Origins of the Indian problem organization for ethnic self-determination and land were unacceptable.
The revolutionary leadership's anxiety about the unity of the young national state, about a separation of the Atlantic coast from Nicaragua, led to a failure to
Two weeks after the bombing of Eden Pastora's press conference at a guerrilla encampment in Nicaragua, the smoke has not yet settled.
Pastora himself has said that the agent who planted the bomb probably represented either the Sandinistas or the ex-Somocista guerrillas of
The Soviet news agency Tass has raised the hypothesis that the CIA tried to kill Pastora because he was opposed to uniting his own "liberal" counterrevolutionary ARDE with the FDN.
The American Broadcasting Company has tried to put the finger of blame on militant Basque nationalists deported from France to Panama.
The Nicaraguan government has said the bombing was the result of "internal wrangling in the counterrevolutionary groups encouraged by the CIA."
In all of this, one thing seems clear, the attempt to open another counterrevolutionary guerrilla front in the south from bases in Costa Rica has suffered a major, if not decisive setback. This is reflected by the fact that the Costa Rican government has expelled Pastora from its territory.
Clearly, the attempt to build a "liberal" counterrevolutionary operation against the Sandinista government was fraught with contradictions.
There is, moreover, another interesting factor. In its June 2 issue, the Paris daily Liberation reported that the ARDE was left without troops, since the Indians led by Brooklin Rivera, leader of the organization Misurasata, have decided to wage a struggle for the autonomy of the Miskito Indians on their own."
integrate the native population into the national economy and culture.
The central government no longer saw any solution through working with Misurasata.
After the Indian movement countered by demanding an Indian territory covering a third of Nicaragua, Misurasata was banned outright in August 1981. Then, the counterrevolutionary groups in Honduras and Florida turned the political controntation into a military one. The managed to organize an armed force of a few hundred Miskitos against the Sandinistas.
Today, the Indian area is a closed military zone. In January 1982, about 8,500 Miskitos were moved against their will further into the interior, and in late November of that year, another 5,000. Twelve thousand Indians took refuge in the UN camps in Honduras.
A rightist guerrilla force made up of former Somoza National Guard, peasants and Indians is waging a bush war against the Sandinista army. The war leaves no room for social and economic construcbeen a central element in the counterrevolutionary operation.
So, it seems worth reviewing the Nicaraguan Indian problem. The fol lowing articles dealing with the question were published recently in the papers of sections of the Fourth International. The first is by the Berlin ethnologist Robin Schneider. It was published in the February 1 issue of
Die Linke, the journal of the Austrian section of the Fourth International.
The second is a report of the impressions of an observer from a national organization of Scandinavian Lapps.
Internationalen, the paper of the Swedish section of the Fourth Inter-
The Lapps are an ancient people related to the Finns who settled in the northern forests of Scandinavia before the invasion of the Germanic peoples and have been pushed back futher and further into the subartic area. The Lapp organizations have tended to take more and more interest in the struggles of the Indian peoples of the Americas in the framework of a sort of international community of threatened native
Robin SCHNEIDER
At the origin of the conflict between the
Indian movement Misurasata, and the left government was the question of how the
Indian-inhabited areas would be incorporated into the revolution. The Sandinistas had a special interest in the natural resources of the Atlantic coast - hardwoods, gold and shellfish — as a means of meeting the growing deficit of hard currency.
What the Miskitos were concerned about was preserving the traditional life in their more than 200 village communes.
8
It is from the April 16 issue of
IV At the end of 1980, a compromise was
The communes were to be given land titles that would assure that Indian land would no longer be occupied by Spanish-speaking small farmers pushing into the Atlantic coastal region. The state was to pass on 80% of the profits from the lumber industry to the villagers.
The literacy campaign, which had been boycotted by the village communes, was finally to be carried out in the Indian
Positions began to harden in February 1981 when the state security force arrested all the major Indian leaders in response tion. The work of building up the fishing industry and mining, as well as the re-forestation projects, and the plans for building a bilingual school system have all been essentially stymied.
The history of the Miskitos explains their fierce opposition to rule by outsiders, even revolutionaries. The result of their long history of rebellions and alliances is that the Miskitos have survived as the largest lowland population in Latin America today. While the forest Indian groups number in the hundreds and few thousands, there are as many Miskitos in Nicaragua and Honduras as all the Indians who live in the gigantic Brazilian Amazon region.
Rebellions against the Spanish conquerors of the Pacific coast region and accompanying alliances with the British colonial power in the Caribbean made it easier for the Miskitos to absorb foreign influences than for other Indian peoples. Since the seventeenth century, they have been a racial mixture, combining the blood of the older Indian people with that of escaped Black slaves.
For 250 years, the Miskitos had their own kings, while the Atlantic coast was a British protectorate. They were able to reduce the smaller Sumu and Rama peoples to tribute-paying status, up until 1894, when Nicaragua, with the help of the Us, annexed their country by military force.
International Viewpoint 18 June 1984
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NICARAGUA
40,000 hectares of forest on Indian land. Rannas to be enthusiastic about learning
Today, the culture of the Miskitos is a hybrid one. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been transformed by the puritanical missionaries of the Moravian church and by plantation work. In particular, it has been turned upside down by the big North American banana and lumber companies that came in early this century and plundered the natural wealth of the region, leaving vast areas between Rio Coco and Puerto Cabezas as barren steppeland.
Up until today, the