The purpose for the travel covered by this grant was to carry out preliminary dissertation research on titling and demarcation of indigenous land rights in Nicaragua. In August 2001, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered the Government of Nicaragua to develop legislation for titling indigenous lands throughout the country. The Government has been given fifteen months to title lands claimed by the Mayagna community of Awas Tingni that filed the case. The process for titling and demarcating Awas Tingni’s land will likely be used as a model for broader efforts to recognize indigenous land rights throughout the country as ordered by the Court. During my time in Nicaragua, I focused primarily on how the Court’s decision is being implemented with particular attention to the role of a growing number of maps made by Awas Tingni and other indigenous communities in that process.

I used this opportunity to develop contacts with a variety of institutions, organizations and communities with whom I will collaborate during my dissertation research. I also used my time in Nicaragua to gain a better sense of the political and cultural contexts in which the Court’s decision is being implemented. I am currently developing a number of proposals to fund my dissertation research in Geography on indigenous land rights in Nicaragua. This travel has proved to be indispensable to the development of those proposals, affording me the opportunity to develop a participatory methodology with the personal contacts that I made in Nicaragua.

I spent a total of five weeks in Nicaragua, beginning July 16 and ending August 19. During that time I carried out informal interviews with government officials, World Bank representatives, community leaders, non-governmental organizations and academic researchers involved with implementation of the Awas Tingni case. Lawyers from the Indian Law Resource Center, a Washington D.C. based NGO that represented Awas Tingni in their historic land claim, helped me to make initial contacts in Nicaragua and gave me extensive access to their files on the case. Once in the city of Puerto Cabezas on the Atlantic Coast, I worked closely with lawyers from the field office of the International Human Rights Law Group. Through that organization, I had access to negotiations between Awas Tingni and the Government of Nicaragua concerning implementation of the Court’s decision.

I also met with a number of key regional and national government representatives involved with the case, including members of a government-run project to regularize property rights. This project is funded by the World Bank, who has continually emphasized protection of indigenous land rights as an important part of creating the infrastructure necessary for development in the region. On the face of it, the Bank’s role in the process seems like a glaring contradiction. Background research that I conducted in June 2002 in Washington D.C. as well as my conversations with government officials in Nicaragua has led me to believe that both parties see indigenous land rights as a different, yet no less governable, form of property rights. In the Bank’s opinion, lack of recognition of property rights is one of the key obstacles to decentralization and development projects.

Though indigenous property rights will likely be communally held, inalienable, and tax free, none of that obstructs the kind of natural resource development that prevails in the rich forests and marine areas claimed by indigenous communities. In both cases, the government has used concessions to rent extraction rights to private companies. With the recognition of indigenous land rights, the ability of companies to rent those same rights is not necessarily impeded. As one of the poorest areas in the Americas, it does not seem unlikely that indigenous communities will rent rights to logging companies and commercial fishing interests. This is one of the topics that identified in the field that I plan to research further as part of my dissertation.

I also spent a considerable amount of time traveling to Awas Tingni and neighboring communities involved with implementation of the Court’s decision. The emphasis placed by the Court, NGOs and the government on demarcating Awas Tingni’s lands is presently threatening to exacerbate conflicts with neighboring communities over access to areas of overlapping claims. Mapping projects carried out by Awas Tingni related to the preparation of their claim as well as maps made by a 1998 diagnostic study of land claims in the Atlantic Coast funded by the World Bank play a key role in the development of these conflicts. I met with a number of community leaders that participated in these earlier projects and plan to carry out more extensive interviews with them as a part of my dissertation work. As the communities are politically divided by the legacy of the war with the Sandinistas during the 1980s as well as the rapid economic and political changes that came following the end of the war, figuring out who makes maps and why is a key question that I will address with further research.

Lastly I developed working relationships with the two main academic research institutions in the northern Atlantic Coast region, both of whom play will play a key role in developing a methodology for identifying indigenous lands as well as training people in skills needed for demarcation. I am currently working with the Universidad Regional Autonoma del Caribe y Costa Atlántica de Nicaragua (URACCAN) to coordinate my dissertation research. Working with a number of Mayagna students from URACCAN, I developed a workshop for training community members in using global positioning systems (GPS) to map their lands. That material served as the basis for a one-day workshop in Awas Tingni that trained 14 community members in the use of GPS. In the future, I will most likely teach a course or two addressing the problems and methods for demarcation and titling at URACCAN. I also developed a relationship with the Centro de Investigación y Documentación de la Costa Atlántica (CIDCA) that I hope will provide institutional sponsorship for my research.

 

The travel funds provided by the Center for Latin American Studies considerably helped me with the development of my dissertation research. Without this support I would not have been able to have the opportunity to make the necessary contacts in Nicaragua prior to my dissertation research. This is the second grant that I received through this program and I am very grateful for the opportunities that CLAS has afforded me to develop my research in Latin America.