
The Mosquito Reservation
Few events demonstrated the purely symbolic
nature of Miskitu kingship than the dissolution of the kingdom by the Treaty of Managua
(1860) signed by Nicaragua and Britain without
consulting the king. This treaty recognized the
sovereignty of Nicaragua over the region, which
was transformed into the Mosquito Reservation
with the legal status of a municipal authority
(Oertzen et al., 1990, p. 61). The Reservation
was geographically smaller than the Kingdom
of Mosquitia owing to the exclusion of the key
strategic points of Cabo Gracias a Dios and San
Juan del Norte (Greytown); a change that left the
majority of the region’s indigenous population
outside the Reservation’s jurisdiction (Gabbert,
2011, p. 25). Furthermore, property qualifications for membership of the Reservation’s
governing General and Executive councils effectively excluded Indian membership (see Oertzen
et al., 1990, 324). Although George Augustus
Frederick’s title changed to Hereditary Chief,
his role within the Reservation government
remained marginal, with the signatories to the
new Municipal Constitution of the Mosquito
Reserve being overwhelmingly Creoles (see
Oertzen et al., 1990, pp. 63, 319).
The period of the Mosquito Reservation
was characterized by increasingly conflictive
Miskitu–Creole relations, as well as the reemergence of long-simmering intra-Miskitu
conflicts. The evangelizing work of Moravian
missionaries who arrived in the region in 1847
had had a profound impact in developing a sense
of collective identity amongst Miskitu communities living north of Bluefields. Providing a
written script for their language, organizing
intercommunity events and establishing a network of schools, the Moravians provided new
forms of communications that facilitated the
foundations for a common ethnic consciousness (Gabbert, 2006, p. 93) which grew after
the mass conversion to Christianity in 1881,
known as the Great Awakening. These changes
augmented existing divisions between the ethnic Sambo Miskitu communities in the north
who felt disgruntled over their effective exclusion from the Hereditary Chiefdom which was
located in the southern Creole city of Bluefields.
These divisions would be skilfully exploited
by the Nicaraguan state and ultimately lead to
the demise of the Reservation. As the Treaty
of Managua assigned the Reservation to the
Miskitu Indians, its Creole-dominated government became the focus of Nicaraguan critics
who dismissed its “black Jamaican” governors. In response, the representation of village
From British colonialism to revolutionary developmentalism
headmen in the General Council increased to 30
out of 43 members by the 1880s to underline
its indigenous credentials (Oertzen et al., 1990,
p. 64). Such criticisms also influenced the succession to George Augustus Frederick in 1866,
when the General Council elected his nephew,
William Henry Clarence, who was seen as of
purer Indian decent than the chief’s eldest son
whose mother was a Creole (Oertzen et al.,
1990, p. 67).
The succession process for the Hereditary
Chief also exposed increasing intra-Miskitu
conflict after the death of Chief George William
Albert Hendy in 1889, when Miskitu headmen supported Alexander Clarence against
the Creoles’ favoured candidate, Robert Henry
Clarence. The dispute was settled by the election of a compromise candidate, Jonathan
Charles Frederick, yet his sudden death in
1891 revived the divisions amongst the Miskitu.
Miskitu headmen nominated a Sambo Miskitu
from the north, referred to in the literature
as Mawcambray, against a southern Tawira
Miskitu candidate nominated by Creoles.
Divisions between Sambo and Tawira Miskitu
appear to have existed at the time of European
contact, with the Sambos’ success in courting
British patronage seemingly motivated by a
desire to dominate southern Tawira communities (Offen, 2002, p. 323). Tawira attempts to
negotiate an alliance with the Spanish to counter Britain’s preferential treatment of Sambos
had led to a civil war in 1770–1771 which
almost wiped out the Tawira (Offen, 2002,
p. 325). Given the British and Spanish patronage of the opposing factions, analysis of this
conflict has failed to attribute its dynamics
to internal differences within Miskitu society
(Offen, 2002). As the Treaty of Managua had
excluded many of the Sambos’ traditional communal lands from the Mosquito Reservation,
the Tawira were left with a near monopoly over
the office of the Hereditary Chief, a situation
that appears to have reignited these old enmities and led the Sambos to crown their own
king in 1891 in opposition to Robert Henry
Clarence, a Tawira Miskitu who was the sitting Hereditary Chief. The fact that the Sambo
“king” gained the approval of the Nicaraguan
government, which used the dispute to serve its
own territorial ambitions, led commentators
to erroneously locate the roots of the conflict
within Nicaraguan–British competition over
the region (Offen, 2002, p. 326). This misrecognition was repeated in the interpretation of the
sporadic attempts to reinstate Chief Robert
Henry Clarence after the Reincorporación in
1894. The most notable of these attempts,
the rebellion led by Sam Pitts in 1907, was
interpreted as an expression of lingering antiNicaraguan sentiment, yet such episodes were
more likely motivated by Tawira opposition
to the Nicaraguan-approved appointment of
a Sambo Miskitu as the new Hereditary Chief
(Offen, 2002, p. 327).
At the same time as intra-Miskitu conflicts
began to resurface, US business interests also
became critical of the Reservation over laws
designed to protect small debtors which rendered North American creditors powerless to
recover their funds in cases of default (Pineda,
2006, p. 59). Given most Creoles still had access
to the means of subsistence, these laws acted as
a barrier to economic compulsions to engage
in wage labour; something that earned the ire
of US business interests which had to contract
migrant labour from Jamaica (Oertzen et al.,
1990, pp. 76–77). With North American colonists complaining about the lack of investment
and public order, as well as the indolence of
the local population, the waning of support
for the government from both the Miskitu in
the north and North American colonists in the
south meant that the “rule of the Creoles had
almost no future” (Oertzen et al., p. 77).
Nicaragua took these divisions as an opportunity to rid what it considered its national
territory of a British institution, with Nicaraguan
forces landing in Bluefields in February 1894
and deposing the Reservation government.
The Moravians’ pacifist teachings helped quell
suggestions of violent resistance against the
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Reincorporación, with opposition focusing on
a petition to Queen Victoria written by Creoles
and signed by the Hereditary Chief. Although
hopes were raised by the arrival of the British
warship Cleopatra, its mission was restricted
to protecting British citizens. Some resistance
emerged in July when Nicaraguan soldiers were
run out of Bluefields by armed Creoles, but
ended when the US warship Marblehead dispatched a force of marines to restore Nicaraguan
authority. With the crushing of this last act of
resistance, Robert Henry Clarence, the sitting
Hereditary Chief, boarded a British ship bound
for Jamaica and sailed into exile. Diplomatic
necessities were met by a Mosquito Convention
held in November 1894 which claimed to have
secured the voluntary consent of the Miskitu
Indians for the Reincorporación, as stipulated
by the Treaty of Managua. Although a significant number of northern Sambo communities
signed the Convention as a strategy to wrest
control of the Hereditary Chiefdom from the
Tawira (Offen, 2002), their actions are rarely
acknowledged by contemporary Miskitu elders
whose denunciation of the Reincorporación
portrays it as a unilateral breach of the Treaty
of Managua.
Given the critical role played by the British
in the creation of the Kingdom of Mosquitia
and the Mosquito Reservation, their portrayal
as inventions of imperialism appears to possess
a significant degree of currency. Indian affairs
were important to the Reservation’s Creole
government, but only as a legitimizing factor
in their confrontation with the Nicaraguan
state. Miskitu disputes during the succession
to George William Albert Hendy appear to
be related to intra-Miskitu ethnic divisions
rather than the role of the Hereditary Chief or
the nature of the laws approved in his name
which remained of little concern to the Miskitu
population. There is no evidence in the literature of the Miskitu ever attempting to use the
legislative mechanisms of the Reservation in
the resolution of disputes, which they tended to
address to British and Nicaraguan authorities.
It was only decades later, under the very different conditions prevailing in the 1980s, that the
Miskitu began to draw on the internationally
recognized diplomatic status of the treaties
and conventions that created, transformed and
dissolved the Kingdom of Mosquitia and the
Mosquito Reservation, in pursuit of an entirely
novel agenda of indigenous autonomy.
Company time and the Somoza
dictatorship
After the Reincorporación, authority passed
into the hands of expanding US companies,
rather than the Nicaraguan national state, which
established extractive economic enclaves along
the coast and transformed small settlements
such as Bilwi into bustling cosmopolitan centres
of international trade (Pineda, 2006). Given
Nicaragua’s policy of attracting foreign capital,
the central government did nothing to jeopardize such investments, especially when it received
lucrative payments for logging and mining concessions. The dollar wages and well-stocked
company stores reinforced the positive regard
Costeños possessed for Anglo colonists, while
the companies’ good relations with the central
government led to minimal state interference
in coastal affairs. The enclave nature of the US
operations also proved minimally disruptive to
the life ways of rural Indian communities which
continued to engage in communal subsistence
agriculture, although a number of Miskitu men
earned supplementary income through seasonal
trading with the companies.
The boom of the post-war period, known
locally as “Company Time”, came to an end in
the 1960s. Attempting to fill the vacuum left by
departing US companies, the Nicaraguan state,
under the auspices of the right-wing Somoza
dictatorship (1937–1979), began to exhibit
a developmentalist impulse which in the case
of the Caribbean Coast took on an integrationist agenda (Vilas, 1989, p. 61). Significant
numbers of land-hungry non-indigenous
From British colonialism to revolutionary developmentalism
Spanish-speaking mestizo migrants were
attracted to the region by a state-sponsored
agrarian reform programme which granted land
titles to 2,594,550 acres, many of which were
located on Sumu-Mayangna communal lands
(Pineda, 2006, p. 134). Large-scale reforestation projects funded by the World Bank also
encroached on communal lands (Pineda, 2006,
p. 133) and significant investments in seafood
and resin industries were also made (Pineda,
2006, pp. 134–135; Vilas, 1989, p. 83).
It was these policies that appear to have
sparked the first signs of Indigenous mobilization, with Miskitu farmers setting up the
Association of Agricultural Clubs (ACARIC)
and, in 1974, the Alliance for the Progress of
the Miskitu and Sumu (ALPROMISU) which
pushed a more overt Indigenous agenda for
communal land rights (Hale, 1994, p. 126). As
a consequence, ALPROMISU soon came to the
attention of the dictatorship’s National Guard
which persecuted its leadership (D. Rodriguez
Gaitan, personal communication, July 2009).
Bluefields’ Creoles also showed signs of
increasing mobilization around issues of racial
discrimination by the Somozista state that
excluded Creoles from local government posts
(H. Sujo Wilson, personal communication, July
2009). By the late 1970s a more radical element
of opposition developed among Creole university students based in Managua whose wider
exposure to the dictatorship led them to form
clandestine links with the Sandinista National
Liberation Front (Sandinistas) (D. Hooker
Kain, personal communication, June 2005).
The Sandinista revolution and the
Caribbean Coast
The overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in
July 1979 by a Sandinista-led popular insurrection was viewed with some apprehension
by many Costeños owing to lingering negative
historical memories of the Sandino Rebellion
of the 1930s which contemporary Sandinistas
took as a source of inspiration. Bearing the
name of its rebel leader, Augusto Sandino,
the Sandino Rebellion had recruited a number of Miskitu from communities that had
remained isolated from the Moravian mission
(Wünderich, 1989, p. 78). The beheading of a
Moravian pastor by one of Sandino’s generals,
however, led most Costeños to see Sandino
as a bandit (Gurdián & Hale, 1985, p. 129;
H. Sujo Wilson, personal communication,
July 2009), essentially making the rebellion
a “rebellion from without” (Schroeder &
Brooks, 2011, p. 84) which repeated many
of the assimilationist tendencies of traditional
mestizo nationalism (Pineda, 2011, p. 102).
These tendencies appear to have been inherited by the Sandinista movement of the 1970s,
with the Historic Program of the FSLN (Frente
Sandinista de Liberación Nacional [FSLN],
1969) advocating the reincorporation of the
coast into the nation’s life through an assimilating developmentalism (Borge, Fonseca, &
Ortega, 1982, p. 19). With the revolutionary
triumph in July 1979 the Sandinistas nationalized the coast’s natural resources, including
communal lands and forestry, and administered
natural resource exploitation through a central
programme that linked the coastal economy to
national development plans (Gurdián & Hale,
1985, p. 133; Ramírez, 1982, p. 9). Criticisms
of the Miskitu’s failure to mobilize against the
Somoza dictatorship also led to calls for their
cultural assimilation to overcome what was
perceived to be the political backwardness characteristic of the Miskitu’s ethnic consciousness
(Hale, 1994, p. 92; Ohland & Schneider, 1983,
pp. 143, 152).
Despite the apparent passivity of the coast’s
indigenous population, by 1981 Miskitu communities which had acquiesced during the
Reincorporación and throughout the Somoza
period mounted an armed rebellion against the
Sandinista revolutionary government. This was
an unexpected turn of events given the range of
policies designed to revive the region’s cultures
and languages and the government-sanctioned
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creation of a new indigenous mass organization—Miskitu, Sumu, Rama, and Sandinistas
Working Together (MISURASATA)—which
expressed strong support for the Sandinistas’
programme in its founding document General
Directions (H. Lau Blanco, personal communication, July 2009; Ohland & Schneider, 1983,
pp. 51–52). Yet it was in the process of implementing projects in language education and
land demarcation that inherent contradictions
between Miskitu and mestizo world-views came
to light which sparked an armed confrontation.
Although MISURASATA was given responsibility for implementing a mass literacy project
in local languages, the project soon encountered
criticisms from Costeños as the teaching materials were direct translations of Spanish literacy
primers used in Pacific Nicaragua that reflected
mestizo national culture. Lessons condemning
the US and praising Sandino inverted Costeños’
positive memories of Company Time and the
Moravians’ portrayal of Sandino as a bandit.
Government security forces also became suspicious that MISURASATA had manipulated
the campaign to increase its membership and
presence throughout the coast (Ramírez, 1982,
p. 7). These suspicions turned into accusations
of separatism with the publication of the Plan
of Action for the MISURASATA Movement
in 1981 (Plan 81) which represented a systematic strategy to raise the organization’s
mobilizational capacity within indigenous
communities while at the same time increasing
MISURASATA’s administrative-political status
in the region by taking over the functions of
the Nicaraguan Institute for the Atlantic Coast
(INNCA), the governmental body responsible for administering the coast (Ohland &
Schneider, 1983, p. 90). The document had
been informed by discussions with the head of
INNCA, William Ramírez, concerning the right
of MISURASATA to place cadres within this
governing institution (H. Lau Blanco, personal
communication, July 2009), yet was condemned
by Sandinista security forces as an attempt by
Steadman Fagoth, MISURASATA’s General
Director, to threaten the institutional unity of
Nicaragua and “seek annexation to England”
(Ohland & Schneider, 1983, pp. 99–100).
Suggestions of separatism were also fuelled
by efforts to submit historic land claims through
the commissioning of a map of communal lands
(Ohland & Schneider, 1983, p. 122). Rumours
began to circulate that the map depicted a large
strip of contiguous territory corresponding to
the boundaries of the Kingdom of Mosquitia,
leading security forces to arrest MISURASATA’s
leadership before it could be presented to the
government at an official ceremony in Puerto
Cabezas-Bilwi to mark the conclusion of the
literacy project. These arrests were followed by
the disclosure that Fagoth had been an agent
for Somoza’s secret police and his portrayal in
the national media as a separatist with aspirations to become a modern-day Miskitu king (El
Nuevo Diario, 22 February 1981, front page;
Barricada, 24 February 1981, p. 7).
Escaping from custody, Fagoth fled to
Honduras where he made contact with US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed
counter-revolutionary forces, or Contras,
and used his considerable influence amongst
Miskitu communities to call for a general uprising. The heavy-handed tactics of the Sandinista
People’s Army (EPS), particularly the relocation
of Miskitu communities away from their traditional heartlands along the Coco River, led
hundreds of Miskitu to cross into Honduras
where they were recruited into a CIA-backed
force called MISURA commanded by Fagoth
(Ohland & Schneider, 1983, p. 23). As fighting
intensified, splits amongst the Miskitu emerged
over the rebellion’s objectives, with Fagoth
using anti-communist rhetoric to reposition
his struggle closer to the main CIA-backed
mestizo Contras, while Brooklyn Rivera,
another founder member of MISURASATA,
attempted to maintain a distinctive position
for Miskitu fighters based around the demand
for indigenous rights and autonomy (Baracco,
2011b). Rivera’s subsequent expulsion from
MISURA and his formation of a rival Miskitu
From British colonialism to revolutionary developmentalism
force prepared to negotiate with the Sandinista
government around the issue of regional autonomy, together with the Sandinistas’ eventual
recognition that autonomy was not part of
the counter-revolutionary agenda, eventually
led to a peace agreement which culminated
in the inclusion of an Autonomy Statute in
Nicaragua’s constitution in 1987 (L. Carrión,
personal communication, May 2005).
The Sandinista response: Indigenous
consciousness and imperialist
manipulation
The Sandinistas’ interpretation of the crisis
focused almost exclusively on the depiction of
indigenous peoples as peculiarly vulnerable to
manipulation by the revolution’s imperialist
enemies owing to the perceived “backwardness” of their ethnic consciousness. The US
enclave economy was seen to have retarded
the region’s development, preventing the emergence of a working class consciousness that had
enabled mestizos to recognize their exploitation
by imperialism (Ohland & Schneider, 1983,
pp. 142–143; Ramírez, 1982, p. 6). Adding a
new gloss to traditional mestizo ethno-centrism
toward coastal peoples, the Sandinista analysis could not identify Indians as fully-formed
political subjects under conditions of modern
capitalist economic relations. While Sandinista
literary and cultural texts often celebrated
heroic battles against the Spanish conquest
as demonstrations of Indian political agency,
this portrayal was exclusively historical given
the belief that indigenous life-worlds had been
eroded by the development of dependent capitalism, replacing indigenous struggles against
colonialism with class struggles against capitalism (Wheelock, 1985, pp. 35–37, 116–118).
Underlying the class rhetoric lay a set of cultural
assumptions common amongst Latin America’s
progressive sectors known as Indigenismo that
paternalistically paid respect to the stubborn
survival of Indian populations while perceiving
them as historical anomalies which had to be
helped to become modern (Hall & Fenelon,
2009, p. 69), and in the specific case of the
Sandinistas, proletarian (Ohland & Schneider,
1983, p. 152). An alternative cultural elaboration of these views is contained in Hale’s
concept of “Anglo cultural affinities” which
portrays the Miskitu’s adoption of AngloAmerican culture as an act of resistance against
mestizoizing Nicaraguan nationalism (Hale,
1994, p. 49, 83). As Hale acknowledges, such
a strategy discloses the existence of an essentially “contradictory consciousness” amongst
the Miskitu, who drew upon the experience
of Anglo-American colonial subordination to
resist “Spaniard” Nicaraguan internal colonialism. It was also owing to this affinity to Anglo
culture that the Sandinistas’ anti-imperialist and
anti-Yankee brand of Nicaraguan nationalism
proved particularly alienating for the Miskitu
(Hale, 1994, p. 162).
Despite the ameliorative intentions which
framed these views, they continue to characterize the non-class identity of Indians as
inherently “backward”, politically confused
and, consequently, vulnerable to imperialist manipulation. Rejecting MISURASATA’s
claims that ethnic consciousness could provide a
foundation for political agency, the Sandinistas
focused on proletarianizing Indians through
economic development-cum-integration into
the rest of Nicaragua. Hale’s more cultural
elaboration hardly represented an advance on
the portrayal of Indians as hapless, confused
objects of imperialism given his own depiction
of Miskitu consciousness as “contradictory”
(Pineda, 2006, pp. 215–216). Documentary
and interview data discloses an acute awareness amongst the Miskitu of the underlying
threat to their indigenous identity posed by
Sandinista agrarian reform policies that sought
to redistribute communal lands as private plots,
as well as the threats posed by the government’s
proposals for the commercial exploitation of
communities’ natural resources and labour
(A. Anon, personal communication, July 2009;
383
384
L. Baracco
O. Hudson Blanco, personal communication,
July 2009; Ohland & Schneider, 1983, p. 215).
Modernization, ethnic identity and the
“re-birth” of autonomy
The Sandinista response characterized ethnicity as a primordial phenomenon, a perception
that was largely shared by MISURASATA
which attempted to use historical precedence to
legitimize many of its claims. However, recent
approaches to ethnicity reject such primordial
characterizations, portraying it as a thoroughly
modern phenomenon related to processes of
migration and the increasing incidence of
encounters with cultural Others (Connor,
1994; Eriksen, 2002; Horowitz, 2000). Ethnic
taxonomies were actively constructed by colonial administrative units, imposing them on
pre-colonial populations with the effect of creating identifiable subjects as part of a wider
process of governmentality (Anderson, 1991).
The censuses used by colonial administrations
privileged the thoroughly Eurocentric category
of ethnicity which permitted the agglomeration
of populations divided by multiple stratification factors into a handful of definite groups,
making those captured within them amenable
to processes of governance. The “fiction of
the census” is precisely its presumed ability to
place everyone into a single well-defined category within its ethnic grid, effectively silencing
other “fractions” of age, family, locality, and
gender which formed elements in the equation
of pre-colonial identities and thus ensured a
dominant role for ethnicity in post-colonial
societies (Anderson, 1991, pp. 166–168).
Anderson’s observations disclose some of
the ways colonialism constructed ethnic labels
which, by the 19th century, were granted a
legitimizing scientific status by the emergence
of archaeology and cartography (Anderson,
1991, pp. 163 – 185). However, to portray
colonial peoples as passive recipients of such
ethnic labels who have had no say in the
matter would be mistaken (Schuurman, 2001,
p. 62). Scientifically authenticated ethnic categories employed by colonial states proved to
be extremely malleable and capable of being
inverted; having their origins in colonial projects of governmentality, they provided the
raw material for political strategies to imagine
distinctive communities on the part of indigenous peoples themselves as they struggled to
maintain their separateness from increasingly
invasive outsiders (Ruijter, 2001, pp. 38–39).
It has already been noted that populations
on the coast lived in scattered, acephalous kinship groups whose forms of social organization
were transformed radically by their encounter with Europeans. Mosquito (Miskitu), for
instance, was a collective category created and
used by Europeans to refer to the indigenous
inhabitants of the region while the people conceptually captured by this category felt little
affinity toward one another (Gabbert, 2006,
p. 93). The Miskitu adopted this categorization during the 19th century, with a critical
role in this new self-ascription being played
by Moravian missionaries whose educational
efforts facilitated inter-communal communication that allowed a self-conscious group identity
to begin to emerge (Gabbert, 2006, p. 93).
Although educational provision in Miskitu villages was often intermittent and of a vocational
nature, in contrast to the more literary education provided by “Creole School” in Puerto
Cabezas-Bilwi and Bluefields, Moravian village
schools provided basic instruction in Miskitu
(Pineda, 2006, p. 132) which, together with a
series of church-sponsored communal events,
played an important role in the coalescence of
the Miskitu into an ethnic community.
These efforts appear to have occurred in
response to the disruptive influence of the
cash economy introduced by the US enclaves
which fostered a degree of social differentiation amongst Miskitu communities (Gurdián &
Hale, 1985, p. 127). The destructive impact of
the encroaching cash economy on long-established Miskitu practices, such as subsistence
From British colonialism to revolutionary developmentalism
production, mutual assistance, and collective
decision-making, together with the disenchanting impact of the resulting social differentiation,
sparked an unprecedented attempt to underscore the Miskitu’s distinctiveness vis-à-vis
outsiders. It was this attempt, notably undertaken by the Moravians, which provided the
catalyst for the emergence of a shared subjective
self-awareness amongst the Miskitu: “In this
sense, the Moravian missionaries paved the
way for the common ethnic consciousness that
was to emerge among different kin and dialect
groups in the late 19th and early 20th century,
converting the category Miskitu into an ethnic
community” (Gabbert, 2006, p. 93).
The disruption of Miskitu communal relations intensified in the late 20th century when the
increasingly invasive national state attempted to
commodify labour and natural resources. These
changes led to a more intense reaction amongst
the Miskitu that involved the historicization of
the past into a publically celebrated collective
Miskitu history designed to assert a distinctive identity vis-à-vis mestizo Nicaraguans.
Although national states are apt to believe that
their increasing presence stimulates a sense of
national belonging amongst ethnic minorities
in peripheral areas, the reaction is usually the
reverse as the pervasive presence of a cultural
Other sparks xenophobic opposition which
induces a dynamic process of self-recognition on
the part of the ethnic minority group (Connor,
1994, p. 37; Connor, 2004, p. 40; Smith, 2009,
p. 29). The building of state schools that taught
in Spanish, the creation of state enterprises
which replaced US companies, the increasing
importance of the cash economy, and significant
mestizo immigration that impinged on longestablished community practices led precisely to
this counter-intuitive reaction which energized
efforts to further elaborate and consolidate the
Miskitu’s distinctive ethnic identity.
Representative of this reaction were the consciousness-raising efforts of the North American
Capuchin priest Gregorio Smutko, who created
a novel narrative of a Miskitu nation and the
dominion of the Miskitu kings. Granting them an
ancient antiquity by projecting them into a biblical past (Hawley, 1997, p. 119), these narratives
exerted a powerful cohesive influence to counter
the disintegrative impact on Miskitu communities of the increasingly assimilationist intent of
the Somoza dictatorship. The sermons were
published under the title of Pastoral Indigenista
(1975) and provided a “repertoire of ethno-historical symbols which the Miskitu, particularly
Moravian pastors, appropriated in a regeneration of latent ethnic-nationalist aspirations”
(Hawley, 1997, p. 121). It was at this time that
stories began to circulate amongst Miskitu communities about the return of the king, an event
suggestive of a “return” to self-rule (Bourgois,
1986, p. 5; Hawley, 1997, p. 122).
Despite this portrayal of the Moravian
Church, its role in defending Miskitu identity
was, perhaps, less straightforward. Miskitu
pastors certainly did engage in new politicized
forms of evangelization that reflected currents
within the wave of liberation theology sweeping Latin America’s Catholic Church (Gordon,
1998, p. 152). Yet this social activism was not a
consequence of changes in the conservative attitudes of the Moravian Synod, but the efforts of
a growing number of newly-ordained Miskitu
pastors (Pineda, 2006, p. 137) whose ideas were
not always shared by the urban Creoles who
dominated the church hierarchy (Hale, 1994,
p. 126; Pineda, 2006, pp. 138–139). Miskitu
pastors’ social activism appears to have been
driven by the dire economic conditions faced
by their rural Miskitu congregations as a consequence of the economic recession affecting the
coast at the time (Pineda, 2006, p. 137) and by
the growing influence of “militant Indianist”
ideas through growing contacts with pan-indigenous organizations in North America (Hale,
1994, pp. 127–128). Those pastors most closely
associated with this new progressive repertoire
became the main protagonists behind the formation of ACARIC and ALPROMISU (Hale,
1994, pp. 126–127).
When the Sandinistas took power in 1979
385
386
L. Baracco
they were confronted with a set of clearly
defined demands which appear to have surprised them given their perceptions of Indians as
backward and politically unconscious (Ohland
& Schneider, 1983, p. 250). Such demands
represent the continuation of a process that
had begun 20 years earlier as a reaction against
the modernizing efforts of the Somozista state.
Given the Sandinistas’ developmentalism, further ethnic mobilization amongst the Miskitu
was unsurprising, yet the intensity of this
mobilization relates to the set of circumstances
prevailing in the post-Somoza period which
provided an open invitation to engage in activities that would fortify the Miskitu as an ethnic
community (Hale, 1994). The literacy project
became critical in this, as it acted much like earlier educational activities of the Moravians in
promoting a network of communications that
linked dispersed Miskitu communities together,
only with much greater intensity (Baracco,
2011a, p. 139). The continuous travels of técnicos, who played an organizational role in
implementing the literacy project, and brigadistas (literacy teachers) created an itinerant
network of Miskitu that made communities
aware of each other’s simultaneous existence
and enabled the beginnings of an imagining
process of commonality between them. At the
same time the nature of the pedagogic materials also underlined further the alien nature of
mestizo society.
The Sandinistas’ growing hostility toward
Miskitu demands can be seen as deeply rooted
in their primordial characterization of ethnic
consciousness which made it ipso facto politically backward. Calls for autonomy only served
to confirm these assumptions given that the evidence surrounding the historical entities drawn
upon by the Miskitu suggests that they never
constituted indigenous institutions at all. By
resurrecting the idea of autonomy the Miskitu
were seen to claim as their own a thoroughly
non-indigenous system created by British imperialism, and which had served the interests of
US neo-colonialism, leaving the indigenous
population excluded from what were supposed to be their own political institutions.
Although the Sandinistas’ Historic Program
had promised to respect the region’s original historic traditions, autonomy’s perceived
imperialist provenance and non-indigenous
status rendered the Sandinistas unable to
recognize it as in any sense an “original”
tradition.
By focusing on analogies with colonial-era
institutions the Sandinistas failed to recognize the essential modernity of contemporary
demands for autonomy, the roots of which
did not lie in antiquity but in Miskitu attempts
to maintain their identity boundaries in the
face of disruptive social change which threatened long-standing practices of communal land
ownership, collective decision-making and
subsistence production based around mutual
assistance that underpinned relations in Miskitu
communities (Gabbert, in press). This failure
to observe the novelty of what was being proposed was compounded by the tendency of
MISURASATA itself to use history and culture
ethno-symbolically, granting modern day ethnic
struggles a primordial status by projecting them
into the past to underpin these struggles with a
legitimizing antiquity. In doing so the Miskitu
did not differ radically from other ethnic groups
around the world at the time which began to
discover their cultural uniqueness owing to the
disruption posed by the onset of the contemporary phase of globalization. Such (re)vitalization
movements are sui generis modern phenomenons as they represent attempts by ethnic groups
to negotiate on their own terms encounters
with invasive national states (Eriksen, 2002,
p. 86) from the 1970s onwards. In negotiating
these encounters ethnic groups often reflexively adapt the rational bureaucratic practices
characteristic of modern states in a radically
constitutive engagement (Eriksen, 2002, p. 129;
Giddens, 1990, pp. 38–39). This was precisely
the strategy undertaken by MISURASATA’s
university-educated leadership. Their familiarity with impersonal legal-rational organizations
From British colonialism to revolutionary developmentalism
enabled this leadership to play a highly reflexive
role as interethnic brokers whose success in
mastering the workings of bureaucratic institutional orders made MISURASATA such a
formidable mediator between the Miskitu and
the national state. More recently this strategy
has met with a number of dissenting voices
and has become a source of division between
MISURASATA’s successor, Yapti Tasba
Masraka Nanih Aslatakanka (YATAMA),
which takes the form of a constitutional party
to qualify for participation in regional and
national elections, and the Council of Elders
of the Communitarian Nation of Moskitia
which views YATAMA as a non-indigenous
organization because of its non-communal
party structure (Finley-Brook, 2011, p. 330).
Such contradictions are suggestive of greater
differentiation amongst the Miskitu in more
recent times, particularly between rural Miskitu
Figure 1: Map of the Mosquitia.
Source: Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. XXV, No. 2, 1893.
387
L. Baracco
388
communities and a Miskitu elite (Gabbert, in
press).
The use of symbolic resources by ethnic and
nationalist groups is common precisely because
they offer an entrée into the emotional and psychological attachments of individuals to their
group identity (Smith, 2009, p. 16), yet their
meanings are commonly refashioned to serve
the boundary-setting requirements of a specific
time and place (Eriksen, 2002, p. 68). Whatever
the primordial status attached to culture and
history, they remain essentially modern creations for they are tailored by and for the present.
In the case of the Miskitu these elements became
Figure 2: MISURASATA map.
Source: Ohland and Schneider (1983, p. 171).
condensed into an “ethno-scape” represented by
a map based around historical communal lands
which cognitively mapped the Miskitu people
to a specific territory (see Figure 2). The territoriality of MISURASATA’s maps is striking
compared to late 19th-century representations
of the Mosquito Coast which emphasized the
locality of place with details of rivers, forests,
mountains, and population centres (see Figure
1). By making borders the primary signifier,
MISURASATA’s map-making constructed a
bounded, abstract, homogenized space through
the absence of place (Figure 2). The disembedding of place in the spatial representations of
From British colonialism to revolutionary developmentalism
modern maps allowed for unitary histories to be
stretched evenly and entirely over large contiguous territories (Giddens, 1990, pp. 18–21) and
was a strategy employed by many post-colonial
states to imagine an immemorial community
which was distinctive from a series of Others
in close proximity (Anderson, 1991, p. 174),
creating a symbolic narrative of an exclusive,
autochthonous unity between a people and a
space. Paradoxically, it was the intrinsically
modern ability of such maps to disembed place
from space which granted them their archaizing quality.
Figure 2 shares strong affinities to the “logomap” produced by 19th-century European
empires which segmented the globe into jigsaw-like colonial territories, with “lines of
longitude and latitude, place names, signs for
rivers, seas, mountains, neighbors” summarily removed (Anderson, 1991, p. 175) and
replaced by precisely drawn border lines; a
feature which made MISURASATA’s maps
ripe for logoization on documents, posters,
and flags to create a pervasive, quotidian and
exclusive identification between a territory and
the Miskitu people. The potentially national
character of the community being imagined
by these maps and the histories which they
silently communicated was quickly recognized
by the Sandinistas, a fact acknowledged by the
suppression of MISURASATA’s first attempt
to cartographically represent indigenous land
claims. Together with many of the other symbols promoted by MISURASATA which plotted
the Miskitu peoples trajectory through time and
space, these maps attempted to transform a
dispersed, isolated and diverse population into
an ethnic community, transforming localized
contingency into a collective destiny through
visualizing a past that legitimized the present
movement for coastal autonomy. Fiction does
indeed “seep quietly and continuously into
reality, creating that remarkable confidence
of community in anonymity” (Anderson,
1991, p. 36).
Conclusion
Does the construction of symbols such as maps,
myths, histories and a standardized written language imply that they are fabrications created to
meet the challenges faced by the Miskitu in the
1980s? The authentication of the ethno-scape
carefully constructed by MISURASATA inevitably entailed a significant degree of subjective
“invention”, and in the case of the portrayal of
Miskitu kingship as a precursor to autonomy,
a radical transformation into something that it
clearly was not at the time of its original currency. The portrayal of the symbolic resources
drawn upon by ethnic and nationalist groups
as in some sense “false” perhaps misses the
point, for they form the basis of sociological
communities to which individuals possess deep
psychological attachments despite their often fictive or imagined status (Connor, 1994, p. 202;
Smith, 2009, p. 13) and “are as much part of
social reality as any material or organisational
factors” (Smith, 2009, p. 25). The construction
of a common history and language, as well as
an historic homeland, form the symbolic repertoire that enables an ethnic community to
maintain collectively held identity boundaries in
relation to other groups (Gabbert, 2006, p. 89;
Smith, 2009, p. 25), a process made necessary
in the case of the Miskitu by the disruption
to their communal organization, first by the
Somoza state and then, more thoroughly, by
the Sandinistas’ national development project.
And the collective meanings which the symbolic
content of an ethnic community takes on, as
well as the ways such symbols are employed
in the maintenance of identity boundaries, can
be highly changeable owing to the prevailing
historical and geographical context (Connor,
1994, p. 43; Gabbert, 2006, p. 89; Smith, 2009,
p. 19). The inventive deployment of symbols is
a reaction to very real changes and the anxiety
they provoke which forms the backdrop to the
politicization of culture. While MISURASATA
dressed the politicization of Miskitu culture in
traditional grab, its objectives had nothing to
389
L. Baracco
390
do with preserving tradition but were motivated by the need to negotiate an assimilating
impulse borne by increasing encounters with a
developmentally determined national state. The
ethno-genesis of the Miskitu into an ethnic community helped bridge the growing incidence of
differentiation consequent on this encounter and
represents a new form of social solidarity capable of sustaining social cohesion amongst the
Miskitu despite such differentiation (Gabbert,
in press). This is a feature which the Miskitu
share with other groups which transformed into
ethnic communities in the face of crises and
rapid change in order to maintain their group’s
internal cohesion (Smith, 2009, pp. 25, 35). If
we are to understand why the Miskitu vitalized certain symbols in the ways that they did
and continue to do, it is critical to understand
the role these symbols played in maintaining a
subjective self-awareness amongst the Miskitu
concerning their own distinctiveness under the
new conditions presented by the Sandinista
revolution.
Glossary
brigadistas
Costeños
mestizo
Miskitu
teachers on the Literacy
Project in Languages
population of the Caribbean
Coast of Nicaragua
the dominant Spanishspeaking majority of Latin
America that emerged from
miscegenation between
Amerindians and Iberian
settlers
the largest of the indigenous
groups living in the Coast,
particularly in the northern
coastal areas along the Coco
River and Honduran border
MISURA
a Contra force made up of
indigenous peoples from
Nicaragua’s Caribbean
Coast and led by the
ex-General Director of
MISURASATA, Steadman
Fagoth
MISURASATA Miskitu, Sumu, Rama, and
Sandinistas Working
Together—a mass
organization formed by
Miskitu university students
in 1980 to garner support
for the Sandinista revolution
amongst the indigenous
population of Nicaragua’s
Caribbean Coast
Mosquito
the term first used by
Europeans to refer to both
the region (Mosquito
Coast) and its indigenous
inhabitants
Sambo
one of two ethnic subdivisions
Miskitu
which make up the Miskitu
who inhabit the northern
areas around the Coco River
and Puerto Cabezas-Bilwi
Tawira
one of two ethnic subdivisions
Miskitu
which make up the Miskitu
who inhabit the southern
areas around Pearl Lagoon
and Bluefields
técnicos
organizers of the Literacy
Project in Languages
YATAMA
Yapti Tasba Masraka Nanih
Aslatakanka—the Peoples
of Mother Earth Party
which is the successor to
MISURASATA
From British colonialism to revolutionary developmentalism
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