State, Class, and Ethnicity in Nicaragua: Capitalist Modernization and Revolutionary Change on the Atlantic Coast 9781685851460

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State, Class, and Ethnicity in Nicaragua

State, Class, and Ethnicity in Nicaragua Capitalist Modernization and Revolutionary Change on the Atlantic Coast Carlos M. Vilas Translated by Susan Norwood

Lynne Rienner Publishers • Boulder & London

Published in the United States of America in 1989 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU ©1989 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vilas, Carlos Maria. State, class, and ethnicity in Nicaragua : capitalist modernization and revolutionary change on the Atlantic Coast / by Carlos M. Vilas p. cm. B i b l i o g r a p h y : p. Includes index. ISBN 1 - 5 5 5 8 7 - 1 6 3 - 1 1. Nicaragua—Politics and government—1979- 2. Indians of Central America—Nicaragua—Atlantic Coast—Government relations— History—20th century. 3. Social conflict—Nicaragua—Atlantic Coast—History—20th century. 4. Nicaragua—Economic policy. I. Title. F 1 5 2 8 . V 5 6 1989 972.85'053—dcl9 89-3604 CIP British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

To Carmen María, Guillermo, Pedro, Pablo, with whom I make my road. And to a moon flowing over Yulu.

Contents

List of Tables

ix

Preface

xi

1 The Atlantic Coast: A General Overview

1

2 A Conflictive History

13

3 The Atlantic Coast and Capitalist Modernization

60

4 The Atlantic Coast and the Sandinista Revolution

96

5 From Confrontation to Autonomy

142

6 Final Considerations: The Unequal Development of Social Revolutions

188

Bibliography

200

Index

211

About the Book and the Author

221

vii

Tables

1.1 1.2 3.1 3.2 3.3

4.1 4.2 4.3

5.1 5.2

Department of Zelaya: Intercensal Average Annual Growth of Total Population Atlantic Coast: Ethnic Distribution of the Population, 1981 Department of Zelaya: Changes in Agricultural Structure in the 1960s Department of Zelaya: Changes in the Average Distribution of Land Area and Cattle in the 1960s Main Petroleum Exploration Concessions on the Atlantic Coast in the 1970s Evolution of Health Indexes on the Atlantic Coast, 1973 and 1983 Land Reform Titles to Indian Villages, 1981-1985 Agrarian Reform on the Atlantic Coast: Evolution of Land Tiding Special Zone II: Changes in Ethnic Distribution in Managerial Positions in the Main State Institutions November 1984 General Election Results in the Department of Zelaya

ix

3 4

73 73 78

112 113 114

157 170

Preface

At about four o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 23, 1987, in Rosita, a town in the mining area of the Atlantic Coast, homage was given to several members of the Ministry of the Interior who had fallen in combat a year earlier in the counterrevolutionary attack on Alamikamba. There were about three hundred people in Rosita, mestizos and Indians. An army truck was the stage, and all the town's leaders were up there. The event began with a brief speech by a Moravian pastor, a Sumu; he talked about the men who had died, mixing Bible verses with passages from José Martí and Sandino. He likened the revolutionaries' struggle in Alamikamba to the struggle of the just for a peaceful world. Later on, a Sumu boy, fourteen or fifteen years old, got up on the truck with a guitar, and behind him a member of the Ministry of the Interior, a fat, ugly man about thirty years old in a dusty, worn-out olive-green uniform. "I am here to give homage to the compañeros who were killed in Alamikamba, and I'm going to sing a song. It's a very beautiful song we used to sing together sometimes," said the fat man. I was expecting to listen to a song like "El yanqui se va a joder," "Revolución, revolución," or the like. The boy started playing the guitar, and the fat man in olive green began to sing: Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás vemos la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante.no hay camino: solo estelas en la mar. Traveler, there is no road, We make the road as we walk. The road is made as we walk, and, looking back, we see the path we will never walk again. Traveler, there is no road: Only our wake in the sea.

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PREFACE

—Antonio Machado and Joan Manoel Serrat in the depths of the mountains of Rosita, on that late afternoon already announcing the night with its profusion of stars. Their song, I realized, was the best synthesis of this revolution that had invited me to participate. A powerful feeling took hold of me, unrepentantly, as if somehow I had begun to sink, feet first, through the dusty ground of Rosita, into the truest part of this town, these people, these mountains, this country. I, an Argentine, a white, middle-class intellectual, traveler of a thousand roads. "The road is made as we walk." Or, as the Sandinista martyr Ricardo Morales Aviles put it: "We have taken the first step, and never will we stop walking."

Shortly after the Sandinista victory on July 19, 1979, the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua gained international notoriety. The Coast had long been there, with its extreme poverty, pillaged of its natural resources, its people dying of silicosis, its rivers contaminated, but never before had so many people in Latin America, the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world— including Nicaragua—shown such interest in it. For a number of reasons, the Atlantic Coast rapidly became one of the most conflicted areas of the country, and the one where violent contradictions with the revolutionary government exploded first. Some persons' and groups' concerns about the impact of these contradictions on the people came up against others' interest in manipulating the contradictions in order to weaken the revolution. The revolutionaries tried to defend themselves; to go ahead; to understand the historical and present-day specificities of a region that had been exploited and impoverished as had few others, that had remained isolated from the changes in Nicaraguan society in the almost three decades preceding the revolutionary victory. Today, an autonomous government, supported by the ethnic groups that live there, is beginning to be created on the Atlantic Coast. This may also be the region of Nicaragua where the peace process has advanced the furthest—a process that began long before the five Central American presidents signed the Guatemala accords in August 1987. It is curious that none of this good news has received anything like the attention gained by the previous years' bad news. I knew almost nothing about the Coast until a relatively short time ago. In my book The Sandinista Revolution there is not even a passing reference to the Coast and the Costeños—an implicit geographical reduction of the Sandinista Revolution, and of Nicaragua, to the Pacific and the centralnorthern areas of the country. I began to study the region, its history, and its present-day problems in a systematic manner when I joined Nicaragua's Center for Research and Documentation on the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA) in

PREFACE

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October 1984. This book is a result of the almost four years I was with CIDCA; it evolved naturally from the research, advisorships, and related tasks I conducted then, more than as an intentionally pre-fixed research project. My main goals have been to identify and discuss the way in which the Coast has been conceptualized, both before and after the revolution, by the groups that act within the Nicaraguan state; to analyze the social bases of those groups; to characterize the policy actions inspired by the differing viewpoints; and to consider the changes made in the state and in the region it acts on, as well as the network of tensions, contradictions, movements, and reactions these changes produce. The state is seen as the synthesis and expression of coalitions of politically dominant social forces, with specific ethnic identities. In a multiethnic society like Nicaragua's, class domination combines with the domination of one ethnic group over others. For the purposes of this research, I have distinguished two main stages: the modernizing or developmentalist stage of the Somocista state, starting in the 1950s, and the revolutionary stage after 1979. In the first chapter, I present the general features of the region and its main socioeconomic, ecological, and demographic aspects, and discuss the impact of the unequal development of capitalism in Nicaragua on the configuration of two strongly different socioeconomic formations: the Atlantic and the Pacific/central-northern regions. In Chapter 2 , 1 present a historical background to the tensions and conflicts that exploded in such a violent way after the revolutionary triumph. In Chapter 3, I consider the impact on the people and economy of the Atlantic Coast of the process of capitalist modernization that took place in Nicaragua after 1950. The developmentalist approach of international organizations and U.S. government agencies caught on in certain dominant sectors in Nicaragua and changed the prevailing viewpoint about the Coast. As a result, new government mechanisms were designed and new policies carried out to promote the exploitation of natural resources, the expansion of the agricultural frontier, and rural population movements. In Chapter 4, I discuss the unequal regional development of the conditions that led to the birth and progress of the revolutionary process. I present the main aspects of what I understand to be the viewpoint that initially inspired the Sandinista Revolution's approach to the Coast, the policies that grew out of this viewpoint, and the tensions and contradictions they generated within many sectors of the Costeño population. In Chapter 5, I examine the way these contradictions were brought to light by the revolutionary process on the Coast; the rapid move from hesitant support to opposition on the part of many Costeño leaders; and the skillful manipulation of the escalating conflict by internal opposition and U.S. government agencies, which led to the outbreak of war on the Atlantic Coast. I examine the resettlement of the Indian villages, in particular the Tasba Pri case, and

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discuss the autonomy process starting in 1984.1 consider also the change in attitude toward the Coast by the revolutionary government and that of the Costeño leadership toward the revolution, as well as the evolution of the peace process on the Coast. In Chapter 6, I discuss on a more conceptual level some of the material of the preceding chapters, arguing that the conflictive nature that the ethnic and regional question assumed on the Atlantic Coast in the first stages of the Sandinista Revolution (in comparison to the passivity shown during the Somoza period and that of foreign domination) may be seen as both a manifestation of and an effect on the periphery of the unequal development of revolutionary processes in a multiethnic society. I am a political scientist with particular interest in the problems of development and transition. I have tried to make good use of the contributions of other social and human sciences with a longer tradition of dealing with the kind of questions arising in this book, and also of the advice of colleagues much better qualified than I in the fields of history, anthropology, and the analysis of ideologies. However, I believe that it is valid to look at the topics dealt with here from the point of view and in the categories of political science; it seems to me that this approach can aid in overcoming some of the limitations of other disciplines. The writing of this book, and the research it is based on, were conducted during my four-year affiliation with CIDCA. I took advantage of the center's excellent working facilities and, above all, of a permanent dialogue with my fellows there and with colleagues who had ties of one sort or another with CIDCA. However, this is my personal work and does not express institutional opinions. Betty Muñoz collaborated with me in the research on which Chapter 3 is based, and discussed several parts of the book with me. Her woik for her B.A. thesis on the state and natural resources on the Atlantic Coast and my research for this book were carried out in parallel during 1985 and 1986, allowing us to establish a fruitful dialogue. Ondina Castillo was my research assistant during part of 1986. I would also like to express my appreciation for the comments made by Juan Luis Allegret, Judy Butler, Claudia Garcia, Galio Gurdian, Charles Hale, Susan Norwood, Germán Romero, Kathy Yih, and Joel Zamora on different parts of the work. I must also thank Ana Maria Hernández, director of the Documentation Center of CIDCA, for her advice in finding materials and her patience with my prolonged delays in returning them. Richard N. Adams, director of the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin; Carol Smith, of Duke University; and Edmundo Gordon, from CIDCA, were kind enough to send me long written opinions on a previous draft of the manuscript, which were extremely useful in improving the final version—although they are not responsible for the limitations it surely must have. In particular, I should like to thank them for

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their interest in the book when it was still in an embryonic stage; Chapter 2, which was not in the original plan of the book, is the result of a wise recommendation by Carol Smith. Conversations held at different times during the research with Ronas Dolores, Ray Hooker, Orlando Nuñez Soto, and Manuel Ortega Hegg helped me clarify several points; the same is true of my meetings with Rodolfo Stavenhagen and Martin Diskin during their visits to Nicaragua. I also benefited from discussions with my colleagues at the Institute fur Soziologie of the University of Hannover, who participated in a joint project, which I coordinated, with CIDCA on the Atlantic Coast: Klaus Meschkat, Volker Wuenderich, Eleonore von Oertzen, Lioba Rossbach, and Ernesto Richter. We were not always in agreement, but the scholarly interchange was, at least for me, enriching. In the course of the research I talked with and sometimes formally interviewed many officials of the national and regional governments and also people of the Coast—leaders, ex-combatants, women and men on the street and in the countryside. When one lives in the place where the research is carried out, and research is part of one's daily life, it is difficult to distinguish between looking for data and simply living. It would be impossible to mention here all those persons who in one way or another contributed— sometimes without any idea they were doing so—to this book. But I should like to mention specially the interest, cooperation, and hospitality of Dr. Mima Cunningham, Subcomandante José Gonzalez Picado, and Reverend René Enriquez Bent. Partial or preliminary aspects of many of the topics dealt with in the book were presented in classes, seminars, and talks at the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Florida at Gainesville, the Center for International Studies of Duke University, the Kellogg Institute of Notre Dame University, Merrill College of the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Development Studies Unit of the University of Stockholm, the Institute for Development Studies of the University of Helsinki, Centro de Estudios sobre América in Havana, the Fifth Nicaraguan Conference on Social Sciences, and the National Cadres School of the FSLN, as well as in public talks in the CIDCA office in Puerto Cabezas. On all these occasions the participants' comments, criticisms, questions, and reactions helped me clarify my ideas. The friendship of Ileana Rodriguez created the conditions so that I could once and for all finish writing the manuscript. The English translation was done by Susan Norwood; I should like to mention here my recognition for the interest she took in the work. —Carlos Vilas

The Atlantic Coast: A General Overview

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE REGION 1 The eastern region of Nicaragua, known as the Atlantic Coast, encompasses the departments of Zelaya and Río San Juan—a surface area of 25,693 square miles, equal to 56 percent of Nicaragua's territory. It extends south from Cape Gracias a Dios to San Juan del Norte on the Caribbean coast and west approximately 90 miles, where it borders on the departments of Jinotega, Matagalpa, Boaco, and Chontales, as well as Lake Nicaragua. In 1982 the Atlantic Coast was divided into three administrative zones: Special Zone I, with its capital in Puerto Cabezas, extending from the Rio Coco on the Honduran border to the Rio Grande de Matagalpa; Special Zone II, with its capital in Bluefields, taking in the rest of the department of Zelaya, with the exception of Rama and Muelle de los Bueyes, western municipalities that became part of Region V (departments of Chontales and Boaco); and Special Zone III, the department of Río San Juan. In September 1987, passage of an Autonomy Statute for the Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua created two autonomous regions: the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic, which correspond to the former Special Zones I and II, respectively. This book will mainly deal with this part of the Coast, with some reference to the department of Rio San Juan. Almost 90 percent of the waters of all the rivers in Nicaragua, many of which are navigable, run through the Atlantic Coast. Some, like the Escondido and the San Juan, are used as means of transportation between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Indian villages dot the banks of the Coco, the Wawa, the Bambana, and the Prinzapolka rivers, among others. This vast and abundant fluvial system has traditionally been a way of life and a means of transportation for the Coast population. It was also used by foreign companies for the transportation of the resources they were exploiting—ore, lumber, and bananas. The Atlantic Coast has two major types of natural vegetation: The pine savanna, which spreads over some 1,730 square miles of the northeast corner of the country between the Coco and Wawa rivers and extends into Honduras, characterized by the predominance of the species Pinus caribaea. As a result of exploitation by U.S. companies for more than half a century, there l

2

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

are now only sparse populations of young pines, and the constant rains have leached the soil. The wide-leaf evergreen forest takes up the greater part of the Coast, with species of great economic value: mahogany, cedar, tuno, and bay, among others. This type of forest has also been subjected to intense exploitation by foreign lumber companies, small farmers, and cattle raisers. The heavy rainfall (an average of 97.5 inches a year, but reaching 225 inches a year in some areas, such as San Juan del Norte) favors the growth of vegetation and the proliferation of fungi and other diseases that prevent the growth of certain crops. A clayey soil in a humid and rainy climate is ideal for root crops but not for basic grains, which require better drainage. These characteristics have influenced the lives of the Coast populations since preColumbian times. Because of the low fertility of the soil, the Indian cultures that settled there, particularly along the rivers and the seacoast, depended fundamentally on hunting and fishing. The contrast of Atlantic Coast climate with that of the rest of the country is notable. In the Pacific region the climate is primarily tropical savanna, with a dry season that lasts between four and six months and rainfalls varying between 19.5 inches and 39 inches a year. The predominating wide grassy plains, naturally fertilized by volcanic ash, are suitable for agriculture and cattle. In the mountainous subtropical central region, with median temperatures between 50° and 68° F„ pine and oak forests and tropical dew forests predominate, and conditions are favorable for permanent subtropical crops and cattle raising.

Population2 Population figures for the Atlantic Coast are imprecise, as are those for the rest of the country. The 1971 population census—the last carried out to date—calculated the population for the department of Zelaya at 145,508 persons. On the basis of this figure, the Nicaraguan Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC) estimated 139,929 inhabitants in 1980. A CIDCA study estimated the population as 282,081 inhabitants for the department in 1981, based on the housing precensus carried out on the Coast in that year (CIDCA 1982). In addition to natural growth, socioeconomic factors have contributed to this doubling of the population in a decade. According to CIDCA (1982:47), it is closely related to the rapid eastward advance of the agricultural frontier. Table 1.1 shows that the most rapid population growth occurred in the 1960s, when there was the greatest amount of displacement toward the agricultural frontier. The relatively rapid growth rate in the 1940s was a result of the reactivation of gold mining and rubber production during World War II. Although ethnic identity is a complex and dynamic matter, and does not always conform to rigid categories, we may count as present-day ethnic

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

3

Table 1.1 Department of Zelaya: Intercensal Average Annual Growth of Total Population (in percentages) 1906-1920 1.0

1920-1940 0.3

1940-1950 5.1

1950-1963 2.4

1963-1971 6.2

Source: Institute Nicaragüense de Estudisticas y Censos, INEC, national censuses.

groups of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua the Ramas, Sumus, Miskitos, Creoles, Garifunas, and mestizos. According to linguistic features and other cultural characteristics, the first three groups belong to the Macro-Chibcha family, which originated in South America. The Creoles derive from an originally African population brought to the region as slaves, and the Garifunas were deported to Central America after an uprising on their native Caribbean island. Table 1.2 presents the ethnic distribution of the Coast population in 1981. Events occurring after this information was gathered changed the number of inhabitants of the Coast, their geographical location, and the ethnic composition of the population. Displacements caused by the war from 1981 on reduced the number of inhabited areas and resulted in a greater concentration of population in urban centers. The total population of Puerto Cabezas, estimated at 5,000 inhabitants in 1980, had grown to around 25,000 by the beginning of 1987; Bluefields, which in 1980 had less than 12,000 inhabitants, in 1986 had about 30,000. On the other hand, extensive areas, such as the southern bank of the Rio Coco, and large areas of La Cruz del Rio Grande, Tortuguero, and Punta Gorda have, in 1989, almost no inhabitants. At the beginning of the 1980s two-thirds of the Coast population was mestizo, whereas the "traditional" ethnic groups represented 36 percent of the total. This ethnic profile, quite different from the image of homogeneity still prevailing in academic and political circles, is an effect of the capitalist transformations that took place in Nicaragua, particularly since the beginning of the 1950s. Before referring to these events, it is necessary to describe briefly each of these groups and communities. Ramas. This is the smallest of the Coast's ethnic groups. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles of the region do not mention them, but rather their ancestors the Votos and other groups linguistically related to them. Rama communities under the domination of the British and the Miskitos were reported during the eighteenth century in the Punta Gorda-Monkey Point area to the south of Bluefields. The Ramas suffered particularly intense consequences of the European conquest: epidemics, wars, and slavery. To avoid being captured and enslaved by the Miskitos and sold to the British, the Ramas were forced to move from one place to another in search of refuge. At present, their main settlement is on Rama Cay, a small island in the Bay of

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THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

Table 1.2 Atlantic Coast: Ethnic Distribution of the Population, 1981 Ethnic Group

Population Percent Number

Rama Sumu Miskito Creole Garifuna Mestizos Total

650 4,851 66,994 25,723 1,487 172,046 271,751

.2 1.8 24.6 9.5 .5 63.4 100.0

Present Lanugage Rama, Creole English Sumu Miskito Creole English Creole English, Garifuna Spanish

Source: CIDCA (1982). aOnly on the Atlantic Coast; the approximately 540 Miskito families living in Managua are not included.

Bluefields; there are also small groups nearby in Wiring Cay, Monkey Point, Cane Creek and, further south, Punta Gorda. Sumus. The Sumus population is dispersed throughout a region that extends from the Rio Grande de Matagalpa in Nicaragua to the headwaters of the Patuca River in Honduras. The Miskitos pillaged, captured, and enslaved the Sumus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; some Sumu communities were finally dominated by the Miskitos, in that period allied with the British, who ruled the region (see Chapter 2). Although most Sumus live in small, isolated communities, there were, before counterrevolutionary war began, located in the Bambana River basin a few large villages such as Wasakín, Fruta de Pan, and Espaniolina, some of which were founded with the help of Moravian missionaries. It is possible to distinguish three Sumu linguistic groups living in geographically separate areas: (1) the Panamahka Sumus, about 2,000 people, who live in the basins of the Bambana, Tungki, Pis Pis, Uly, Waspuk, and Kwabul rivers (the largest village, with approximately 616 inhabitants in 1981, was Musawás on the Waspuk River); (2) the Twahka Sumus, around 1,000 people, living mainly on the banks of the Bambana and Bocay rivers (the largest village is Wasakín, in Central Zelaya); and (3) the Ulwa Sumus, some 1,600 people, who live dispersed along the Rio Grande de Matagalpa and the Prinzapolka River and its tributaries. Miskitos. The Miskito population is at present dispersed along the Caribbean coast of Honduras and Nicaragua, with a refugee community in Costa Rica. The majority live in Nicaragua, from Cape Gracias a Dios in the north to Pearl Lagoon in the south. There are also Miskitos living around the mining towns of Siuna, Rosita, and Bonanza, and along the banks of the main rivers of the northeastern Atlantic region. Before the triumph of the revolution in mid-1979, they lived in small villages and practiced small-scale

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

5

farming and fishing, as well as seasonal salaried labor for foreign-owned companies. The Miskito population and territory expanded mainly by means of the conquest of other Indian groups, the assimilation of foreigners, and natural demographic growth. They Miskitos expanded initially toward the northeast, reaching the Black River in Honduras in 1750. During the following hundred years the Miskitos came to occupy the entire coastal region, reaching as far south as Chiriqui Lagoon in Panama and as far north as the Chamelecdn River on the Honduran border with Guatemala. Today, the Miskitos are the most numerous Indian group, and the second largest of all population groups of the Atlantic Coast. In 1981 the counterrevolutionary war led to the displacement of 21,000 people from their villages on the Coco River on the Nicaraguan border with Honduras. Ten thousand of these crossed into Honduras, 8,000 were resettled in other parts of the Coast, and some 3,000 moved to Managua or other places. Creoles. This is the name used by the descendants of Africans (slaves, runaways, and freed slaves), mixed in different degrees with other groups. African immigration possibly goes back to the arrival of the first buccaneer ships in Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, and Cape Gracias a Dios in the sixteenth century. This immigration became constant after the creation of the Providence Island Company in 1633, which brought in slaves as labor for its plantations on the Coast. When the British left the region in 1787 in compliance with the Treaty of Versailles with Spain, many Africans stayed on the Coast, either as slaves of the British who remained in the area, as freed slaves, or by escaping. In this period, Jamaican merchants also began to arrive on the Coast and soon became permanent residents. In the nineteenth century, with the rapid development of the enclave economy around the activities of the U.S. lumber and banana companies, the growing demand for labor was supplied primarily by the immigration of blacks from the Antilles and the southern United States. The present-day Creole population lives mainly in the city of Bluefields; other important centers are Corn Island, Pearl Lagoon, and Puerto Cabezas. The Creoles work primarily at skilled and semiskilled labor and as office employees, and there is a high percentage of technicians and professionals among the Creoles, in comparison with the Indian groups. Garifunas. This group, whose members physically resemble blacks, has a number of cultural and linguistic features characteristic of the Indians who lived in the Lesser Antilles at the time of the European conquest. After the "Carib War," from 1795 to 1797 in the island of St. Vincent, the British shipped the surviving Garifunas to the island of Roatdn in the Bay of

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THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

Honduras. The cruel conditions of the trip caused the death of more than half those people; only a few more than 2,000 arrived. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Garifunas began to move to the mainland on the northern coast of Honduras, attracted by better employment opportunities. For thirty years after 1880, the rise of the mahogany industry and the banana plantations in Nicaragua's Atlantic regions motivated a Garffuna migration to Pearl Lagoon and Bluefields (Bell 1899:3-4; Davidson 1980). Mestizos. Mestizos presently make up most of the Atlantic Coast's population, although they are concentrated in the western municipalities. At the beginning of the 1980s approximately 164,000 mestizos, or 95 percent of the Coast mestizo population, lived in the western areas of the department of Zelaya that form the agricultural frontier. The first references to a mestizo presence on the Atlantic Coast date from the 1860s, when foreign capital began to enter on an unprecedented scale. In 1886 mestizos from the Nicaraguan town of Granada founded the small town of Rama on the river of the same name; within a few years Rama had become an important center for commerce between the Atlantic and the Pacific regions. At that time mestizo workers started arriving on the Coast. During World War II, the rise of gold mining and the rubber industry attracted large contingents of the Pacific region's labor force. Later on, the expansion of cotton growing and export cattle raising in the Pacific, together with natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, expelled great numbers of peasants to the Atlantic Coast, first on the initiative of the people affected and later as a policy of the Somocista government—a question to which I will return. The Ethnic Labor Hierarchy This brief presentation of the historical background and present demographic weight of the ethnic groups living on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua demonstrates the diversity of situations and interests that make up the ethnic context of the region. The existence of multiple population groups constitutes a fundamental element of past and present in the Atlantic Coast. The tension between the Atlantic and the Pacific regions, which has been given particular attention by observers, is complemented by this sharp differentiation within the society of the Atlantic Coast. On this level of analysis, regional unity gives way to the multiplicity of ethnic groups, cultures, histories, interests, types of socioeconomic organization, modes of production, and forms of articulation to other parts of the country, other countries, and other groups on the Coast. On this level, the regional or geographical viewpoint must be complemented by the social and cultural dynamic arising from ethnic multiplicity within the region. The rise of capitalism on the Coast and the characteristics of its historical development (which will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 2)

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

7

gave birth to a shaip and dynamic ethnic differentiation and hierarchization in the region, as has been pointed out in several studies (CIERA 1981; Rice 1984; Yih and Slate 1985; Bourgeois 1985; Hale 1987a). Miskitos, Sumus, and Ramas were left on the bottom rung of the ethnic occupational hierarchy, doing the hardest, least desirable, and worst-paid jobs as gatherers of rubber and chicle, lobster divers, pit workers in the mines, and so on. The Coast mestizos were on a higher rung, mainly as small- and mid-size farmers or farm workers on the agricultural frontier; together with the Indians, this group showed the greatest degree of illiteracy. Above them were the Creoles, mainly skilled or self-employed workers, small urban businesspeople, fishermen, boat crew, teachers, and technicians. Finally, at the top were the middle and upper classes of the Pacific regions, owners of the means of production or political and economic managers. In addition to this small stratum must be included, in the period before 1979, the tiny layer of administrators and managers—North Americans and Europeans, all of them white—of the foreign companies, as well as owners of ships and other capital resources. After the triumph of the revolution and the nationalization of the companies, this group left Nicaragua; the foreign administrators and managers were replaced by mestizo managers, mainly from the Pacific region. Similarly, the Chinese population, which before 1979 virtually monopolized retail trade in wide areas of the Atlantic Coast—particularly in the urban centers such as Bluefields, Puerto Cabezas, Waspam, Rosita, Bonanza, Siuna, Barra del Rio Grande—was seriously affected by the revolution's trade policies, and most of them left the Coast. This historical process of socioeconomic differentiation and occupational hierarchization has been accompanied by tensions and conflicts among the different ethnic groups. If from a regional perspective the major split is between the Costeños and the "Spanish" (meaning people from the Pacific), from an ethnic perspective there come to light tensions among different Costeño populations, over and above their common regional denominator, or, with respect to the Sumus, Miskitos, and Ramas, their shared identity as Indians. Finally, socioeconomic and occupational differentiation fosters specific tendencies toward changes in ethnic identity and assimilation, when the material base of the members of a given ethnic group, or their position with regard to the power structure, undergo significant modifications (see Vilas 1988 and Chapter 3 in this book). A maiked social underdevelopment and deep poverty foim the background for this process of differentiation and hierarchization of the Atlantic Coast population. At the beginning of the 1960s, almost 70 percent of the population of the department of Zelaya lived in rural areas. This figure was greater than that for the country as a whole (around 50 percent), and in the larger municipalities the percentages of rural population were even greater: 92 percent in the municipality of Waspam, 91 percent in Cape Gracias a Dios,

8

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

96 percent in Rama, 98 percent in La Cruz del Rio Grande. Given the type of capitalism that developed in Nicaragua, it is the rural area that shows the greatest underdevelopment and impoverishment. As in the rest of the country, the land suitable for fanning and livestock was concentrated in very few hands, even though it was on what is known as the agricultural frontier. According to the agricultural census of 1963, 46 percent of the landholdings were farms of less than 10 manzanas (1 manzana = 1.75 acres), constituting only 2.3 percent of the suitable land in the department; another 10 percent of the holdings were farms of less than 20 manzanas, bringing the total to 4.1 percent of the land. Holdings of 1,000 manzanas or more represented only 0.5 percent of the number of farms in the area but occupied more than 35 percent of the land. The Gini coefficient for the concentration of landholding was .81— similar to that for the rest of the country and slightly lower than in the western departments, where export crop raising had increased in the preceding decade (.83 in Chinandega and .90 in León), and in other departments with large peasant populations (.85 in Masaya and. 86 in Matagalpa). However, the differences between the coefficients for these departments and for Zelaya are less than one would have expected for the agricultural frontier, suggesting that at the beginning of the 1960s the concentration of land was already well advanced even on the agricultural frontier. In Chapter 3 , 1 will return to this issue. In this context, living conditions for the great majority of the Coast population were precarious: extremely high degrees of illiteracy, frightful sanitary conditions, poor food, the proliferation of infectious diseases, and generalized malnutrition. At the end of the 1970s, 75.4 percent of the adult population of the municipality of Rama was illiterate; in the municipalities of Puerto Cabezas and Bluefields the illiteracy figure was 75.3 percent; in the department of Río San Juan it was 96.3 percent. In the middle of the same decade the department of Zelaya had only 1.8 hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants and 2.4 doctors per 10,000 inhabitants—much less than the minimum established by the World Health Organization (WHO) of 5 beds per 1,000 inhabitants and 13 doctors per 10,000. There was a deficit of approximately 75 graduate nurses and 203 nurses' aides with respect to WHO'S minimum requirements. Contamination of the rivers by Canadian and U.S. mining firms further aggravated the problem of the generalized lack of drinking water, especially in the rural areas. Tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, yellow fever, gastroenteritis, parasitosis, and anemia were widespread among the Indian population.3 CAPITALIST HETEROGENEITY AND THE NATION STATE Capitalism and foreign domination developed differently in the Pacific region than on the Atlantic Coast.The structural heterogeneity that has been pointed

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

9

out as one of the main features of peripheral capitalism in Latin America (Evers 1979) was very marked in Nicaragua. Over the course of a complex history, two different socioeconomic structures arose in the two regions. The ecological and demographic features of each region were integrated in particular ways with the different modes of articulation to the international economic system. Each of these structures acquired, in the course of history, its own socioeconomic and cultural specificity and its own type of incorporation into different parts of the world market. From the mid-nineteenth century on, capitalism had worked a violent transformation on the relations of production in the Pacific and centralnorthern regions of Nicaragua. Between 1870 and 1890, a number of laws forced the sale of Indian communal land and, in 1881, decreed the forced recruitment of Indian labor for public works. The expansion of commercial capitalism additionally undermined Indian economies. Indian communities were destroyed, and direct producers were expropriated and moved off their lands, breaking down the direct relationship between the producers and their sources of consumption; in this way the labor force was forcibly proletarianized. 4 Coffee growing, in combination with cattle raising, was consolidated through capitalist transformations. This process was carried out mainly by local growers, who started to make up an incipient agrarian bourgeoisie; the most important means of production—the land—and control of the labor force built up the basis for their political dominance. Foreign monopoly capital did not take land away from this class, although in the end it would subordinate it through financing, trade mechanisms, and, in general, operations outside the production process. The proletarianization of the labor force, following the initial destruction of the Indian communities, was slow and limited by the seasonal nature of agricultural work, as well as by the low population density and the existence of an open agricultural frontier. This process contrasts with that which took place on the Atlantic Coast. Foreign capital—British at first, North American later on—was decisive. From the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. monopoly capital assumed the form of enclaves, characterized also by the predatory nature of the exploitation of natural resources, principally lumber. This type of exploitation was promoted by generous concessions from the Nicaraguan government; in this respect, there was a clear continuity between the practices of the Mosquito Kingdom, the Liberal government of José Santos Zelaya, the Conservative restoration supported by U.S. military intervention, and the Somoza dictatorship. The breadth of capitalist penetration on the Atlantic Coast led to the development of a working class that was much broader than its counterpart in the Pacific and central regions, at least until World War II. According to a study by CIERA (Center for Research and Study on the Agraran Reform), the U.S.-based Bragman's Bluff Lumber Company, a subsidiary of the Standard

10

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

Fruit Company, dedicated to the felling and exportation of lumber in the area around Puerto Cabezas, had by 1925 the greatest number of full-time salaried workers in all of Nicaragua—close to 3,000 workers. In general, the sawmills had crews of between 500 and 2,000 full-time workers. The same is true of the banana companies: Standard Fruit in the north and the Cuyamel Company in central Zelaya together employed close to 5,000 full-time salaried workers in the same period (CIERA 1981:59). Despite its enormous capacity to employ wage labor, this enclave capital did not completely destroy the direct relationship between the workers and their means of production. Different situations arose depending on the natural resource being exploited and the areas of the Coast where the companies were established. The companies' use of an almost exclusively male labor force combined with the survival of the Indian villages to form an unstable employment situation in which Indian workers went back and forth between their villages and their jobs in the companies. This situation was reinforced by the general instability of the region's economy, with short cycles and marked phases of expansion and recession. The demand for labor by the companies fit relatively well with a corresponding demand for manufactured consumer goods and tools (rum, machetes, iron and glass utensils, firearms, flour, salt) that were deeply rooted cultural necessities for the Indian groups, particularly the Miskitos (Helms 1971:20, 30; Jenkins 1986:174-175). Employment in the companies enabled them to have access to the cash with which to purchase these goods, either in the company store or from local merchants. However, the dependence on salaried work seems to have been greater for people from the coastal villages than for those inland, because of the unsuitability for agriculture of litoral land. In the inland villages, subsistence agriculture served as a refuge in periods when, because of the fall in international prices or other factors, the companies' activity decreased or ceased altogether. In addition, the involvement of Indians in salaried employment took place primarily in the mines and lumber companies of the northern part of Zelaya; in southern Zelaya, the banana companies, which made up the most economically active part of the economy, mainly employed mestizo workers. The incorporation of Miskitos into wage labor in this area seems to have been a relatively recent phenomenon. One of the most frequently noted features of the foreign companies' activity on the Atlantic Coast is its sporadic nature, strongly dependent on rises and falls in the international market and on increased production costs as the most accessible resources were exhausted and it became necessary to relocate to less accessible areas. The exploitation of resources took on the form of a series of rapid booms and no less spectacular recessions. During the expansions, the male work force was attracted to the plantations or the mines, leaving village agriculture in the hands of the women and children.

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

11

Matrilocality, as a form of social organization in agrarian communities based on seasonal migratory male labor, was additionally strengthened by the ups and downs of the Coast economy. In times of recession and crisis, the men returned to the villages, where they took charge of hunting, fishing, and similar activities.5 Under certain conditions, village agriculture oriented part of its surplus production for sale. This was the case with rice production on the Coco River, which developed after the departure of the Standard Fruit Company and the failure of the banana plantations at the beginning of the 1940s. Smallscale rice production in the villages found a market in the mines and the productive and administrative centers of the lumber companies on the Coast. All of the first harvest was generally sold, except for what was put aside for seed; the second harvest was kept for family consumption, but if it was poor the family was left without enough rice to eat. In the 1950s and 1960s, dependence on the sale of rice in order to obtain manufactured goods became so great that what was kept for family consumption never lasted until the following harvest. As a consequence, during a large part of the year the diet of the villages was basically made up of cassava and bananas (with which they prepared bunia or wabul), and of very low nutritional value (Helms 1971:135; CIDCA 1986). In addition, the dominance of monopoly capital—at first foreign capital and later also Somoza capital—over the Costeflo labor force took two clearly distinct forms. In some cases, the Coast economy was integrated into the international market in terms of the product but not the producer. The dependence on capital (on the company) was defined by such factors as type of product, the quality that was demanded, delivering schedule, and financing. In other cases, the process went beyond the product and converted the labor force itself into a commodity. The banana industry, and to a lesser extent the lumber industry, combined both types of subordination—-formal and real—of labor to capital: The production of bananas on the plantations owned by foreign companies was complemented by purchases from local small producers; much the same thing happened on a smaller scale with the lumber companies. In the mines, on the other hand, there was an absolute predominance of wage labor and small-scale production by independent miners (guiriseros) was marginal. In fishing, a division of labor developed between the industrial fishing carried out by capitalist enterprises oriented almost exclusively toward exports and small-scale fishing oriented both toward exports—especially in the case of lobster fishing—and the internal maricet, 80 percent of which was supplied this way in the 1970s (INFONAC 1975). Finally, the purely extractive character of the enclave, its predatory nature, and the resulting depletion of resources generated contradictions in the development of the material productive forces; which made it impossible to

12

THE ATLANTIC COAST: OVERVIEW

establish new capitalist labor relationships once companies left. It was very difficult under these conditions for the extractive activity to continue, for example, in the hands of small local capitalists that might have been able to buy the assets abandoned by the foreign firms and thus become something like the nucleus of a regional bourgeoisie. At the same time, the persistence of small-scale cash production in the villages acquired greater importance for the survival of the group. The different types of capitalist development in the two regions of the country were complemented by domestic and international political characteristics that deepened the differentiation and set the scene for the appearance of contradictions that would explode later on. As shall be seen in Chapter 2, the Spanish crown, which colonized the Pacific region early on, never had an effective presence in the Atlantic. After independence in 1821 and the dismemberment of the Central American Federation in 1838, the young Nicaraguan state became involved in intense internal struggles and was not in a condition to alter this situation. However, the struggle for political control of the Atlantic Coast—the Mosquitia, as it was called then—by the dominant groups of the Pacific region was to become a constant throughout the nineteenth century. NOTES 1.This part of the study is based mainly on data from CIERA (1981), Castillo and Zurita (1984), and Muñoz, Olivares, et al. (1985). 2. See, in general, CIDCA (1982). 3. From August 1946 to October 1967, two-thirds of the more than 15,000 clinic cases dealt with on the Escondido River were caused by malnutrition and/or poor hygiene: intestinal parasites (5,920), anemia and malnutrition (4,805), gastroenteritis (724). See Hodgson (1977); also Williamson (1979); Smutko (1983). 4. See, for example, Wheelock (1981). In the repression of the revolt of August 7-10, 1881 alone, more than 500 Indians were killed, but the pacification operations in the region lasted until December; the Indians were implacably pursued (see Miranda Casij 1972). 5. Nancy González has pointed out that this type of family group is typical of societies with recurrent migratory low-wage labor. The source of salaried labor is far from the man's home, and he must leave for months and even years at a time. As wages are low, the man's salary is not sufficient to maintain his family. Women and children stay in the villages and complement the male salary with small crops and livestock. The father/husband image disappears from the household for long periods of time. See Solien de González (1965); also Helms (1978).

2 A Conflictive History

A detailed review of the historical formation of Atlantic Coast society is beyond the purview of this book. Studies that deal with this subject from a general perspective already exist,1 and I am not a historian. It is doubtful that, for the sake of methodology, one must be familiar with the Coast's entire history in order to understand more recent problems or go back to the seventeenth century in order to understand what is happening in the last third of the twentieth century; still, it cannot be denied that the past constitutes part of the present for many of the actors of today's regional dynamics and is lived by them as an ever-renewed reality. From the perspective of the Indians and Creoles, it is clear that the contradictions that exploded after 1979 are at bottom one more link in the long chain of confrontations, tensions, and misunderstandings with the Pacific and the "Spanish."2 Thus, I present in this chapter a summary of the most relevant aspects of the historical development of the Atlantic Coast, for a better understanding of its contemporary problems. TWO MODES OF COLONIZATION The history of the Atlantic Coast was shaped by three main elements: (1) British colonial expansion and, later, U.S. neocolonial expansion; (2) the subordinate dynamics of the cultures and institutions originating in the region; and (3) the formative process of the Nicaraguan state and the integration of its territory. These three elements are not independent but rather closely integrated, although in the last analysis the determining element is the process of colonial and neocolonial expansion. As a result of this process, which developed over four centuries, new population groups were incorporated into the region, and the life of the original inhabitants of the Atlantic Coast changed in every way possible (language, for example, was affected, as were religion, settlement patterns, family structure, clothing, technology, and nutrition). At the same time, relations between the Nicaraguan state and the Coast were strongly conditioned by the direct and indirect presence of the metropolitan powers. Just as the success of the Costeños' aspirations toward autonomy was linked to the receptiveness of British authorities and of British colonial interests in general, the Nicaraguan 13

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A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

state's attempts to integrate the Coast into its territory rested to a greater or lesser extent on explicit and implicit alliances with the U.S. government's interest in neutralizing the British presence in the region and controlling the routes of transisthmic communication. One of the most striking aspects of the history of this part of Central America is the contrast between the failure of Spanish attempts to control the Mosquito Coast—Taguzgalpa as it was called early on by the Spanish—and the success of the British. Spain's failure and Britain's triumph were caused by different and even opposing strategies and methods. Spain looked for direct control based on the domination—and, in fact, the destruction—of the aboriginal societies, in accord with the system it had developed in the rest of America and the Caribbean. The British, to the contrary, opted for an approach involving indirect control through an alliance of metropolitan political and economic interests with indigenous institutions and cultures. However, the British approach was not a matter of setting up parallel or superimposed institutions. Rather, it was a dynamic interaction in which the Indians' contact with buccaneers, merchants, and British authorities changed their lives—from the Indians' forms of production to the most specific aspects of their existence, always with the active consent of the aboriginal authority structures. In contrast with the failed Spanish attempts to establish a crude and open domination, the British adopted a strategy that in contemporary terminology we could call hegemony: domination by consent. The consent of the indigenous population of the Coast was not obtained by magic or in a vacuum. British colonialism developed a system of exchange with the Indians by means of which the economic and political interests of nascent British capitalism found enthusiastic supporters and allies. For Great Britain, "civilizing" was synonymous with establishing relations of commercial exchange with the indigenous population and gradually involving these people in market relationships. In the perceptive words of an eighteenth-century British observer: Their wants will undoubtedly increase in proportion as they grow more civilized; and, in order to gain the costlier articles of dress and convenience, they may soon be taught, that nothing more is required on their part, than an advancement of skill, and redoubled diligence in selecting and procuring commodities of superior value, or larger collections of the same kind, for carrying on their barter, and due payment of their annual balance. [Long 1774:319]

Friendship with the Indians would permit Great Britain to establish "profitable colonies" and "lucrative trade" with the Indians and neighboring tribes. In fact, the Miskito Indians, "considered to be a British colony," are "superior to any others," in the sense of having sufficient means of defense without requiring troops or ships from Great Britain, "and possessing a

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

15

greater fund and variety of materials for an advantageous commerce" (Long 1774:320). Native institutions were modified gradually over several centuries. The British, giving a basic recognition to these institutions, promoted their own interests through their development, influenced them and reoriented them. The Miskitos, and later on the Creoles, assumed themselves to be subjects of the British, opposed to any attempt to unite with the Spanish colony in the Pacific and, after independence, with Nicaragua. It must be pointed out, however, that up to the end of the eighteenth century British merchants dealt almost exclusively with a single group: the Miskitos—and, more specifically, with Miskito leaders. The commercial exchange that formed the basis for the relationship only occurred with the Miskitos, who, in turn, resorted to more coercive methods with other Indian groups. Moreover, it seems clear that the practical effects of the relationship with the British—access to manufactured goods, firearms, and so forth—were felt mainly by the leadership and not by the population as a whole. At any rate, the British approach to the people of the Atlantic Coast contrasts markedly with the Spanish strategy. Whereas the British appealed to a combination of exchange and indirect rule, the Spanish attempted an open and direct form of domination. This was not an approach especially designed for the Coast, but rather an extension to the Coast of the approach applied in the Pacific region. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the main economic activity in what is now the western part of Nicaragua was the trade in Indian slaves, basically oriented to the mines of South America. It is difficult to give a good estimate of the extent of this trade. According to Radell (1976), it involved the exportation of about half a million Indians from the western part of the country during the first twenty years of the Spanish colony. During the same period, between 400,000 and 600,000 more died of different diseases, were killed in combats against the Spanish, or fled. Another 250,000 were annihilated in the second half of the sixteenth century. In Radell's estimate, the country's population of around 1.3 million at the time of contact fell to 40,000 by 1550 and 10,000 by 1600. Radell's figures are clearly exaggerated. It is difficult to imagine that an economy like that existing in western Nicaragua in the sixteenth century— with low agricultural yields, without systems of irrigation or with extremely rudimentary and little-used systems, and with grain storage and other problems (see Garcia Bresso 1987)—could have been able to feed almost a million and a half people. Nevertheless, there can be no denying the impact of colonial contact on the demographics of the Indians living in the Pacific region of what is today Nicaragua. The Indians of the eastern region were protected by a natural barrier of mountains, swamps, jungles, torrential rains, and insects, which kept Spanish expeditions out. But the idea of Spanish conquest remained

16

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

throughout the sixteenth century and was strengthened in the late seventeenth century by every incursion by Costeño Indians into Spanish settlements. In some cases the wish to dominate combined with the desire to exterminate. The most explicit formulation of this extreme view is found in the recommendations of one of Long's contemporaries—the Catholic Bishop of León (Nicaragua), Fray Benito Garret y Arlovi. In 1711 the bishop proposed to the king of Spain that he put together a fleet of battleships in order to procure their total extermination, because . . . if there remain any survivors of those barbarians it will be to rest now and later that these lands should suffer the same cruel insults. . . . Your Majesty's dominions run a great risk if this cruel enemy is not exterminated. . . . The conveniences which Y o u r Majesty's royal crown will find in this idea of devastation (beyond that which is the principal aim o f Your Majesty's Catholic zeal, to seek redress for the holy faith and to relieve the souls now moaning in that horrendous captivity) are the following: The first, the security of conserving for Y o u r Majesty the castle of the San Juan River. . . . The second is that, o n c e exterminated the Miskitos, the thousand men [of the expedition] upon returning can clear the three torrents in the San Juan River. . . . The third and last . . . is that once [we have] destroyed the Miskitos, infamous thieves for the English, and cleared those three passes, Your Majesty's royal coffers shall obtain most singular monies, because trade will return to life. [Garret y Arlovi 1711]

The bishop's request was not granted, but the illustrious prelate gives us a good example of the range of alternatives offered, or suggested, to the Spanish crown, in contrast with the British approach to the Coast. For Great Britain, commercial expansion depended on its alliance with the leaders of the Indian groups; for Spain, on their complete domination. This difference in perspectives and strategies corresponded in turn to two different types of power structure in the metropolis. The British monarchy integrated into the power structure certain members of the merchant aristocracy and of the rising liberal bourgeoisie who had made their own revolution at the end of the seventeenth century. By contrast, Spanish colonialism was based on an absolute monarchy of a distinctly feudal type, firmly imbued with the religious fanaticism of the Counter-Reformation and the Reconquest. The ascendancy of Great Britain in the region was based principally on its commercial supremacy, which was in turn based more on British predominance in world trade and industry than on a direct influence on the internal political affairs of the region. British policies seem to have been dictated by commercial interests rather than by strictly political or "state" considerations and, in good measure, were formulated or inspired by the merchants who had settled in the region rather than by the civil servants of the Foreign Office or the Colonial Office. Spanish policy, on the other hand,

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

17

was basically the result of political and ideological motivations in which economic considerations were strongly dependent on extraeconomic arguments, and, in any case, both had been defined by civil servants far away from the scene. FROM THE CONSOLIDATION OF BRITISH HEGEMONY TO THE QUESTION OF TRANSIT The first contact between the Indians of the Coast and the Europeans came with the establishment of the Providence Island Company in 1631, founded by British Puritan businessmen who established sugarcane and tobacco plantations. The company brought African slaves to the island; in 1633 they numbered some 400. In the same year the British population of the island was 540; 500 of these were men. British settlers later widened their activities in the area, including attacks on Spanish ships navigating in the area and trade with the Indian population of the coast across from the island. The trading post they established on the mainland on Cape Gracias a Dios quickly became the most important post of the Providence Island Company. From the outset the colonists were able to establish excellent relations with the Indian population of the Cape. In 1641 the Spanish attacked and destroyed the settlement on Providence Island and British activity moved to the Coast. About the same time, a group of shipwrecked Africans (possibly runaways from Providence), found their way to shore, in the Miskito Cays, where with the passage of time they integrated with the Indian villages of Sandy Bay and Cape Gracias a Dios. Between 1655 and 1685 privateering was revived in the Caribbean. Many of these privateers were tobacco farmers who had been unable to convert their holdings to sugarcane (Gordon 1985). The Coast's geographical features— bays and lagoons—made it an attractive refuge from storms and a safe anchorage for repairs. Some of these privateers made contacts with the inhabitants of Cape Gracias a Dios; they took refuge with them, lived with their women, and settled in their villages. The Indians provided food and accompanied the pirates on their raids. Their interaction with the pirates gave the Indians access to some firearms. This technology, monopolized until then by the Europeans, reinforced the group's alliance with the British and gave them a clear superiority over the other Indian groups of the region. In 1685 pressure from Europe brought Caribbean privateering to an end. The pirates settled down and dedicated themselves to trading with the Indians and, to a lesser extent, to subsistence agriculture. The Miskitos came to be the intermediaries for commerce on the Coast. They traded with other Indian groups inland and with the Europeans. They exchanged slaves, cacao, sarsaparilla, animal skins, turtleshell, and balsam for weapons, ammunition, tools, kitchen implements, and jewelry. They later came to have an interest in cotton cloth, rum, and mirrors, developing a

18

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

growing dependence on products manufactured in Europe. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Miskitos, alongside their traditional crops such as cassava, pineapples, and squash, planted crops brought by the British and other Europeans: plantains, bananas, and sugarcane. Bananas and plantains rapidly became the main element of their diet and were used to make their alcoholic beverages. According to travelers of the period, the Miskitos lacked a stable, structured political organization and only in times of war came together under a leader of special prestige. Their access to firearms, the political and military support of the British, and their cultural and biological mixture with Africans and Europeans gave the Miskitos a military advantage over the other Indian groups of the Mosquitia. As the Miskitos expanded along the coast of Central America out of their settlements in Cape Gracias a Dios and Sandy Bay, other Indian groups either moved inland in order to avoid contact with them or were absorbed into the Miskito population. Their military superiority allowed the Miskitos to raid and enslave other Indian groups. In 1720 a number of Miskito Indians participated in the British repression of a runaway slave uprising in Jamaica.3 Miskito political domination increased with their military, economic, and cultural predominance. As early as 1657, the Miskitos believed that in order for an individual to be legitimated as chief, he must be recognized as such by the British. Several chiefs—who at some unrecorded moment began to be called kings—went to England, others were ratified by the governor of Jamaica and, later on, by the superintendent of Belize. In addition, several socalled (by the British) princes were taken to England, Jamaica, or Belize for their education. It is often said that the Miskito kings were crowned by the British, but this practice began only in the nineteenth century—that is, when the Mosquito monarchy was already in a clear decline. During the seventeenth and eighteen centuries the British authorities gave the king a commission, by virtue of which he was to take over certain functions related to English interests in the area. The first king commissioned in this way was Jeremy I (1687-1720), taken for this purpose from Cape Gracias a Dios to Jamaica; he was followed by a long line of succession. It is interesting to note that although before King Jeremy three other kings are attested (Olien 1983), by the middle of the seventeenth century the legitimacy of the king, and not only of a given line of succession, had come to depend on recognition by British authority. According to Long (1774), when the king was not invested by British authorities, he was not recognized as king by his subjects. Long, whose main interest, as we have seen, was in establishing a solid relationship between the Miskitos and the British merchants in Jamaica—of whom he was one—may have overstated the importance the people attributed to the king's recognition by the British. Be that as it may, it can be said that

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

19

starting some time in the eighteenth century, the king's legitimacy began to be based on the British commission as well as on his line of descent. There later appeared other ranks besides that of king, with their own territorial provinces: a general, a governor, and an admiral, whose titles were clearly influenced by British nomenclature. Those who held these positions were chosen among those who had risen to leadership through their successes in trade and pillage, and they also established lines of descent. In 1757 there existed three Indian groups in the Mosquitia (Olien 1983): (1) the original Indians, between the Pearl Lagoon area and Bragman's, who obeyed the governor, (2) a group of primarily Sambos, from Bragman's to Little Black River in the north, whose chief was called the king; and (3) a mixed group of Indians and Sambos to the west of Little Black River, whose leader was the general. There later appeared a fourth authority, the admiral, in the Pearl Lagoon area. The chiefs' functions were hereditary; they had more or less the same power, and the king was a kind of first among equals but with privileged access to the British. Tensions and conflicts arose among these Indian leaders, which the Spanish tried to exploit. In the 1780s the Spanish gained access to Admiral Alparis and attempted to get him to confront Miskito King George II; but the king's power was consolidated, thanks to the support of the British. Later on, the Spanish managed to win Governor Colville Briton to their side; he accepted the Catholic faith, swore fealty to the Spanish crown, and adopted the name of Carlos de Castilla but was defeated in his confrontation with Admiral Alparis, once again allied with the king. Completely isolated and abandoned by almost all his people, the governor was killed in Tuapi in 1790. When, in the following year, Alparis broke his alliance with the king, he suffered the same fate as Briton/Castilla. The tragic fate of Don Carlos symbolizes the failure of Spanish attempts to supplant the British on the Atlantic Coast. The Miskito king remained unmoveable in his loyalty to the British crown, although the departure of the British for Belize in 1787 substantially reduced the internal importance of his post. It seems clear that the king's loyalty to Great Britain was swayed by British smugglers who argued, possibly with good reason, that the Spanish had little to trade with the Indians (Floyd 1967:181). These conflicts seem frequently to have developed along ethnic lines, particularly between the Sambos, living in the area of the Cape and Sandy Bay and led by the king, and the "pure Indians" (Tawiras, Ulwas, Twahkas, and others) living farther to the south and west, corresponding to the areas held by the governor and the admiral. The conflicts grew into all-out wars at the end of the eighteenth century. In about 1806, a British traveler declared that as a result of the confrontations the Sambos had almost exterminated the "pure Indians," although this account seems slightly exaggerated (von Oertzen 1986).

20

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

In the course of time, the differentiation between the Miskito leaders and their followers came to be manifested in economic terms. Possibly the most notorious case was that of General Lowry Robinson, during the first half of the nineteenth century. Robinson became a rich cattle raiser, with 5,000 head of cattle on the Black River (now the Tinto River, in what is presently Honduras). On several occasions he defied the authority of King George Frederick (1816-1824) and, in 1843, signed an agreement with the government of Honduras by which he recognized Honduran sovereignty over his territory.4 In the mid-1700s the settlement on the Black River began to prosper and grow as a center of contraband trade with Spanish settlements. A large part of this commerce was controlled by William Pitt, the richest British resident. In the south, another powerful resident, Henry Corrin, of Bluefields, controlled the Indian slave trade and was also involved in trade with the Spanish. In addition, the development of sugarcane plantations increased the importation of slaves from Africa and caused a greater concentration of capital than had the tobacco plantations that had preceded them. In 1739 Captain Robert Hodgson was sent to the Black River (now in Honduran territory) as the first superintendent of the Mosquito Coast, with instructions to cement relations with the Miskitos and Sambos of the area. Hodgson combined political success with personal success in his mission. As for the first, it is sufficient to say that between 1743 and 1786 eight attacks on Spanish settlements were carried out by the Miskitos, on their own or together with British troops, and 400 Miskitos participated in the British expedition of 1780 to the San Juan River. In addition, contraband trade with Spanish settlements expanded throughout Hodgson's administration. As for his personal success, the young officer married the daughter of William Pitt, the largest British planter and merchant and possibly the real local power behind the formal authorities. In 1787, by virtue of the Convention of London between Great Britain and Spain, the British evacuated the Mosquito Coast and went to Belize, where they received lumbering rights. At this time 2,214 people left the Coast, of whom 537 were free and the rest slaves. It is estimated that of these slaves, 1,200 belonged to the 40 richest colonists. But many blacks refused to go with the British. Together with their compatriots on Providence, San Andrés, and Com Island, they formed new communities in Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, and, farther north, on the Black River. With the arrival of freed slaves from other areas, the populations of these communities increased rapidly. A small group of Britons chose to stay on the Coast, accepting Spanish authority. Among these was Robert Hodgson, Jr., who was Superintendent on the Black River between 1768 and 1776. He was allowed to remain upon swearing loyalty to Spain, and became the Spanish crown's main agent on

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

21

the Coast. His mission was to use the prestige he had earlier acquired among the Miskitos as British superintendent in order to create sympathy for Spain. However, he was not successful in this and later was forced to abandon the Coast in order to save his life. The British for their part, conserved their ties with the Miskito king on the Cape and with the Miskito governor farther south, in the Tuapi Lagoon area, but the departure of most of the British for Belize decreased the intensity of institutional relations with them, and this in turn affected the Miskito monarchy, diminishing the importance of the king with respect to other Indian chiefs. Hodgson came to be one of the richest men in the Mosquitia, owner of more than 200 slaves; according to Salvatierra (1958:10), two-thirds of the Bluefields area, where he lived, was his property, and he shipped the products of his plantations in two large brigs, also belonging to him, to the British port of Bristol. When Hodgson fled to San Andrés in 1790 after the failure of his attempts to mediate between the Miskitos and the Spanish (Pérez Valle 1978:58-60), many of his slaves remained on the Coast. The departure of the British did not improve Spain's chances to gain effective control over the Mosquitia. The attempts at colonization with people brought over from the Peninsula or from other Spanish colonies failed because of the colonists' lack of experience and material support. Spain could not give to its relations with the Miskitos the commercial foundation and the mutual support that had provided the basis for the good relations between the Indians and the British. Besides, the merchants and woodcutters were opposed to Spain for economic and commercial reasons. In consequence, Spanish attempts at control were centered on San Juan del Norte, Cape Gracias a Dios, and the Black River. In the Black River area the Spanish managed to establish a brief alliance with the Garifunas, whom the British had just deported to Roatán. Garífuna combatants joined the Spanish troops who attacked the British settlement on the Black River in 1799 and fought against the Miskitos allied with the British. However, by 1802 the Garifunas who had settled in the Trujillo region close to the Black River began to travel to Belize to hunt, fish, and cut wood for the British colonists just as their Miskito neighbors had been accustomed to doing (González 1983). In spite of the departure of most of the British residents, Jamaican merchants remained involved in contraband on the Coast, and during the first decades of the nineteenth century British woodcutters from Belize joined with them. 5 Renewed British involvement on the Mosquito Coast at the beginning of the nineteenth century, particularly in the Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon area, was a result of the expansion of British residents' commercial interests: both the traditional mahogany trade and the contraband trade with the settlements of the Pacific and central regions of Nicaragua.

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The Mosquito Kingdom went into a decline with the departure of the British. The Miskitos' relations with British authorities slackened, and their main contacts began to be a small number of Jamaican merchants. Trade became the most important form of communication between the Indians and British subjects in the area (Zavala 1804). Some ties with San Andrés and Com Island were maintained. In 1804, however, a British officer traveled to Caratasca Lagoon on behalf of the Belize Assembly carrying gifts to King George and General Lowry Robinson. Until that time, gifts to the king and other Indian authorities had been rather a private matter between merchants and local British authorities, subject to the ups and downs of events. For the Indian chiefs, gifts were the equivalent of the tribute they received from their own subjects: material tokens of recognition of their authority by their British allies. For the British, such gifts were a way of keeping up an alliance that had been extremely profitable to them. From 1804 on, gifts to Miskito chiefs became an established custom, to the point that in 1830 a delegation from the king arrived in Belize to complain that for some years he had received no gifts. In 1838 the British crown assumed these expenses, which up to that time had been paid by the residents of Belize. Naylor (1960) has pointed out that for a number of reasons (the growth of the Belizean mahogany trade after 1800, the scarcity of saleable mahogany within the limits of the settlement, and the change in the Board of Trade's policy in favor of free trade after 1836) Belizean woodcutters were forced to look for richer and more accessible locations in other places. To compete with the regions that had previously suffered from the preferential treatment given to mahogany coming into the British market from Belize by protectionist policies, now abolished, they moved first into the Aguán River area on the northern coast of Honduras and later went farther south. According to Naylor, the Belizean lumber companies revived the institution of the Miskito king, which had fallen into decline after the conflicts of the late eighteenth century, in order to validate the expansion of their activities into the Aguán area with permits and titles granted by a legitimate authority—just as had been the practice of British traders and woodcutters of the preceding century. They were doubtless successful, judging by the numerous large concessions granted by George Frederick (1816-1824) and by his successor Robert Charles Frederick (1824-1842).6 At the same time, the renewed interest in the Mosquito Kingdom seems to have been the result of the need to secure San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, as a means of access to Lake Nicaragua and to neighboring towns, with which an active contraband trade was being developed. The independence of Central America from Spain in 1821 created a kind of vacuum that Jamaican, Belizean, and British traders wanted to fill. With independence, Spain was out of the game, and the Central American Federation lacked an

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

23

effective institutional presence in the area. The dismemberment of the Federation and the emergence of the Nicaraguan Republic in 1838 did not immediately alter the situation. The revival of the Indian monarchy represented for British commercial interests the possibility of obtaining a certain legitimacy for their intentions of gaining control over a strategic port and of expanding inland. In August 1841 British Superintendent Alexander MacDonald enforced the abolition of slavery on the Mosquito Coast on behalf of the British crown. On Corn Island, where since the end of the eighteenth century a certain number of cotton plantations had been exporting their product to Jamaica, abolition eliminated the labor force for this crop, which soon disappeared from the island. The freed slaves became independent producers, especially of coconuts—an activity that would predominate on the island until the mid-twentieth century. After declaring the abolition of slavery, Superintendent MacDonald continued on south and, accompanied by King Robert Charles Frederick and supported by a British frigate, seized San Juan del Norte and imprisoned the Nicaraguan commander. In the face of Nicaraguan protests, the British authorities answered that the city did not belong to Nicaraguan territory but to the Mosquitia. Soon afterward, however, Nicaragua regained its positions. In 1842 King Robert Charles Frederick died, leaving three minor children. In his will, the king established a regency of British citizens living in Belize with economic interests in the Coast, to be presided over by Superintendent MacDonald. Between 1837 and 1841, Robert Charles Frederick had conferred a great number of property titles, often conflicting with one another, for wide extensions of land and forests. The large concessionaries, among them the Shepherd brothers, tried to influence the princes. Prince George Augustus Frederick was in the charge of Mrs. Mary Sheperd in Bluefields, but in 1842 another large concessionary, Mr. Bell, took charge of the official concessions register and of the prince himself. The British crown would eventually invalidate all these concessions, but the incidents demonstrate the passion with which merchants, planters, businessmen, and speculators manipulated the institutions of the Mosquitia. In 1844 Patrick Walker, the British consul and former secretary to Superindent MacDonald, was installed in Bluefields. Walker's designation may be inteipreted as the combined result of many different considerations, mainly British government support for the revival of the monarchy in the Mosquitia and, directly related to that, official validation of British subjects' commercial interests in the area. In addition was the decision to put an end to the legal confusion surrounding the land concessions granted by the two preceding kings and possibly also to find an acceptable way out of the impasse of Robert Charles Frederick's succession. At the same time,

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A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

Walker's presence would limit the political powers of the merchants and woodcutters forming the regency council, which had taken charge of local affairs until the coming of age of the king's successor, the identity of whom was not entirely clear. Finally, the designation of the consul may have possibly also been an attempt by Great Britain to maintain its predominance in the area and give continuity to the activities begun by MacDonald a few years before in the face of the growing advances in the area by the United States, which had announced the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. The consul formally established a British protectorate over the Mosquitia, making explicit Great Britain interest in consolidating its position in the region. Walker also carried out important reforms in the political and social organization of the Coast—and particularly of Bluefields—and consolidated his own authority relative to the superintendent in Belize. In fact, as soon as Walker arrived in Bluefields, he began a fierce competition with Superintendent MacDonald for political control of the kingdom, in which the consul came out on top. In May 1845 King George Augustus Frederick, Walker's candidate, was crowned instead of MacDonald's choice (William Clarence, the youngest prince). The king, a thirteen-year-old boy, went to live in Walker's house, and in order to better confront MacDonald, Walker made an alliance with Bell and the magistrature, which at that point was very receptive to the consul's initiatives. Bluefields was declared the official capital of the Mosquito Kingdom, thus making it possible to keep the young king away from the superintendent and, at the same time, moving the capital closer to San Juan del Norte. In accord with instructions from the British crown, on October 8 of the same year the Council of State in Bluefields declared null and void all property titles granted by Robert Charles Frederick before October 8, 1841, as the latter had not been in his right mind and as the beneficiaries were interested not in colonizing but in speculating. A few years before some colonization projects had begun in the Bluefields area with Prussian subjects, but these failed. 7 However, an event tangentially related to these frustrated attempts was to become crucial in the later history of the people of the Atlantic Coast: the arrival of the first mission of the Moravian Church in 1847, at the request of the British consul.8 At Walker's behest several measures were adopted to discipline the labor force and create more favorable conditions for the development of economic activity. There was an attempt to control the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages and to regulate labor relations in a small way; for the first time a fiscal budget was estimated on the basis of export income and import expenses. The Mosquitia was given a flag, and the name "Mosquitia" was made official for the region. The strengthening of the most visible symbols of the Mosquito Kingdom—the creation of a flag, renovations in institutions, consolidation

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

25

of the king relative to other traditional leaders—went hand in hand with a growing separation of the monarchy from the Indian villages. Starting in the 1840s, in fact, the king became a docile tool in the hands of the British consul, the capital of the kingdom was established in an area which had nothing to do with the original territory of the Miskito people, and the Creole population increased their social and economic predominance on the Coast and consolidated their position as the preferred intermediaries in relations with Great Britain and, later, with the United States. The development of new and more complex political institutions of a primarily urban nature, the demand for certain occupational and technical skills (for example, knowledge of English and basic arithmetic), which could be found only in Bluefields, created the conditions for the political and social rise of the Creoles and undermined the position of the Indians. THE ADVANCE OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE NICARAGUAN STATE

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 increased the importance of the Central American isthmus as a region for interoceanic travel. U.S. discontent over British influence in the area grew, and from this time forth political relations between the two countries would openly center on the issue of transisthmic trade. In June 1847 Great Britain officially announced that the boundaries of the Mosquitia—over which it had just renewed its protectorate—extended from Cape Honduras in the north to San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, in the south. This irritated the United States as much as it did Nicaragua, but U.S. reactions did not intimidate the British. On January 1, 1848, imitating his former superior MacDonald, Patrick Walker took over San Juan del Norte in the name of the Mosquito king under the protection of a British battleship. However, he was not as fortunate as his predecessor: the operation was hardly over when he fell overboard and drowned. The importance of San Juan del Norte was directly tied to British trade— legal and illegal—with inland Nicaragua and to the town's strategic position on the transisthmic route. San Juan del Norte could never compete with the route via Panama, which had a better infrastructure. In the twenty-two years of existence of the San Juan del Norte route (1848-1869), some 125,000 people passed through the port from New York to San Francisco and back, while something more than 606,000 people did so via Panama. At any rate, the impact of that number of people, and of travel-related activities—such as infrastructure, local trade, lodging—on the economy of the southern Mosquitia was enormous, and explains the interest Britain and the United States, as well as Nicaragua, took in the city. However, the boom was shortlived; when the transisthmic railroad across Panama was inaugurated, the route through Nicaragua lost its attractiveness and finally closed in 1868

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when the construction of the U.S. transcontinental railroad was completed (Lanuza 1983:44). The United States viewed British occupation of San Juan del Norte as an affront to the Monroe Doctrine but appealed to diplomacy and not direct action. The tensions and conflicts between the United States and Great Britain for control of the region ended with the signing of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty in 1850. The treaty referred to the "Mosquito Shore" as a political entity independent of Nicaragua and established that neither the United States nor Great Britain were to exercise their influence over the governments of "Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Shore or any other in Central America" for the construction of an interoceanic canal or equivalent means of communication, nor should they build military constructions in order to gain such control, nor in any other way attempt directly or in alliance with other governments to obtain control over the interoceanic route or to exercise any kind of domination over any point in the region. As Great Britain was still, in practice, the main foreign power in the region at this time, the treaty is generally interpreted as a first diplomatic advance by the United States in Central America. In 1852 the Webster-Crampton agreement between the United States and Great Britain was signed. The accord defined the Nicaraguan border with Costa Rica as the southern edge of the Great Lake of Nicaragua. At the same, it established that "the Miskito Indians can reserve for themselves the territory which at other times they have claimed or occupied on the Eastern Coast of Central America." The southern boundary of this area was set at the Rama River, and the northern boundary was the Segovia, or Coco, River—in other words, no longer the Black, or Tinto, River in the north. The rest of the territory formerly occupied by the Indians would come under the jurisdiction of Nicaragua, including the city of Greytown or San Juan del Norte (Article 1). The agreement recognized that Nicaragua and the "Mosquito Indians" could sign a treaty by which the Indians "can be definitively incorporated and united with the State of Nicaragua, it being stipulated that in this case the Mosquito Indians will enjoy the same rights and will be subject to the same duties as the other citizens of the aforenamed State of Nicaragua" (Article 2). The city of San Juan del Norte (Greytown) would come under the jurisdiction of Nicaragua, but only as a free port for merchandise in transit across the isthmus (id.). The accord mentioned for the first time the Mosquito reserve as a legal entity and considerably reduced the territory that would remain under the authority of the Indians (and Creoles). But the Nicaraguan government considered these to be internal issues and, therefore, its exclusive province. As a result, the Nicaraguan Congress did not accept the Crampton-Webster accord and protested "solemnly against all foreign interventions in the affairs of the government" (Gaceta de Nicaragua, September 11,1852).

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27

This accord was the first of two convergent diplomatic arrangements between the United States and Great Britain on this issue. In 1856 they signed the Dallas-Clarendon Treaty (named for the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom and the British secretary for foreign affairs, respectively), in which they agreed to withdraw the British protectorate from the Mosquitia, and defined the boundaries of a Mosquito reserve, under Nicaraguan sovereignty but with self-government for the Indians. Greytown was declared a free port, the treaty between Great Britain and Honduras giving the Bay Islands status as a free state under Honduran sovereignty was confirmed, and the boundaries of Belize were defined. Costa Rica was recognized as having the right to use the port of Greytown and the San Juan River, and AngloU.S. arbitration for Costa Rican boundary disputes with Nicaragua was established. The treaty was not ratified, but many of its clauses anticipated, like those of the Crampton-Webster Treaty, the 1860 Treaty of Managua between Great Britain and Nicaragua: British renunciation of the protectorate and a kind of semiautonomy for the Bay Islands, which resembles the system that would be adopted for the Mosquito Reserve, among others. At the same time that the United States and Great Britain were trying to arrive at an agreement, the government of Nicaragua took some steps on its own account designed to assert its claims to sovereignty over the Coast. When British Consul Frederick Chatfield reported on the coronation of George Augustus Frederick in Belize in 1845, Nicaragua sent a diplomatic note of protest. In 1847 the Nicaraguan government sent a mission to convince Princess Agnes Ana Frederick, the older sister of King George Augustus, to repudiate British claims to San Juan del Norte. The princess accepted and signed an "agreement of friendship and alliance and mutual protection" with the Nicaraguan delegation, but, as we have already seen, this agreement neither affected British plans nor stopped the occupation of the port city several months later.9 In 1849 Nicaragua sent a delegation to London to make a definitive settlement of the Mosquitia question, but it failed. Nicaragua would have better luck later on, as the result of direct negotiations with the British government leading to the signing of the Treaty of Managua on January 28, 1860. This treaty ended the British protectorate over the Coast and assigned to "the Mosquito Indians within the territory of the Republic of Nicaragua a district . . . which will remain under the sovereignty of the Republic of Nicaragua" (Article 2). The district had as boundaries the Rama River in the south and the Hueso River in the north, leaving out the Cape Gracias a Dios area, the original territory of the Miskito people. Within this district the "Mosquito Indians" would enjoy the "right to govern themselves and to govern all other persons residing in said District, according to their own customs, and in conformance with the regulations which from time to time may be adopted by them which are not

28

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incompatible with the sovereign rights of the Republic of Nicaragua" (Article 3). However, the Miskitos could "at any future time" decide "their absolute reincorporation into the Republic of Nicaragua," at such a time coming "to be governed by the general laws and regulations of the Republic instead of by their own customs and regulations" (Article 4). At the same time, Nicaragua agreed to pay 5,000 pesos annually for ten years in order to "promote the social betterment of the Mosquito Indians" and "provide for the maintenance of the authorities who are established" in the district (Article 5). And given that the Costeños—Indians and Creoles—had had no part in the treaty, "His British Majesty agrees to use his good offices with the Chief of the Mosquito Indians, so that they will accept the stipulations contained in this Convention" (Article 6). Finally, the treaty declared San Juan del Norte/Greytown a free port under the sovereignty of Nicaragua, and took on the question of the ownership of the lands that were now outside the territory of the district and that had been subject to cessions and transfers. The 1860 treaty included provisions that had figured in previous accords signed between the United States and Great Britain. It left out the opinion of those directly involved, but it is clear that Great Britain had no problem in carrying out what it agreed to do in Article 6. Nicaragua obtained recognition of its sovereignty over the region, the delimitation of which left out the area of Cape Gracias a Dios, thus tacitly recognizing the Nicaraguan state's direct authority over a territory traditionally identified with the historical development of the Miskito people—in fact, the original seat of the Mosquito Kingdom. The motives for this exclusion are not clear, and the historians who have written about this treaty have not dealt with this point. It may be pointed out, however, that in spite of repeated references to the "Mosquito Indians" in the treaty, the name seems to have a geographic rather than an ethnic reference. In fact, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Creoles were the majority in the Bluefields-Corn Island area and represented a high percentage of the population of the southern part of the Pearl Lagoon basin. The government of the kingdom was clearly in the hands of the Creoles, and the region's economy mainly passed through Creole commercial establishments: small banana plantations, trade, and service activities. The boom of San Juan del Norte and of the mahogany industry reinforced the social and economic weight of the Creoles, who rapidly linked themselves to the most dynamic economic and commercial enterprises. In a word, the Creoles were the dominant social group in the Mosquitia. The territory defined by the Treaty of Managua was not exclusively Creole, but all Creoles, their economic base, and the geographical and ecological site of their ethnic identity were included in this territory, including the area most closely

A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

29

tied to their historical origin as a distinct ethnic group. It is clear that there were also important Miskito (and Sumu) groups living there, but the Indians living in the area that was the traditional seat of the Miskito people were left out of the treaty, without autonomy rights and subject to the direct and unmediated authority of the Nicaraguan state. The 1860 treaty accelerated the social differentiation of the Costeflo population and the social decline of the Indians. In 1862 George Augustus Frederick, chief of the reserve, died. Nicaragua decided to suspend payments to his successor, alleging that the latter did not represent Miskito interests. According to Nicaragua, the new chief had been elected by the Creoles ("Jamaicans" and "Negros") without the recognition of the government of Nicaragua. Supported by Great Britain, the government of the reserve took the issue to international arbitration. In 1881, the arbitration of the emperor of Austria determined that the government of Nicaragua should make the required payments and further established that the Nicaraguan sovereignty recognized in the 1860 treaty "is not full and unlimited with respect to the territory assigned to the Mosquito Indians . . . but rather limited by the self-government recognized for the Mosquito Indians in Article III of the aforementioned Treaty" (Article 1 of the imperial arbitration). The arbitration also established that Nicaragua could not grant concessions to exploit "the natural products of the territory assigned to the Mosquito Indians," a right that corresponded to the "Government of the Mosquitia" (Article 5); nor was it empowered to regulate the commerce of the Miskito Indians, nor to charge duties on imported merchandise in the territory reserved to the Miskito Indians (Article 6). The Nicaraguan government's desire to exercise its authority in specific aspects of the economic activity of the Coast was thus limited by the emperor's decision. At the same time that diplomatic relations between Nicaragua and the Mosquito Reserve were becoming tenser, the Atlantic Coast economy went through some important transformations. Between 1860 and 1880, mahogany, gold, rubber, and bananas became the main items of production. In 1891 the reserve exported 1,155,000 bunches of bananas; the gold deposits produced 5,000 ounces of gold; and the rubber plantations exported 600,000 pounds of rubber. In 1894 investments in the banana industry were almost $3.75 million (Teplitz 1974:358). The development of banana plantations on the Escondido River opened the way to rapid U.S. economic penetration— which was not to be limited to this activity. The plantations needed additional labor; this demand was supplied in great measure by black workers from the southern United States and from Jamaica. In the 1880s, 90-95 percent of trade in the area was controlled by U.S. citizens (Laird 1972). In the 1890s, U.S. investments in the Bluefields area were almost $1.5 million, or around 90 percent of the foreign investment in the city. U.S. citizens also

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controlled the larger part of international trade in the city, having replaced the British as the economically dominant foreigners. 10 But the economic boom also included some groups of Nicaraguans. In the late 1880s capitalists from Granada and Managua began to arrive in Bluefields looking for land on which to plant bananas. A few years earlier, the town of Rama had been founded at the head of the Escondido River as part of the general movement of Nicaraguan interests and population toward the Atlantic. The Creoles (the "mixed population," in the legal language of the period) benefited from this boom. They became increasingly urbanized; Creole English replaced Miskito as the lingua franca of the Coast. Having previously achieved political control of the court and of the king himself, they had little difficulty in maintaining and even consolidating their dominance in the legal and political context of the reserve. The fact that they were primarily city dwellers made it easier for them to enter into cash transactions and to have access to property qualifications. According to Laird (1972), in 1890 the government of the Mosquito Reserve was in the hands of Jamaican blacks; this was also the impression of contemporary British observers: "They [the Miskitos] simply furnish a name under which foreigners set up a government of their own to the usages of civilized nations, and by means of which they carry on a prosperous business" (Teplitz 1974:350). Indian leaders maintained their authority on the lower levels of Costeflo society and particularly in the immense rural areas: villages, forests, lagoons. The centralization of Creole dominance in Bluefields allowed for the maintenance of Indian customs and institutions. However, when the political and economic forces that had maintained Miskito preeminence disappeared, the unity of the group was weakened. With the boom of new extractive activities, the Indians began to leave their villages; they accepted contracts as salaried workers and descended in the Coast hierarchy. Their growing dependence on wages income opened the way to a flow of money and manufactured goods into Indian villages and to the progressive introduction of new necessities of consumption as well as to a certain degree of monetarization in economic relationships. THE GOVERNMENT OF THE MOSQUITO RESERVE The image of the government of the Mosquito Reserve prevailing in Nicaraguan historiography is that of a kind of fiction, docile to the dictates of foreign economic and political interests. This image directly reflects the thinking and interpretation of the Zelaya government, which prepared the way and justified the military operation of the Reincorporation. However, a less passionate and partial analysis gives us a much less simplistic view. In 1861 a meeting of fifty-one local chiefs (wihta, in Miskito; headmen, in English) approved a Municipal Constitution for the government of the

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reserve, proposed by the British consul. This constitution established a bicameral legislature, composed of a General Council and an Executive Council. The General Council was made up of the chief of the reserve and forty-three representatives elected by local chiefs. Its function was to make most laws and name most officials. It elected the members of the Executive Council, which dealt with fiscal and judicial issues (see Mosquito Reservation 1884). The judicial branch included a Supreme Court and a Magistrates Court for civil and criminal cases, which also administered the police. A special court was in charge of trade arbitration, and a jury court dealt with issues involving government officials and embezzlement. The municipal laws and the administration of justice were basically modeled on the British system. The right of habeas corpus was established (thirty-two years before it was instituted in the rest of Nicaragua by the 1893 constitution). Search warrants were required, and the accused was guaranteed the right to a defense. In addition to the Anglo-Saxon judicial inheritance, there were AfroIndian dispositions for the protection of the villages. For example, a law dated October 1863 created a land commission to control the use and assignation of land and forests. The commission was authorized to award and rent public lands but not to sell them. The law stipulated that rents and profits from the sale of the produce of the land should be used in the interests of the village (Mosquito Reservation 1884:21-23). The legislation passed by the General Council covered a wide range of issues: control of liquor sales; prohibitions on the opening of shops, playing of cards, and unloading of boats on Sundays; boats were prohibited from going upriver to unload liquor. It also legislated the entry and exit of foreigners, as well as quarantines. In 1861 the General Council declared that the ports of the Mosquito Reserve were free, and in 1890 the free zones were broadened to include Bluefields. This move antagonized Nicaraguan fiscal interests, but in a sense it reflected both British and U.S. commercial interests and traditional African and Indian practices. The government of the reserve also printed its own money, at a time when Nicaragua still lacked a national currency, and currencies from several different countries were in circulation. In 1875 a law established obligatory primary education for all children of school age. The government of the reserve also passed its own extradition law, decreed taxes on goods imported from Nicaragua, refused to recognize navigation permits for riverboats issued by Nicaragua, and denied Nicaragua's right to send troops to Bluefields—a decision that would act to detonate the military occupation of 1894. Much of this legislative activity was favorable to the prevailing economic interests, a point that has been emphasized by Laird (1972). But other authors, such as Teplitz, point out cases in which, on the contrary, the

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A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY

government of the reserve acted counter to foreign interests. For example, many Creoles and Indians frequently fell behind in the payment of their debts to U.S. and European merchants and businessmen. In 1883 a reserve law canceled all debts not paid by March 1884 and abolished the debtors' prison, thirty years before it was abolished in Nicaragua. Debtors were put on the government payroll at fifty cents a day; half of this wage went to their creditors until the debt was paid. The maximum interest rate was fixed at 6 percent annually, and basic household goods were declared not seizable. The foreigners criticized this as "a fiasco" because judgments against the natives were not followed by financial execution; they complained that debtors could act freely, whereas creditors were left without protection (Teplitz 1974:352).» By integrating the village chiefs and naming them as officials of the new institutions, the government mixed traditional and modem elements. This reduced the distance between modem institutions, whose province was the Creole-dominated urban Bluefields area, and the rural sphere of the Indian villages. The wihta of the coastal towns were set up as regular government authorities; many of them became arbiters for local disputes (rural judges in accordance with the 1863 civil and penal laws of the reserve). But the wihta were marginal figures on the councils established in Bluefields, where Creole predominance was decisive. In the convention of fifty-one chiefs that approved the 1861 Constitution, thirty-three delegates came from Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, and Com Island; these same thirty-three delegates became three-quarters of the General Council and two-thirds of the Executive Council. In addition, the debates in these bodies were carried out in English, which many Indian delegates from the north did not know or could not speak fluently. This weak political representation of Indians contrasts with their demographic predominance. At the beginning of the 1860s, the indigenous population of the Atlantic Coast was estimated at 10,000-15,000, of which the Miskitos numbered nearly half (Bell 1862:250). By that time, the entire population of Bluefields was, it was estimated, no more than 1,000 (Pérez Valle 1978:121, 130); including Com Island and Pearl Lagoon, total Creole population could hardly have exceeded 2,000. This situation may explain in part the Indian villages' passivity in the face of the Reincoiporation in 1894. Because it represented economically and politically subordinate groups, the removal of the government of the reserve did not confront strong interests such as those of the Creoles of Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, and Com Island. On the other hand, there were conflicts between the laws of the Miskito Reserve and traditional village norms (and, thus, the authority of the wihta). For example, when the government of the reserve made school attendance obligatory in 1875, the wihta, who were responsible for carrying out the law, completely paralyzed the system after a

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33

short while (Rossbach 1986: 95), apparently as a reaction to the use of English, and not Miskito, in classrooms. THE MORAVIAN CHURCH In 1847 two Moravian missionaries arrived from Jamaica on an exploratory trip in response to a request from Patrick Walker, the British consul. This visit marked the beginning of the Moravian presence on the Atlantic Coast, a presence of an intensity and breadth unequalled by other institutions of any kind. In the course of less than two generations, the Moravian Church became the main form of expression of the ethnic identity of the Coast's people, both Indians and Creoles. The Moravian mission was formally established in 1849 in Bluefields. Until 1855, it worked primarily among the Creoles of the city, and only after that year did it begin to work with Indians and in rural areas. It gave priority to education and, especially in the beginning, to literacy, in order to make the Bible accessible. The schools founded by the church were practically the only educational institutions in most Indian villages until well into the twentieth century. But even where there later were schools set up by the Nicaraguan government, the Moravian Church's schools always had higher prestige. Missionary work with the Indians led the church first to learn the Miskito language, later to use it systematically, and finally to make church work a vital factor in the development and maintenance of the language. The Bible, psalms, and hymns were translated into Miskito; dictionaries and grammars were written in order to teach the language. In spite of the church's declared noninvolvement in political issues, Moravian missionaries participated from early on in governmental bodies— first, in the Mosquito Kingdom and, later, in the Mosquito Reserve. Pastor Pfeiffer, one of the first three missionaries to arrive on the Coast in 1849, was quickly incorporated into the Council of State created by the British consul. The Moravian Superintendent Reurig, who arrived in 1859, was appointed adviser to the king. Four out of the eight missionaries on the Coast were called to form part of the first General Council created by the Municipal Constitution of 1861; from that time on the church maintained its representation intact. In addition, one of the missionaries (Feuring) was named the financial administrator of the government of the reserve, and, until 1894, all the superintendents who followed him held the same office. As Rossbach (1986: 77) comments, this meant that all the income and outlays of the public exchequer passed through the office of the superintendent of the Moravian Church. This involvement by missionaries and church authorities in the political institutions of the Bluefields government went hand in hand with similar movements to involve the most prominent government officials in the affairs

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of the congregation, whether or not they belonged to the mission. Thus, J. W. Cuthbert, who was the government's attorney general, and C. Patterson, who in 1861 was named vice president of the reserve, soon belonged to the select group of notables of the congregation. In the course of only a few years the main political leaders of the Mosquito Reserve became, in most cases, church members or at least felt themselves to be spiritually linked to it (Rossbach, 1986:79). The missionaries entered into positions in the government, and they put government officials into the most prestigious positions in the mission. Moravian missionaries became the exclusive translators for the government of the reserve. The sessions of the General Council were conducted in English, which they translated into Miskito for the Indian delegates. This doubtless helped to increase the ascendance of the missionaries over the Indians. The missionaries were the "objective administrators of the Indian language" (Rossbach, 1986:79) thanks to their school activities; their production of dictionaries, grammars, and Bible translations; and their interpretive functions in legislative debates. The missionaries preached the necessity of abandoning "laziness" and adopting good work habits; they emphasized the virtues of agriculture, against the traditional inclination of the Costeños—above all, the Indians— for hunting and fishing, which the missionaries considered to be rather uncivilized activities. A puritanical sexual morality, abstinence from alcoholic beverages, moderation in daily life, monogamy, sober dress, family life, and hard work became the central themes of Moravian pastoral woik; these made a deep impression on the Indian villagers. The Protestant labor ethic became the central theme of religious belief, reinforcing the coincidence of the religious image of the good Christian with the capitalist paradigm of the good worker. The missionaries became so important in the Indian villages that they became the true secular authority; the Moravian ethic attained the status of a legal imperative. In this sense, one of the most remarkable aspects of Moravian activity on the Atlantic Coast is the great importance the missionaries and their native assistants ("helpers")—and later on, the lay pastors—acquired in the secular affairs of the villages. The religious authorities rapidly became the administrative and political authorities of the villages.12 On some occasions, however, the institution of native helpers introduced contradictions into the missions. The helpers opened the way into the villages for the missionaries and were an extremely important contact for the first establishment of the mission and its later organization and operation, especially when the mission covered several villages. But, at the same time, many of these helpers still believed in their traditional religion and kept on practicing it, sometimes in secret, at other times more openly, combined with and influenced by Christian symbolism. The tensions arising from this

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situation occasionally had tragic consequences, as in the case of Pastor Karl Bregenzer in Musawas.13 The traditionally widely dispersed villages began to regroup around the missions; the missionaries preached the advantages of a sedentary life and adopted certain measures designed to achieve it. They sponsored the relocation of people living in small villages to larger ones, in order to facilitate the missionaries' work and to maintain the Indians under a strict supervision that would prevent them from falling back into vice and sin. They also favored cattle raising to encourage the sedentarization of the people, as a cow is more difficult to transport in a canoe than a few chickens or even pigs. 14 The changes in people's habits also included consumption, reinforcing what was already a long-term tendency in the relationship between Coast Indians and Europeans. In May 1855 the church established several shops for the sale of consumer items ("mission stores"); at the end of the nineteenth century there were six stores in a total of fourteen mission stations, the main ones being in Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, Tuapi, and Wounta-Haulover. They offered merchandise imported from Great Britain, Germany, and, later, the United States. The explicit goal of these stores was to contribute to the financing of the mission, but they quickly gained commercial fame, becoming a commercial department. In 1914, when Nicaragua entered the war against Germany, this department, which up to this time had been operating under the name German House, changed its name to Commercial House, doubtless to avoid problems (Pérez Valle 1978:313). When the department was definitively closed down in June 1922, after sixty-eight years in operation, it was possibly one of the oldest commercial establishments on the Coast. 15 The Moravian Church adopted an anti-Nicaraguan position. It is possible that the issue had a religious content rather than a political one, in the sense that the Nicaraguan state had a clearly Catholic and even Jesuit bent. 16 But the political repercussions of this religious confrontation are obvious. It is clear that the Moravian Church had no desire to have the reserve's (or, previously, the kingdom's) relative autonomy come to an end, which would pave the way for full sovereignty by a state that professed a faith traditionally antagonistic to that of the Moravians. The fear that the Nicaraguan government would interfere with their educative and pastoral work was understandable. In turn, this position on the part of the church reinforced the aspirations of Costeños for autonomy, adding a spiritual argument to other, more secular ones. The Moravian Church, like any church, always viewed secular political affairs from the specific perspective of its pastoral interest or mission. What, in the point of view of some currents of historical and political interpretation, has been seen as the result of the church's commitment

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to foreign political and economic interests—U.S. interests in particular— was, more than anything, the result of a decision taken with respect to a Nicaraguan state in which the church perceived an element of hostility, derived from its anticlericalism (in the case of Zelaya) and later from its firm commitment to the Catholic Church. The fears of the Moravian Church were confirmed when, in 1913, the Conservative government issued permission to the Capuchin order to take charge of evangelization on the Coast.17 The convergence of the pastoral practice of the church with the economic interests of foreign companies originated primarily in the functionality of the Moravian concept of the good Christian for the kind of labor force demanded by the enclave economy. There was an objective coincidence between the Protestant ethic and the practice of capitalism, which was strengthened by these political factors. The Moravian Church saw the growing presence of U.S. interests, merchants, officials, and companies as a guarantee that the Nicaraguan government would not dare to reincorporate the territory and eventually prohibit the Moravian mission. In addition, several aspects of Moravian doctrine coincided with some of the laws of the reserve government, which redounded to the benefit of Moravians and capitalists alike: for example, the outlawing of obeahs (shamans) and black magic, restrictions on the sale and consumption of liquor. This coincidence should not, however, be exaggerated. It is true that the emphasis on sedentarization, in order to make the missionaries' woik easier, contributed to the domestication of the labor force that the new foreign companies were beginning to demand at the time. Likewise, the insistence on the Protestant ethic was, in a way, an insistence on the virtues of the good worker. But there were also cases of conflicts between missionary doctrine and the practice of capitalism, when the appearance of new centers of economic activity encouraged the Indians to move to areas where there was no church work as yet and eventually to fall prey to the temptations of alcohol, sex, animistic cults, and forgetting the true faith. In all, the Moravian Church had an ambivalent attitude toward the foreign companies that exploited natural resources and toward the enclave economy as a whole. The church enthusiastically greeted the arrival of new investments and companies, in which it saw the solution to the serious problems of unemployment, bad habits, and low incomes for the natives. It also recognized the support that missionary work generally received from the administrators of these firms and emphasized the negative effect the closing down of some of these companies had on the living conditions of the natives.18 But the church also saw the development of these new economic activities, the migration of the men to camps far away from mission activity, and the diffusion of new forms of behavior resulting from economic expansion as threats to its missionary woik.19

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REINCORPORATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The 1880s saw the beginnings of certain capitalist transformations in the Nicaraguan economy and political system, in the context of a Conservative government. A slow but progressive mercantilization began to filter into the primitive economy of the country via international trade, particularly that related to the production and export of coffee to Europe. This would introduce what was, at first, a timid sort of socioeconomic and political differentiation into the dominant local groups and families. The arrival of some European investors—German, British, and Italian—helped advance the process of product diversification. Economic integration into the world market as well as different legal dispositions opened lands to coffee growing, especially at the expense of Indian communities. At the same time, there were initiatives to improve the transportation and communications infrastructure that would tie the new planting areas to the centers of political decision making and improve the integration of Nicaragua with its foreign markets. Nicaragua's interest in a settlement of the Mosquitia question thus took place in the context of the beginning of economic and institutional modernization. The political integration of this vast region undoubtedly had to do with the desire of all states to control their own territory. Although the point to which the Atlantic Coast formed part of the territory of the Nicaraguan state (or earlier that of the Spanish colony) is debatable, the fact is that the dominant groups and families of Nicaragua inherited the unsatisfied aspirations of the Spanish and insisted on the incorporation of the region. In turn, this project was based on two main elements: the interest of the merchants of Granada—who formed the nucleus of the group in power in Nicaragua in that period—in consolidating and widening their participation in trade and in the economy of the Atlantic in general, including the banana plantations; and the attraction that the customs duties of the port of Bluefields held for the exhausted finances of the new state. In spite of the signing of the Treaty of Managua in 1860, the creation of the Mosquito Reserve, with its semisovereignty, was never satisfactory to the dominant groups of Nicaragua. In his study on the area of Cape Gracias a Dios, Alegret (1985) describes several attempts by authorities in Managua to pass over the articles of the treaty and exercise acts of sovereignty in the territory of the reserve. Later, the suit decided by the arbitration of the emperor of Austria showed once again the desire of the Nicaraguan government to change an institutional situation it felt to be unsatisfactory. Moreover, only in 1887 did the Nicaraguan government send representatives to the government of the Mosquito Reserve: a commissioner and his secretary, who carried out apparently symbolic and protocol functions—such as raising the flag and dealing with Nicaraguan citizens. In 1892 Bluefields, the capital of the Mosquito Reserve, had a population of around 3,500 people, whereas Managua, the capital of

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Nicaragua, had some 30,000 inhabitants. In that year, the Liberal party came to power by means of a brief revolution that brought José Santos Zelaya into the government. Imbued with a modernizing but autocratic mentality and linked to the group supported by the coffee interests, the Zelaya regime (1893-1909) carried out a series of reforms designed to accelerate the integration of Nicaragua into the international economy and expand capitalist forms of production. 20 On February 11, 1894, by means of a small military operation, an expeditionary force of the Nicaraguan government occupied the city and port of Bluefields, removed the authorities of the Mosquito Reserve, declared the sovereignty of Nicaragua over the region, and raised the Nicaraguan flag. The immediate motive wielded by the Nicaraguan government was the state of war with Honduras and the refusal of reserve authorities to permit the temporary stationing of Nicaraguan troops on their way north. But it is clear that this move was more a matter of putting an end to a particularly irritating question for the dominant groups of the Pacific region, both Conservatives and Liberals. In fact, the military operation did not come out of the blue and had been preceded by other initiatives aimed at the same objective. Thus, before deciding in favor of an armed intervention, the Zelaya government's commissioner, Carlos Alberto Lacayo, had fruitlessly tried to bribe the government of the Mosquitia to accept its subordination to Nicaragua. Clarence, the chief of the Mosquito Reserve, declined the offer to name him general for life of the Nicaraguan army and retain his salary as chief of the reserve; the vice president of the reserve, C. Patterson, and the attorney general, J. W. Cuthbert, refused offers of pensions and other benefits. Other attempts to bribe members of the General Council, thirty-six village chiefs, and other officials also failed (Teplitz 1974:356; Rossbach and Wuenderich 1985). The arguments advanced by the Nicaraguan government to explain and legitimate its action were weak and contradictory and showed elements of racism. The government stressed the offense to national sovereignty implied by the chief of the reserve's behavior in times of war. A note from the special envoy of the Nicaraguan government to Nicaragua's ambassador in Washington, states that, "We cannot allow that, in moments of conflict for our country, the Chief of an Indian tribe should favor, even indirectly, the hostilities of the enemy and favor his plans" (April 1, 1894, in Pérez Valle 1978:175-180). An attempt was also made to justify the operation by alleging the inadmissibility of a situation in which half-savage tribes pretended to govern educated foreigners. According to the same official: It was a real insult to common sense to put under the dependence of a tribe, which has no consciousness of its rights and which lacks all notion of government, a community of foreigners, composed of men of superior ability, accustomed to living in their country protected

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from a system of speculation. [March 30, 1894, in Pérez Valle 1978:168—171]21 At the same time, there was an appeal to another type of argument, which had already been raised in the conflict over the suspension of payments in the 1860s: the usurpation of the government of the reserve, which belonged to the Indians, by a foreign oligarchy which truly made a laughingstock of the accords between Nicaragua and Great Britain . . . a group of Jamaicans . . . Jamaican government . . . the Indians neither govern nor have any influence on the Reserve. Their name has served only as a pretext to maintain in that territory the exclusive influence of foreign interests . . . extravagant customs of the Indians, accepting polygamy, . . . not having for persons and property the guarantees assured by the educated nations of the world . . . exotic laws imported by Jamaican colonists. [Report by the special envoy of the Nicaraguan government to the government ministry, April 30, 1894, in Pérez Valle 1978:183-209] Since the Treaty of Managua to the present, the Mosquito Indians, victims of the mistreatment and slavery to which a tyrannical power has subjected them, nearly exterminated, lost in the depths of the jungles, and with one or two villages still remaining, give us no reason to consider the former tribes as still alive. Time itself has made radical changes in these things, which must be honored over and above the international agreements which were contracted because of them. What existed until yesterday . . . is a black oligarchy, whose political and administrative immorality and the corruption of their origins would justify, if there were no other causes, the destitution which their members have been caused to suffer. [Carlos Alberto Lacayo, the Nicaraguan government's commissioner to the Mosquito Reserve, in Cuadra Chamorro 1944:13-14] On the one hand, the claim is that a system in which savage Indians govern educated foreigners is irrational; on the other, it is claimed that the Indians have been marginalized by a small group of Jamaican blacks of corrupt origins. The argument that the Indians had been displaced by the Creoles was not totally fanciful, as we have seen and as has been evidenced by several studies (see Laird 1972; Dozier 1985:150). This was also the opinion of U.S. government officials: "An alien administration, in other interests than those of the Indians, notoriously exists, especially at Bluefields. Nobody is deceived by calling this authority a Mosquito Indian government" (in Dozier 1985; Teplitz 1974:350). It is possible that by repeating these arguments the Nicaraguan government was attempting to concur with the view of the U.S. government.

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However, it seems that the opinion of U.S. merchants and businessmen living in the reserve was different, possibly because they saw the local government as easily influenced, whereas officials of the U.S. government were more preoccupied with the pro-British loyalties of the reserve government. In any case, the position and the explanations of the Nicaraguan government seem to be tinged by strong elements of racism, or at least of disdain for the population whose government they had just overthrown: "Bluefields is composed of two elements: blacks and smugglers: this should be sufficient to understand the atmosphere in which we live" (Rigoberto Cabezas to President Zelaya, March 16, 1894, in Pérez Valle 1978:159). The military operative established martial law, and Spanish was made the obligatory official language in all transactions and in education. Official Spanish meant, in fact, the closure of the schools to Costeño children, who with few exceptions did not speak Spanish. The Moravian Church could not immediately carry out this decree and was forced to close a large number of its schools for more than a decade. The schools connected with other religious missions also had to close their doors.22 The General Council was eliminated and replaced by an Executive Council of fifteen members, but only three of them were citizens of the Mosquitia. Mestizo civil servants sent from the Pacific were substituted for Creole civil servants; for several years the Miskitos and Creoles complained of the maltreatment to which they were subjected by the new officials. In view of the kind of opinions expressed by mestizo leaders as to the Costeños, it is not difficult to imagine the kind of treatment dispensed by low-level officials. After the intervention, on October 5, 1899, President Zelaya decreed a provisional system for the government of the Mosquitia. The Indian population of the Mosquitia would be ruled by mayors elected by their respective villages, and the central government would name a governor intendent. In order to reinforce the intervention's claims to legality and to carry out the stipulation of the Treaty of Managua that the consent of the inhabitants of the Mosquitia needed to be obtained for its incoiporation into Nicaragua to be valid, a meeting of the representatives of the populations of Bluefields and the villages was called. This meeting, known as the Mosquito Convention, decided that the Costeños would be subject to the Nicaraguan constitution and government. According to the text of the agreement, all income generated by the "Mosquito Coast" would be invested for its own benefit, and in this way the Coast would retain "economic autonomy," although this income would be collected and administered by the "fiscal employees of the Supreme Government" (Article 2). "Indians shall be exempted in peace and war from all military service" (Article 3); there would be no personal taxation of the Indians (Article 4). Suffrage was extended to men and women over the age of

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eighteen (Article 5), but only "Mosquito Indians" would be able to hold office (Article 7). The villages would pass their local regulations in assemblies presided over by the chief inspector of each, and these would be submitted to approval by the national government (Article 11). Finally, as testimony of the Costeños' gratitude to President Zelaya, who had carried out the reincorporation, it was decided to give the name, "Department of Zelaya" to the territory that had belonged to the reserve. The Convention has been dealt with acridly by historians. They mention the manipulation of the Costeño population, the lack of real freedom of opinion, discrimination against the black population, the Convention's true goal of veiling the actual situation with a mantle of legality (Teplitz 1974:377ff.; Rossbach and Wuenderich 1985). Finally, in 1905, a new treaty between Great Britain and Nicaragua put an end to the legal questions concerning thereincorporation.With this treaty, the 1860 treaty was declared abrogated, and Great Britain acknowledged Nicaragua's sovereignty over the territory of "the former Mosquitia Reserve" (Article 2). The Nicaraguan government would propose to the National Congress a law that would exempt for fifty years "all Mosquito Indians and the Creoles born before 1894" from military service and from direct taxes "on the persons, goods, possessions, animals, and means of livelihood"; it would permit the Indians to live in their villages according to their own customs; property titles for communal lands would be legalized, and where there was no title every family of four would be assigned 8 manzanas (14 acres) with 2 manzanas (3.5 acres) more for every additional person (Article 3).23 The treaty also authorized former chief of the reserve, Henry Clarence, who had left for Jamaica after the events of February-March 1894, to return to the region. The population of Bluefieldsrespondedwith different manifestations of opposition to the occupation and the elimination of the government of the reserve. On March 8, 1894, a month after the military occupation, 1,800 residents sent a petition to Queen Victoria, through the British consul, repudiating the annexation by virtue of which "We shall have been left in the hands of a government and a people which have not the slightest interest, sympathy or affection for the inhabitants of the Mosquito Reserve; and as our usages, customs, religion, laws, and language do not correspond, there never could be unity" (in Rossbach and Wuenderich 1985:39). They therefore asked the queen not to allow the forcible reincorporation and once again to take the region under her protection. Great Britain did not respond to the petition, but it is interesting to see how the signers founded their rejection of the annexation on a relatively complete expression of the material and symbolic elements of their ethnic identity and the preservation of that identity on British protection. In the following months there were mobilizations and armed confrontations. In order to maintain control, Nicaraguan troops had to call for

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the support of U.S. forces, a number of whom were at that point aboard a battleship anchored in the port. On occasion, British troops also helped the Nicaraguans regain control of the city. In some cases, as in July 1894, the protests and disturbances went beyond the city limits and reached communities such as Tasbapauni, Pearl Lagoon, Rio Grande, Prinzapolka, and even Com Island. The Mosquitia was once regained for almost an entire month by the insurgents. However, the expressions of protest were limited mainly to the Creole population, and to the unhappiness of foreign merchants with the new taxes. The Indian villages, whose integration into the government of the reserve had been relatively weak, looked on passively and with disinterest at the destitution of a government that they had possibly never felt to be particularly their own. This seems to have been especially true with respect to Clarence, the last chief of the reserve. Many Miskito communities showed their unhappiness with his investiture because his mother was Rama. The Miskitos1 opposition went as far as to name another chief in Krukira in the spring of 1892 and to stop paying taxes to the government of the reserve. The legal dispositions that, in principle, announced equal rights for the Costeños were not carried out, and this was an additional cause for grievance. In 1899 the uprising of General Juan Pablo Reyes found wide support. Reyes, appointed governor intendent by President Zelaya, had carried out a number of local development projects, especially in Bluefields, which people in the Coast still remember with approbation: municipal improvements, the construction of the largest high school and of a hospital. Reyes objected to the high national taxes levied on the Coast economy and fruitlessly opposed the reelection of Zelaya. In February 1899 he attempted a coup d'état in Bluefields against the central government; in spite of local support, which united Liberals and Conservatives, the movement was defeated. But in a document that Costeño citizens sent in 1934 to the National Congress, Reyes's name comes up once again as the only official appointed by the national government whom they had found acceptable. As late as 1924, thirty years after the military operation, several letters from Costeños, particularly Creoles, sent to the U.S. and British consuls emphasized the injuries annexation had caused to the region's population. In 1928 a Miskito Patriotic League sent a letter to the U.S. secretary of state asking him to intervene with the Nicaraguan government to reestablish their 1894 status. In 1934 a petition presented by Indians and Creoles to the National Congress questioned the legitimacy of the 1894 convention and enumerated a long series of grievances. According to the signers of the document, $40 million "have been taken from the income of this Department without even a small part being used for betterment." They denounced the "destructive exploitation of the natural resources of this Department by foreign concessionaries . . . and astute [Nicaraguan] speculators"; the

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generalized deterioration of the educational system; the invasion of unscrupulous civil servants; and the massive immigration of the Chinese, who came to control local trade.24 Zelaya sought British financing for the construction of a railroad to the Coast and approached Japanese interests for the construction of an interoceanic canal; both actions irritated the United States. On the other hand, he practiced a policy of granting ample concessions to foreign firms for the exploitation of the natural resources of the region; this practice was clearly a continuation of that of the Conservative governments and the Mosquito Kingdom. Emery Company of Massachusetts obtained a monopoly on the felling and exportation of precious tropical woods in an area equivalent to almost 10 percent of the department of Zelaya. In 1903 the concession to the Dietrick Company gave it a strip of land almost 70 miles wide from north to south on the Coco River and inland, including Jinotega and Nueva Segovia, equivalent to a quarter of the territory of Nicaragua. The explicit goal of the concession was to develop the infrastructure of the area (railroads, steamboats, telegraphs) and implied a monopoly on the felling of trees, mining, and the establishment of plantations. The concession was later annulled by the Conservative government, which considered it fraudulent. Liberal government officials embarked on heavy land speculation in the area where the railroad to the Pacific was to be built. In 1909 the governor intendent, General Juan José Estrada, who had been appointed by President Zelaya, rose up against him at the head of a revolutionary movement that would lead to Zelaya's resignation and the return of the Conservatives to the government, thus creating the conditions for U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua. Like Reyes ten years earlier, Estrada had the unified support of the Liberals of Bluefields and the Conservatives. The support of the latter is easy to understand, as it was a Liberal government that would be ended. But the participation of Bluefields Liberals indicates the presence of a regional element that had already manifested itself in General Reyes' failed uprising. Opposition to the central government motivated regional adherence to the cause over and above traditional national party allegiances. However, the mestizos of the region were the most enthusiastic supporters of the movement. The attitude of the Creole population seems to have been ambivalent: They were in sympathy with the opposition to the central government, but they do not seem to have shown much eagerness to assume a greater commitment to the revolutionaries (see Pérez Valle 1978:296-299). After the fall of Zelaya, and under the protection of the provisional constitution dictated by Estrada to replace the one of 1893, the Moravian mission reopened its schools, closed for more than a decade, in Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon. The granting of land titles to communal village lands, guaranteed by the 1905 treaty, awakened little interest in the Indian population. The amount of

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land in question—an average of 2 manzanas per person—was too small for acceptable cultivation in the ecological conditions of the Coast and were, in any case, less than the amount of land already available. Furthermore, the concept of "title" was of little use in Indian culture, in which the basic issue is the real possession of land and its use in communal projects. Also, the government officials in charge of making out the titles were mestizos from the Pacific regions in whom the Indians had little confidence. Some villages began to respond as late as 1915, when the government demanded that they deal with the question. In this way, between 1915 and 1920 some forty-five Miskito and Sumu villages obtained titles for a combined total of more than 121,079 acres (Jenkins 1986:221-222). Each village was to name a síndico (the equivalent of mayor), who was empowered to deal with affairs related to the titles and the effective handing over or confirmation of the lands. According to some observers of the period, very few síndicos took their work seriously; the majority paid little attention to the matter, and many internal legal suits arose (Grossmann 1930:104). THE ENCLAVE ECONOMY The Coast economy reached its highest levels of activity between 1880 and 1930. During this half-century what is known as the enclave economy was in force. Enclaves are generally defined as areas whose economic activity is controlled by foreign companies with an absolute power over the productive resources, including the labor force. Reality is rather more complex. The concept of economic enclave is defined first as the presence of monopoly capital in a much less developed economic and social environment—in general, a petty commodity economy or a capitalist one still in its competitive stage. As a description, the concept of enclave points up the existence of an inequality or disproportion between the economic potential of the monopoly enterprises and the rest of the economy—regional or national—in which they operate; it is an image of contrast, of a marked inequality between one and the other type of economic organization. The unequal and combined nature of capitalist development at the international level explains why the majority of enclaves in the Third World are foreign. The higher degree of capitalist development in the "core" economies allows capital to be exported in order to continue the process of accumulation on the periphery. 25 But the determining factor of the set of relationships typical of an enclave economy is the presence of monopoly capital, and that fact explains why enclaves are foreign in the majority of cases.26 In the second place, an enclave economy is one whose relations with the metropolis are stronger and more meaningful than those with domestic society. Enclave enterprises have a very high reliance on imports and orient their production toward exports. Machinery, spare parts, and supplies for

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operations come from abroad; the same is true of management staff, technicians, and skilled personnel. Only the field personnel is local: sugarcane cutters, pit workers in the mines, field workers in woodcutting or rubber collection—unskilled labor. But in some cases, when the local labor supply increases more slowly than the companies' productive activity—and their demand for workers—they even import labor. There is no diffusion of technology or training of the native labor force. The commissary system concentrates within the company the spending of salaries on consumer goods. Nor is there any integration with complementary local activities. Enclaves are extractive in more than one sense: When for some reason the companies depart—exhaustion of the resource, unacceptable production costs, changes in the political environment, etc.—they literally leave an empty hole. The economic power of enclave economies causes the firms operating in them to have great political power as well. This is made possible by the weakness of the local dominant groups. Lacking a relevant productive base of their own and without importance in the international market, these groups' ability to establish a stable system of domination generally depends on political and institutional factors more than on economic ones. Gaining direct control of the government gives these groups the means to make themselves a "national" political class over competing groups, families, regions, or cities. State power gives them the means to convert political dominance into economic dominance. The need of these social groups to attain political power in order to gain ascendance in the economy—the opposite of the historical development of the European bourgeoisie—explains the intense and violent nature of their struggles for direct and exclusive control of the state apparatus and the traditional political instability of their societies. Thus, there is fierce competition among these groups to grant advantages and privileges to foreign investors and companies. This competition includes all the political forces through which these groups express themselves, regardless of their political confrontations—or, rather, because of their competition for access to power. Bids for power have been frequently expressed as a race to see which of the competitors could offer greater concessions and wider privileges to the enclave—a competition naturally encouraged by the potential investors. Lumber, banana plantations, and mining were the three economic activities in which the enclave system developed most clearly. The lumber boom, fostered by the growth of the construction industry in the United States, arrived in 1892 on the Wawa River. Some companies cutting pine on the southern plain set up a sawmill there. In 1893 as many as four steamboat loads of wood a month were exported from the Wawa area (Rossbach, n.d.) This allows us to conclude that this industry was no longer made up of individual small companies but rather of large capitalist exporters. In 1921 Bragman's Bluff Lumber Company, a subsidiary of the Standard Fruit

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Company, began large-scale extraction of pine in the area around what is now Puerto Cabezas, with a concession of 50,000 acres. The city of Puerto Cabezas, which rapidly became the administrative and commercial center for the northern Atlantic Coast, was created by Bragman's around the alreadyexisting Indian village of Bilwi, giving rise to complex litigation about the lands of the villages affected by the growth of the city (see Ruiz y Ruiz 1927). The improvements included the construction of a port, a pier, a railway line extending for 100 miles along the Wawa River, and several bridges; a sawmill that in its day was one of the largest of Central America; an electric plant; an ice factory, and other facilities. Lumber companies paid insignificant taxes; Bragman's did not keep inventory or account books. The government had no capacity to supervise extractive activities and exports; acording to the report of a special government commissioner, the companies bribed the inspectors (Ruiz y Ruiz 1927:144-145; 11). At its height Bragman's came to produce 55,000 board feet of wood a day (CIERA 1981:49). Another important lumber company was Nolan, which operated in the area of the Prinzapolka River and the Rio Grande de Matagalpa. The company's base of operations was in the Sumu village of Karawala, at the mouth of the Rio Grande de Matagalpa, where it set up a sawmill with a capacity of 45,000 board feet a day.27 Banana production started on a small scale at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and part of the land speculation mentioned earlier had to do with this. Large-scale production began around 1880 in the Bluefields area. In 1893 the Bluefields-Rama Banana Company of New Orleans began to export bananas to the East Coast of the United States. This company, which was later seized by the United Fruit Company, came to have almost twenty plantations of its own and also bought bananas from more than 500 independent producers. In 1904 it was granted the exclusive concession for navigation of the Escondido River for its subsidiary, the Bluefields Steamship Company, which also took charge of passenger transportation and the mail service. In 1909 this monopoly provoked a strike by the independent producers because of the low prices it paid them for their product. The 1920s saw the greatest amount of activity in banana plantations, with two main enterprises, both with U.S. capital. In the north, Standard Fruit Company, based in Puerto Cabezas, operated its own plantations and also bought from independent producers. In 1929 Standard Fruit attained its highest production record, with 4 million bunches of bananas and exports equivalent to 27 percent of total Nicaraguan exports (Yih 1987a). At the beginning of the following decade, production began to decline as a result of progressive exhaustion of the soils, the instability of the political and military situation (the guerrilla activity of General Sandino), and plant diseases—in 1935, because of "Panama disease," Standard moved its operations to the Coco River, but the following year the sigatoka disease

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affected the crops; in 1936 the company closed down its operations on the Coast. The other company was Cuyamel, a United Fruit Company subsidiary. It operated almost 200,000 acres of banana plantations in the area of the Rio Grande de Matagalpa and the Escondido River in the 1930s. It came to employ 3,000 salaried workers on the plantations and about 1,000 permanent employees in its commercial operations. The banana companies were the targets, and the cause, of intense labor protest, fostered by the heavy concentration of workers and by the dependency of hundreds of small producers. In 1921 Cuyamel workers on the Escondido River went out on strike for higher wages, as did the workers on the Rio Grande de Matagalpa in 1925; company guards supressed the Rio Grande strike severely in what is known as the "El Gallo massacre." Between 1922 and 1926 the independent producers north of Bluefields went on strike against the trading firm Cukra Development Company, demanding better prices for their bananas. There were strikes in 1928 on Standard Fruit plantations in response to low wages and in 1932 in the area of the Coco River, where Indian workers were protesting the importation of Jamaican workers, a company practice that lowered wages even more and displaced local labor.28 Mining began to develop toward the turn of the century, particularly in three places in the northwest area of the region: Siuna, Bonanza, and Rosita. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, mining had become industrialized; a large part of its success was a result of the low wages paid to the mainly Indian workers and the irrational nature of exploitation. In 1921 some 2,500 people were directly or indirectly employed by the companies. The mining companies were U.S. and Canadian; they enjoyed free importation of their machinery and free exportation of their product and were exempt from government and municipal taxes. The exportation of metals was completely uncontrolled by the government; there never was a laboratory to verify the percentages of minerals in the concentrates that were exported, allegedly because of the high cost of such analysis. At the end of the 1940s the mining companies paid Anastasio Somoza Garcia $3,000 a month for his authorization to export precious metals. In addition, the dictator received 15 percent of the total production of the Las Segovias gold mine, estimated at $10 million a year (Gondi 1948). The mining companies' control over the area became almost complete. For example, the entire city of Siuna was on company lands. The owners of buildings, even the churches, had to pay rent to the company for use of the land. Starting in the 1930s, air transportation encouraged foreign mining interests in the region. Equipment, materials, and food were flown in on cargo planes, with more than 2,500 flights a year. The high operating costs were compensated by low labor costs. During the 1950s, daily wages were not more than $1.50 for the 2,500 workers (Miskitos, mestizos, and Sumus).

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Gold was the main export item during the 1940s, and Nicaragua came to be one of the three largest producers of gold in Latin America. The rise of Puerto Cabezas in these years is tied to mining. It was the main port of entry for cargo for the mines, from heavy machinery to food. But part of the food for the mines, and for Puerto Cabezas, also came from the Indian villages of the Coco River, which transformed Waspam into an important trade and transportation center. Waspam was also an important center for labor recruitment in the Coco River area; workers were sent to the mines and the lumber camps. Regardless of the type of activity, the companies operating in the enclave gained relatively wide control over the labor force. Bragman's was the first company to abolish contracting by means of prepaid wages, which in practice put the workers into a debt that could only be worked off through a true system of peonage. But it was also the first company to introduce the system of commissaries, or company stores, with outlets in Logtown, Puerto Cabezas, and San Carlos on the Coco River. The stores were well supplied with products imported from the United States, including liquor. The workers spent their wages at the company stores, which dealt a cruel blow to Chinese retail trade. The stores also served to attract Indian workers, who had for some time been accustomed to consume certain imported goods; buying in the commissaries was a kind of privilege reserved for company workers. The biggest Bragman's commissary was in San Carlos; its sales at the end of the 1920s reached $40,000 a year. In this way, a good part of the workers' wages went back into the coffers of the company, and everybody was happy—except for the Chinese shopkeepers. Later on, other companies imitated Bragman's example. In the 1940s the Rubber Reserve Corporation set up more than forty commissaries to supply more than 5,000 Indian and Creole rubber workers and the almost 200 plant workers. In Siuna the mine commissary was the most important commercial establishment; up to 1970 it enjoyed exemptions from taxes on the importation of unlimited quantities of goods. The system of pay vouchers fit in with the network of commissaries. At Standard Fruit, for example, the workers were paid with checks that could be cashed in exchange for merchandise in the commissary. At ATCHEMCO (Atlantic Chemical Corporation), a resin-extracting company, workers were paid week to week and could get their supplies once a week with vouchers that were deducted from their wages. On occasion, coupons were used as prepayment of wages, redeemable exclusively in the company store. Because of the low wages, workers often ran out of money before the end of the pay period; in these cases, it was common for the company to pay them advances with vouchers exchangeable in the commissary.29 The companies had their own police forces and also took charge of maintaining the security forces of the state. Bragman's, for example, paid the

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salaries of the police of Puerto Cabezas and the lumber camps (Ruiz y Ruiz 1927:57). The mining companies continued to do this until 1979. When the revolutionary government decided to nationalize these companies and took over their mining camps and accounting, it found fat books of check stubs for payments to National Guard commanders and lower-level officers. In some cases, these payments were simply bribery, but in others they represented additional salaries, sometimes greater than the official ones.30 The growth of the enclave economy made the ethnic and demographic profile of the region much more complex. Attracted by the economic boom, Chinese immigrants began to arrive on the Coast in the mid-1880s and rapidly gained control of local retail trade. There are no figures as to the real magnitude of Chinese immigration, but as early as July 1895 President Zelaya's government issued a decree—which was completely ineffectual— prohibiting it. At the same time, the growth of extractive operations motivated the importation of black workers from Jamaica and, to a lesser extent, from other islands of the Caribbean and from the southern United States. This practice made Nicaraguan workers and government authorities unhappy, although for different reasons. In 1925 the workers' society El Avance, of Puerto Cabezas, submitted a petition demanding that black workers be prohibited from entering the country and complaining that blacks had more chances to obtain employment and lodging and received higher wages. In the same year, the special commissioner for the government was worried that the importation of black wage laborers could eventually create "an African people who feel not one bit of sympathy for Nicaragua" (Ruiz y Ruiz 1927:38). In 1931 more than 85 percent of U.S. investments in Nicaragua were on the Atlantic Coast, almost 90 percent in bananas and lumber (Dozier 1985:210). According to some observers, and the annual reports of the Moravian missionaries, in this period the Coast became an authentic frontier territory, with a wide diffusion of gambling, speculation, adventurers of various kinds, prostitution, and delinquency—"an ever increasing desire for pleasure, amusements and an unrestrained life"—in contrast to what seems to have been the situation before 1893. Particularly in Puerto Cabezas, "spiritual work is a difficult task. . . . The moral conditions here are fearful" (Grossman 1930:81-82). This prosperity for the Coast economy lasted half a century, between 1880 and 1930. After this date, the worldwide Depression, impoverishment of the soils, plant diseases, and exhaustion of natural resources led to an abrupt decline in activity and to the closure of many companies; the political situation, resulting from the outbreak of the Liberal revolution in 1926 and, later, the guerrilla campaign of General Sandino, made the situation of the regional economy even more difficult. Low yields on the lands around the Wawa River, the 1935 hurricane, and

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diseases on the plantations eliminated the possibility of a sustained growth in banana cultivation on the Coast. Banana exports from El Bluff port diminished from an annual average of 2,305,207 bunches in 1927-1929 to only 637 bunches in 1940; exports from Puerto Cabezas fell from 528,895 bunches on an annual average in 1927-1929 to 380 bunches in 1940 (Williamson 1979:53). The Indians went back to their villages, but many Creoles, who had no economic base with which to weather the recession or else were small producers ruined by the crisis in bananas, for example, found no alternative but to emigrate to the Pacific region, the Caribbean islands, or the United States. In 1926 a revolutionary Liberal movement arose in Bluefields, directed against the Conservative central government. It was actively supported by the Creoles, who once again rose up against the central government as part of a national confrontation. The military operations and the general tension of local life changed the economic situation. Although the reports of the Moravian missionaries are perhaps not the best source for following these events, lacking a better perspective, they at least offer a first approximation. 3 1 The missionaries report the general deterioration in Costeños' living conditions, the lack of work, money, food, and good clothing. These conditions had a direct effect on the church's ability to collect contributions in the villages, and in the late 1920s the missionaries decided to encourage rice cultivation in the Pearl Lagoon basin in order to replenish the mission's diminished finances (Wolff 1927). General Sandino's struggle against the U.S. military invasion made the Coast economy even more vulnerable. Enclave companies became targets for the military activities of the Ejército Defensor de la Soberanía Nacional. Thus, in April 1928 Sandinista troops proceeded to blow up the installations of the La Luz Mine in Siuna, and in 1931 Sandinista General Pedro Blandón attacked and destroyed Bragman's installations in Logtown. In addition to its obvious direct impact, the war caused a deterioration in the economic activity of the cities and villages that in one way or another were tied to the companies—for example, Prinzapolka, Puerto Cabezas, and Cape Gracias a Dios. Moreover, village Indians took an ambivalent attitude toward General Sandino's army. An apparently important number of Miskito and Sumu Indians actively collaborated with it, as did certain sectors of the Creole population. 32 Others opted to try not to be caught by the U.S. Marines or their agents, in order not to be sent to fight against Sandino; thus, moving between villages became difficult (Grossmann 1926:115). Finally, after the obscure incident of the death of the Moravian missionary Karl Bregenzer in Musawás, a great majority of Miskito and Sumu aligned themselves with the official position of the church, which was the same as that of the U.S. Marines and General Somoza: Sandino and the Sandinistas were nothing more than a handful of bandits and plotters.33

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World War II fostered a resurgence in rubber and gold production which reactivated the Coast economy exclusively in the areas that were directly involved. Between 1939 and 1945, gold exports represented an average of 53 percent of the total exports of Nicaragua, 61 percent in 1940/41. But this was a brief boom that lasted as long as its cause—once again, a foreign one. With the end of the war, the Southeast Asian rubber plantations once again took over from the Central American ones, and gold production fell. Only in the 1960s did the general level of activity improve, basically related to capital investment in fishing and lumber. However, this boom was mainly concentrated along the coast and in the south of Zelaya, leaving out the mining district and the Coco River. There is no doubt that the enormous profits formerly obtained by the companies and exported out of Nicaragua were based primarily on the intense exploitation of the labor force and on the depredation of natural resources. Iniquitous working conditions, high incidence of workplace accidents, contamination of the rivers, and poisoning of the Indian population were the keys to success, more than technological superiority or advanced methods of business administration. 34 The effects are still being felt in the 1980s; the investments necessary to replace the exhausted resources are enormous and far exceed the financial and operational capacity of the country. The completely external orientation of the enclave, and particularly its high import coefficient, conspired against a greater integration of the regional economy with that of the rest of the country. There was no diffusion of technology and no training of the local labor force. For this reason, when the revolutionary government nationalized the mines in 1979, there were practically no Nicaraguan technicians to take over operations. Other companies, such as ATCHEMCO or Wrigley's, were similarly abandoned by their foreign owners and technicians. At the same time, the commissary system and the extensive imports of consumer goods slowed down the integration of a national system of circulation of goods and money and reinforced the Costeño population's propensity toward imports. It is no coincidence that the taste for imported goods, generally a characteristic of the wealthier classes of Third World societies, is also a feature of lower-income classes where there has been an enclave economy. Many Costeños still feel nostalgia for the enclave period. As always, this is a matter of selective recollection: People wish for the good job prospects, the consumption of imported goods, the free-flowing dollars, and the economic and commercial connections with Jamaica, San Andrés, Gran Cayman, and New Orleans. Few will spontaneously bring up the silicosis, the disappearance of fish from the rivers, illiteracy, gringo arrogance, or the corruption of the National Guard.

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THE LEGACY OF A CONFLICTIVE HISTORY There is nothing deterministic in history, but neither is it the domain of free will. As Marx pointed out, men make their history, but they do it in predetermined circumstances, not according to their will. The freedom of past generations limits and defies the creativity of the present one. The discussion in this chapter is hardly exhaustive. I have omitted important aspects of the historical formation of Atlantic Coast reality in order not to outgrow the bounds of this book or because the necessary documentation is still lacking. However, by way of summary, I will present a few brief conclusions in order to explain my own perspective on the legacy of Coast history in the capitalist modernization of the 1960s and 1970s, and, more important, in the Sandinista revolutionary process. 1. The Coast's history created a strong regional identity including all Indian groups as well as Creoles, in opposition to the mestizos, both those in the Pacific region and those living in the Atlantic region. The intensity and complexity of this regional identity are not the same in all Costeño groups, but it nevertheless exists as the result of a long historical process. The open confrontation between Costeños and the "Spanish," or between Indians and Creoles on the one hand, and mestizos on the other, or between the Atlantic and the Pacific, are different ways of expressing this identity in opposition to the non-Costeño identity. Costeño identity is expressed in linguistic, religious, and behavioral differences, which in turn are based on differences in the kinds of social organization, productive practices, technologies, and ways of relating to natural resources and state institutions, among others. In turn, these differences are the result of the different historical and demographic origins of the different groups and in the different ecologies of the regions in which they lived. 2. The affirmation of this Costeño identity is also expressed in its differences with and, occasionally, opposition to the political structures of the Nicaraguan state, which is seen as the prolongation of Spanish domination, something alien and potentially hostile. As a consequence, Costeño aspirations to preserve their ethnic identities and to exercise some form of self-government have been tied to the felt need to seek the protection of a foreign power from the denial of these rights and these identities, first by the Spanish crown and later by the Nicaraguan state. In a way, this involves a survival strategy in which the group's ability to achieve its goals is tied, in a clearly subordinated manner, to the dynamic defined by more powerful actors on the regional, national, or international scene. 3. A corollary is that the nationalist and anti-imperialist elements that make up a part of the political identity of the mestizos of the Pacific, and that are essential ingredients of General Sandino's struggle and, later, that of the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, Sandinista National

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Liberation Front) are absent from the Costeño identity. The highest moments of Costeño society are tied, in its people's collective memory, to different kinds of colonial and neocolonial expansion on the part of Great Britain and the United States. This positive attitude toward foreign domination created an ambivalent relationship between the Costeños and the ruling groups of the Pacific and the Nicaraguan state. This attitude coincided with the acceptance and promotion of foreign domination that was a constant of these ruling groups' political identities. But, to the extent that it was part of the Costeños' aspirations for territorial autonomy, this positive attitude toward the United States and Great Britain conflicted with the aspirations of the Nicaraguan state, and the Pacific mestizo ruling groups, to exclusive institutional control of the Atlantic region. With such control, the Nicaraguan state could even legally conduct economic dealings concerning the Coast with foreign powers. However, sympathies toward colonial and neocolonial powers were to cause deep cleavages between the Costeños and the subordinated social classes and groups in the rest of Nicaragua—peasants, workers, the impoverished petty bourgeoisie, the semiproletariat, the student movement. The material side of Costeño ethnic identity—socioeconomic exploitation, political oppression—was similar to that of these classes and groups throughout the country. But the symbolic dimension of Costeño identity, which included positive attitudes toward Great Britain and the United States and negative attitudes toward General Sandino, and would come to include anticommunism, separated on an ideological level what economic exploitation and political oppression otherwise would have united. 4. Within this regional identity, there was a marked differentiation between Indians and Creoles and among Miskito, Sumu, and Rama Indians. This differentiation also involved a process of internal hierarchization, which was also tied to the Coast's integration into colonial and neocolonial expansion and to the presence of the Nicaraguan state apparatus in the region. Many of the conflicts between state political action and the people of the Atlantic Coast are related to the Nicaraguan state's lack of understanding of the ethnic heterogeneity that exists within this regional unity. 5. Capitalism generated a much slower and more undeveloped kind of class differentiation on the Coast than in the rest of Nicaragua. Social differentiation within each group was an extremely slow process, started relatively recently, and is mixed with other kinds of differentiation based on kinship and ethnic identity. Even today hierarchization tends to be greater across ethnic groups than within each group. 6. The extremely strong political and cultural influence of the Moravian Church, which is usually presented as one of the most outstanding elements in Costeños' ethnic identity, is similar to the influence of the Catholic Church in mestizo society in other regions of the country. Membership in the Moravian Church is part of Costeño identity, in the same way that

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speaking Spanish and fitting into the cultural sphere of the Catholic Church are among the defining aspects of mestizo identity. NOTES 1. See, among the more recent studies, Dozier (1985). For an introductory overview, see Pérez Valle (1978). 2. A recent anecdote may illustrate this point. In early September 1984 Ray Hooker, a well known Creole leader and, from the November 1984 elections, a member of Nicaragua's National Assembly, was kidnapped by members of Miskitos, Sumus, Ramas, and Sandinistas Working Together (MISURASATA)—the Indian organization which took up arms against the Nicaraguan government—in the Pearl Lagoon area while he was campaigning for the national elections of November 1984. Ray Hooker recalls that every night of the almost two months he was held prisoner the Indian combatants would get together around a campfire to listen to the harangues of the elders of the organization. Their main and almost exclusive theme was an extremely impassioned narrative of the affronts, the contempt, the ills and grievances the Indians had always suffered at the hands of the "Spanish"—this name including the Spaniards of the colony as well as present-day Nicaraguans from the Pacific region. 3. From the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century the slave trade was possibly the primary economic specialization by the Miskitos in relation to the British. Miskito raids victimized other Indian groups in the eastern part of what today are Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. According to Helms (1982), the increase in frequency and intensity of Miskito slaving raids coincides with the formative years of the British colony in Jamaica and particularly with the period of economic difficulties, between the decline of privateering and the emergence of the sugar plantations. The half-century between 1685, when privateering was prohibited, and 1740, when the sugar plantation economy based on slave labor brought from Africa was solidly established, corresponds to the period of increased slave-hunting by the Miskitos. A considerable number of Indians from Central America were sent to Jamaica, presumably to work on the holdings that were in the process of being converted into sugar plantations but were still small in size and did not produce enough to buy slaves from Africa. These years also coincide with the end of the flow of white indentured servants to Jamaica and the West Indies in general and with a scarcity of labor. 4. Governor Clementi was also a big cattle raiser, although not so big as Robinson. 5. A detailed description of these illicit operations in the area between Cape Gracias a Dios and Bocas del Toro, including contraband traded with the Spanish via the San Juan River, is found in O. W. Roberts (1827). The author was a merchant in Jamaica, personally involved in these activities between 1816 and 1822. 6. For example, in January 1839 King Robert Charles Frederick made over to Samuel and Peter Shepherd and Stanislaus Kaly the entire territory

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located between the southern bank of Rio Grande de Matagalpa (the Great River) and the northern bank of Rio Grande de Bluefields (now the Escondido River, then the Bluefields Main River), up to the limits of the "Spanish" towns in the west and the seacoast in the east, as well as the land between Rio Grande de Bluefields on the north and the northern bank of San Juan River on the south, with the aforementioned eastern and western boundaries. On the same occasion he also made over to the same beneficiaries the land between the southern bank of Río San Juan in the north and Bocas del Toro and the Chiriqui Lagoon in the south. In June of the same year the king ceded Com Island to the same merchants. See Pérez Valle (1978:76-78). Other concessionaries affected by these cancellations, and who later contested them, include Passenger (2 million acres); Hedgcock, Rennick, Haly, and Brown (1.3 million acres in all); Willock and Alexander (2 million acres); and G. R. Brown (800,000 acres). 7. According to Nicaraguan historian José Dolores Gamez, the annulment of the titles had to do with the Prussian colony and the rights its members could claim on lands granted them by the king. The annulment of all concessions made it possible to "cancel out the dispossession of Prussian subjects with an equal dispossession of English landholders and still save the lands acquired after that date by sale or royal concession, which were a matter of personal interest to Mr. Walker." See Pérez Valle 1978:92-93. 8. The invitation to a church with no relationship whatever to the British Empire seems to have been because an earlier request to the Church of England aroused no interest. 9. The complete text of the treaty has been published in the Memoria de Relaciones Exteriores 1920, vol. 2, 396:402. 10. Intense exploitation caused the rapid disappearance of mahogany and rubber. According to Laird (1972), Nicaragua's limited sovereignty, on the one hand and the reserve's semi-sovereignty, on the other, created a situation in which no one tried to ensure a rational use and conservation of resources. It is possible that the legal ambiguity of the situation created a climate of greater permissiveness for investors; but history after 1894, when the Nicaraguan government found its own solution to the problem, shows similarly predatory behavior. Moreover, what could concepts such as "rational use" and "conservation of resources" have possibly meant in the 1880s, according to the development then attained by the natural sciences? 11. It was a generalized practice for merchants to grant credits to Indians and poor blacks, intentionally putting them into debt and keeping them dependent in this way. Some companies used a similar system, contracting workers by prepaying part of their wages. Most workers could not pay back their debt by the end of the first contract and found themselves involved in a peonage system that lasted for years. Speaking of the Reserve government's measures, Teplitz (1974:352) comments: "The system may have disadvantaged alien creditors, but foreigners' complaints about Mosquito statutes and court actions showed that the legislature and judiciary acted to protect the masses, a situation unique in nineteenth-century Nicaragua." 12. Cf., for example, a report by the Moravian Church's correspondent

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for 1926: "The leader of the Sumu people is now a helper and was also Magistrate of the community. He punished both women and men, who lived immoral lives. He believes in giving the transgressors "bush medicines', that is, corporal punishment. The guilty person's hands are tied to a beam above the head, then the policeman gives a certain number of lashes with sticks, or with strips of leather made out of tapir hide. I have counted 17 lashes applied to the back of a woman. One man was found guilty of incest with his daughter for many years, while he had his wife." Final comment of the minister: "In Musawis one gets an insight into the immoral conditions of heathenism both among the old and the young. It is horrible!" See Schramm (1927:107-111). In other cases, the village sindico, converted to Christianity, prohibited the sale of alcohol in the villages; see Grossmann (1930). 13. A typical case is that of Musawis. According to a Moravian report, a Sumu leader named Nelson Matthew had a dream in which he was ordered to bring together his people and build a church in which to pray and give praise to God. The Indians worked hard on the church in what would later be Musawas, and when they finished they went to see the missionary Schramm in the village of Sangsangta to ask him to go there to preach the Gospel. Nelson became the first native helper of the Moravian mission and later became the sindico of the village (see Schramm 1927:107-111). Nelson was in reality a sukia—that is, a priest and celebrant of the animistic traditional religion of the Sumus. Many sukias were concerned about the appearance of the missionaries and, in a kind of survival strategy, chose to join the new religion instead of opposing it or openly competing with it. By becoming "helpers" they kept their positions in the community. This phenomenon has also been noted in other Indian societies in similar circumstances. Missionary Schramm's narration, moreover, offers an excellent description of what in Marxian political economy is called a petty commodity economy. For the story of Karl Bregenzer, see Note 33. 14. One of the clearest cases of this resettlement policy is Musawis, which was to become the center of the Sumu population. The Sumus in the region originally lived dispersed in small hamlets along the Waspuk River, one of the tributaries of the Coco River. Around 1920, in what was to become Musawds, there were only eight houses, but as a result of the activity of the missionaries there were already more than forty in 1928, as well as fields of food crops. The people who resettled there came from different points along the river through the jungle: "Of course it has cost some work to bring the Sumu Indians so far, but the Lord has blessed our labors" (Schramm 1927:109). 15. Not all the Moravian missionaries were convinced that going into trade was a good decision. According to Guido Grossmann, superintendent of the church when the Commercial House closed, "I am convinced that the time and energy of our missionaries could have been better devoted to the actual spiritual work in the congregations, than that they should have stood behind the counter." Grossmann (1930:85). 16. Anti-Jesuit sentiment was not specific to the mission on the Atlantic Coast but seems to have been generalized throughout the Moravian Church; see Allen (1967).

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17. For example, the church's initial attitude toward the government that came to power after the Liberal Revolution of 1926 was opposition, in spite of the fact that the revolution had been actively supported by the Creole population of Bluefields—mainly Moravians—and that Creole leaders developed particularly important roles in it. The position of the Moravian Church was a result of the marriage law passed by the new Liberal government: According to the legal text, a marriage celebrated by a Catholic priest would have full value before the civil authorities, but marriages celebrated by ministers of other denominations would not. In these cases, the union was made legal by means of a subsequent civil marriage. Celebrated by an official of the civil registry, this ceremony cost $20, too much for most of the Costeño population. As a consequence, many members of Protestant churches chose a Catholic marriage, cheaper and legally valid; see Grossmann (1926). Later, the church's attitude changed, and in his annual report in 1930 Superintendent Grossmann declared that although the Conservative government merely tolerated the presence of the missionaries, the Liberal goverment "favored" it (Grossmann 1930:103). 18. Superintendent Grossmann enthusiastically greeted the founding of the Bragman's Bluff Lumber Company in Puerto Cabezas as a blessing for the "laboring classes," who would find employment and money. He particularly praised the fact that the company had eliminated the system of contracting by means of prepayment of wages; see Grossmann (1925). Because of the importance Puerto Cabezas was acquiring as a result of its economic activity, the Moravian Church decided to move the seat of the mission there, which up to that point had been in Tuapi, slightly to the north. In May 1927 the superintendent's office, originally in Bluefields, was also moved to Puerto Cabezas. 19. Jobs in the lumber camps and the mines caused the majority of those who attended church in the decades of 1910 and 1920 to be female. The young Miskito and Creole generations were very receptive to the new worldly fashions: "They go too far in imitating foreigners in everything— food, style, pleasures which sap their vitality as much as their purse, causing not a few to become careless and indifferent." In Bluefields, the traditional Moravian prohibition against dancing created problems with the young people, and the congregation had to discipline eighteen members for violations of this rule. The missionaries noted that work in the Sumu villages was less complicated, because they had remained "pretty free" of the influence of the "new life" that came to the Coast along with the companies (Grossmann 1929). 20. See, for example, Teplitz (1974) and Vargas (1982), although the latter, in my opinion, exaggerates the capitalist nature of the Zelaya government and its socioeconomic impact. 21. It is interesting to note the pompous way in which Nicaraguan government officials referred to the foreign (white) residents of Bluefields, many of whom were vulgar adventurers and soldiers of fortune. 22. See Yih and Slate (1985). The authors point out that elderly Bluefields Creoles still remember this period in which they could understand

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nothing in the classroom and the children and young people looked for ways to escape and hide from the truant officers charged with returning them to class. Clandestine classes in English were held in private houses. 23. The measure pertaining to land modified a law passed September 24, 1903, which assigned to each Indian family living within the limits of what had been the reserve ownership of 4 manzanas if there were not more than four persons in the family, and 1 manzana more per additional person; see Diario Oficial 2054, October 11, 1903. 24. See the text of this document in Encuentro 24-25 (April-September 1985): 168—170. 25. An example of a nonforeign enclave is that of mining in Bolivia before its nationalization; a large proportion of mining capital was the property of a few Bolivian families. 26. See a detailed presentation in Vilas (1987a); also Yih (1987a). 27. The companies mentioned were not the only lumber companies, but they were the most important. To them may be added Mengol, which operated between 1908 and 1935 in the Escondido River basin; Waddell's Prinzapolka, on the banks of the Escondido; and the previously mentioned Dietrick on the Coco River, among others. 28. The sources consulted—newspapers, in particular—do not give any idea as to the number of workers or producers involved in these movements. 29. A device by the companies to lower labor costs was to maintain a certain percentage of the workers on temporary contracts; this allowed them to pay only the basic wage. At other times, workers were fired at the end of the temporary contract and given a new contract in a lower category or as an apprentice. In general, recently contracted workers were paid less than the minimum wage, as the companies claimed that they had come to learn the job. 30. Information gathered in interviews with officials of the Nicaraguan Ministry of Justice. 31. Because of the negative attitude toward politics and the emphasis on the necessity for people to keep out of political conflicts. See, for example, Wilson 1927:96-98. 32. The best study on this topic is Wuenderich (1986a); see also Macau lay (1967). 33. On March 31, 1931, Sandinista General Pedro Bland6n's troops arrived at the Sumu village of Musawds and put to death the Moravian missionary Karl Bregenzer. The Moravian Church's version is simple: "Bregenzer was murdered in 1931 by a group of followers of the rebel Sandino. The village and the church were burned down" (Schnattschneider 1961:77). Beyond the argument that Bregenzer was killed because the Sandinistas mistook him for a spy for the U.S. Marines, no one seems to have asked why Bregenzer was killed, or at least why there was a confusion, althought the question is senseless if one assumes that the Sandinistas were simply bandits. According to internal reports of the Moravian Church, things seem to have been less simple. Bregenzer had been having a number of problems in the village of Musawas, and part of the village was strongly opposed to the missionary (Grossmann 1930:85), apparently because of his immoderate nature

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and a certain favoritism for some villagers over others. According to an obituary published by the Moravian Church, "Our brother was outspoken and fearless in his denunciation of sin. There have been those who have disagreed with him, but we have yet to hear from one person who did not admire him for his absolute sincerity. Even some of those who felt the sting of his reproof later became his friends, for they realized the utter devotion and honesty of purpose of him who had perhaps offended them." (Proceedings of the Society for Propagating the Gospel [1931:107-109]). Bregenzer's lack of moderation must have been caused by his personal history. Born in Germany in 1894, originally a Catholic, he emigrated to the United States in 1911. For seven years he wandered from one job to another, from keeping sheep in Texas to working on a banana boat that traveled back and forth to Central America. According to the biography published at his death (ibid.), it was in this period that Bregenzer lost his faith and forgot about religion, until in 1918 he joined the Moravian Church in the state of Wisconsin through the woman who was to become his wife. He became a Moravian and, after four years, entered the Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated as a pastor in December 1922, at twenty-eight years of age. Bregenzer's faith was, therefore, a convert's faith, and an adult convert who well understood the execrable condition of the sinner, having felt it in his own flesh. If we add to this the brutal secular manifestations that the punishment for sin assumed in Musawds (see Note 12 above), it is not too farfetched to suppose that Bregenzer could have been accused by members of the village, who had suffered from or were opposed to the missionary's inflexible zeal. The accusation of being an agent for the U.S. Marine Corps or the U.S. government could have been simply a way of giving credibility to the accusation. It is hard to believe that the Sandinistas would have been willing to help a group of Indians get rid of a troublesome pastor, but they doubtless would have been eager to eliminate an enemy. The subsequent burning of the village—including the Moravian church—seems rather to be an example of the kind of hurricanes reaped by those who enjoy sowing the wind. According to Wuenderich (1986), a conflict broke out between Nelson, the Sumu leader who had been one of the founders of the village of Musawis, and Pastor Bregenzer on the subject of Nelson's animistic practices: the pastor expelled Nelson and his followers from the village, who later made the accusation to Blandon's troops. In this sense, Bregenzer's death was the result of an internal village conflict completely removed from politics, but the conflict became involved in the anti-imperialist war that was ongoing in the region at the time. 34. For example, according to technical reports made after the triumph of the revolution, the Bonanza mine dumped more than 500 tons a day of chemical wastes (cyanide, quartz, lead, zinc) for more than forty years into the river that is rightly called Sucio ("Dirty"), a tributary of the Bambana. The same reports recommended, therefore, that the waters of these rivers should not be used for human consumption by the Indian villages, mainly Sumu, located on their banks: See IRENA 1980a and b. On the catastrophic impact of this contamination on these villages, see Dolores (1985).

The Atlantic Coast and Capitalist Modernization

A DEVELOPMENTALIST APPROACH TO THE ATLANTIC COAST The economic boom during World War II revived the interest of the Somoza government in the Atlantic Coast. After the war, a growing number of references to the Atlantic Coast and its economic potential appeared in government pronouncements, indicating an approach quite different from the one that had prevailed up to that time: a modernizing approach, which had as its goal the capitalist development of productive forces on the Coast and their integration into a more dynamic overall economic plan. The leaders of the Nicaraguan government—the Somoza dictatorship— repeatedly defined two fundamental tasks on the Atlantic Coast in this period: the geographical integration of the Coast with the Pacific region and the integration of Costeños into national culture (the "Hispanization" of the Coast). Later, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, government agencies would develop an approach converting wide areas of the Coast's territory to agricultural production for the domestic market and for export The message sent by the dictator Anastasio Somoza to the National Congress in 1942 shows one of the first signs of this new approach: Basic education is showing visible progress, and I have tried to strengthen it on the Atlantic Coast where there are twelve new schools . . . the Government will open new schools and will reinforce the educational centers in the principal towns of the Atlantic Coast, in order to conclude the campaign of spiritual and real nationalization which will definitively incorporate into the heart of the nation our Nicaraguan brothers in that great and fruitful area. It is not necessary to deliberate over the supremely important consequences for Nicaraguan economic life which the highway to the Coast will bring. In addition to coming into contact with those unexploited regions and hard-working peoples, this highway will strengthen the spiritual, social and commercial bonds between the Pacific and those wild and rich regions, bringing us into contact with the civilization of the Atlantic and its markets, which will consume more products on a greater scale. There were problems with linguistic nationalization . . . the wall of passive resistance by Protestant 60

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schools and a strong nucleus of the Creole element insisted on paralyzing this work. But [their] selfish maneuvres and racially-based excuses were of no use. These were met with an effective reaffirmation of the plan, and at the same time, with no eye to the cost, the Government supported and accepted any means proposed to reach its goal. Special Spanish-language instructors, paid by the state, were named, and in this way the teachers who did not speak Spanish were eliminated. [Somoza Garcia 1942; emphasis added].

Somoza's piece is particularly explicit. The Nicaraguan state's twopronged approach to this part of its territory and population can be clearly seen. In both cases, the viewpoint is integrationist: "spiritual" integration or nationalization "from above," imposing the dominant language through the school system; and geographical integration of the Coast with the Pacific. Both these approaches had the same goal: to increase the circulation and marketing of products from the Pacific. The approach to the Coast as a potential market for products from the Pacific is related to certain measures dear to the heart of the dictatorship— and, in fact, to measures taken during this period throughout the continent— aimed at increasing domestic demand for capitalist production by expanding the domestic market (see Gutiérrez 1978). The dictator's message coincided with certain measures taken in the same year to make use of the productive potential of the Coast. In 1942 experimental agriculture stations were created in Kukra Hill and El Recreo, both in the department of Zelaya, in order to experiment with humid tropic-type crops. This project was carried out in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which apparently kept the most important research findings. Governmental interest in geographical and cultural integration was to remain explicit, however, although the economic goal of expanding the domestic market would be dropped in favor of modernizing the system of agricultural export production. Domestic and regional-level factors influenced this redirection of the economic function of capital assigned to the Atlantic Coast. The domestic factors were the cotton boom that took place in the early 1950s and the general recession on the Coast in the 1960s. The regional-level factors were efforts toward Central American economic integration and modernization strategies sponsored by international financial institutions and, in particular, by the Alliance for Progress. Stimulated by the rise in world prices, cotton growing developed rapidly in the Pacific regions and this development introduced profound modifications in the country's economy and its class structure. The best lands for this crop were to be found in the northwest (the departments of León and Chinandega). The cotton boom led to the forced displacement of farmers who had previously settled in this region, and who were growing food crops. Because the volume of production increased in the amount of land under cultivation

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rather than through higher yields per acre, a prolonged and massive movement of people were pushed off their land toward the agricultural frontier (the department of Nueva Segovia in the north, as well as the Atlantic Coast) and the cities. This migration would last two decades and would later be further aggravated by the growth of export cattle raising and irrigated rice production (Vilas 1986, Chapter 2). The migration toward the Atlantic that began in the 1950s was qualitatively different from that of the preceding period. In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, employment opportunities in the fastest-growing sectors of the Coast economy—mining, the rubber industry, and transportation and storage for the banana companies—were a strong attraction for labor. Only after these activities declined did workers take up farming. By contrast, the immigration starting in the 1950s consisted primarily of small farmers who had been pushed off their land by the rise of export-oriented agriculture and commercial capital.1 From a political point of view, this new approach to the Atlantic Coast formed part of the process of modernizing export agriculture that had been recommended by the World Bank at the beginning of the 1950s. A World Bank delegation that visited the country in 1952 recognized that Nicaragua would continue to have a predominantly agrarian economy in the foreseeable future and that industrial development would necessarily be subordinated to agricultural development. It consequently recommended promoting export agriculture and cattle raising, increasing foreign investment, free importation of capital goods, tax exemptions, equal rights for foreign and domestic capital, and guaranteeing total convertibility of profits (IBRD 1953). At the same time, this change in orientation coincided with the modernizing and developmentalist approach of certain UN agencies. It was also to have much in common with the kind of anticipatory reformism postulated a decade later by the Alliance for Progress, which saw social polarization and lack of development in the countryside as the breeding ground for revolution. It was also related to the general modernization of export policies motivated by the integrative approach of the Central American Common Market and set the stage for linking this with the expansion into Central America of small U.S. multinational companies. In more specific terms, the new approach sought an answer to the recession on the Atlantic Coast, which had begun to be felt particularly strongly in the early 1960s. Identifying new areas of economic activity and directing domestic and foreign capital to them was supposed to reinject economic growth into the region. Finally, the developmentalist approach reflected certain initiatives by the more modernizing sectors of the dominant classes, who saw the Coast as a territory open to the introduction of capital and labor from inside and outside the country. The government's goal was to create the most propitious conditions for using this space for capital

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accumulation by building an infrastructure, settling and concentrating the labor force, and homogenizing the population. In brief, the government was to transform the land into capital and the population into a labor force and put these elements to use in the service of export capitalism. In its effort to carry out these tasks, the state itself underwent changes and modernizations as profound as those made in the territory and its resources. The patrimonial state of the 1930s and 1940s, which was simple to the point of primitivism, had to give way to a modernization and differentiation of its structures. It was aided in this, as were other countries in the region, by programs of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Just as U.S. capital and the way it expanded into foreign markets modernized the Central American economy, U.S. governmental structures modernized their counterparts on the periphery. This was a prolongation of a historical constant, although through different means: What had been done at the beginning of the century by the U.S. Marines was now being done by USAID technocrats. In a certain way, modernization also affected U.S. state apparatus and style.

INFONAC, Forest Policy, and the Development of Cattle Raising The first institution designed to carry out this modernizing approach was the Instituto de Fomento Nacional (Institute for National Development, INFONAC). Created in 1953 on the recommendation of the World Bank delegation, INFONAC was not specifically conceived for the development of the Atlantic Coast, but many of its more ambitious projects were carried out there. Possibly the most important of all was the Proyecto Forestal del Norte (Northern Forest Project). Its goals were reforestation and fire fighting and prevention in the pine forests that were growing back naturally, the development of experimental and research plantations, and the establishment of a wood-pulp and paper-processing complex after the pine forests had been reestablished. In 1959 INFONAC took on 24,710 acres of pine savanna between the Coco and Wawa Rivers that had been severely affected by overcutting and fires; in 1964 the project area had reached 321,230 acres, with an investment of $370,000. According to estimates by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which collaborated with the project, natural pine reforestation should allow for the production of wood for pulp within eighteen years (FAO-INFONAC 1966). The project focused on a real problem but did so in a wrong way. Instead of calling for the help of the Miskito population living in the area, it opted for technocratic measures supported by sophisticated and expensive equipment, which generated hostility toward the project among the Miskitos.

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According to Jenkins (1986:149), the Indians intentionally burned down the pine forests in retaliation against the arrogant attitudes of the technicians, as well as to get a better salary on the fire-fighting teams. INFONAC was also active in creating forest reserves. It aimed at conserving resources on the brink of extinction as a result of the predatory practices of foreign companies; however, it did not take into account the Indians living in affected areas. Several reserves were created: 1.

2.

Decree 569 of February 28, 1961 established the Proyecto Forestal del Norte, covering the area between the Coco River in the north, the Caribbean Sea in the east, and the Wawa River in the south and west—in other words, the entire Cape Gracias a Dios region. The Somoza government hoped, after a certain period of recuperation for the forests, to be able to give out concessions in the area once again. This area consisted of 1,561,672 acres, of which something more than 8 percent (130,963 acres) were communal lands. Decree 106 of February 1969 declared the project area to be a Permanent Forest Reserve to be administered by INFONAC. Later, Decrees 156 (April 1971) and 147 (November 1976) declared the area between the Rio Grande de Matagalpa and the Wawa (2,152,859 acres) and the area between the Wawa and the Kukalaya (251,053 acres) each to be a Permanent Forest Reserve, and to be administered by INFONAC.

In all, 3,953,100 acres of forestland were affected, of which something more than 494,200 acres belonged to Indian villages. This created tensions and conflicts with the Indians, which some governmental agencies fruitlessly attempted to overcome. In 1974 the Instituto Agrario Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Agrarian Institute) gave land titles for almost 74,130 acres to sixteen villages on the Coco River (among which were Waspam, Bilwaskarma, Saklin, Wasla, Kum, Bismuna, and Kisalaya) that had been dispossessed by INFONAC's Proyecto Forestal del Norte. In 1976, 21,498 acres more were given to the group of ten villages around Puerto Cabezas, which already owned 24,710 acres by virtue of the Harrison-Altamirano Treaty (Jenkins, 1986; 222-224). But these measures were not enough to calm the Indians. The lands they had been given were only a small part of those occupied by INFONAC. In addition, the Sumu villages were not taken into account in these compensatory measures. Litigation among the villages concerning their lands and boundaries further confused the situation. As village population grew, the villages demanded more and more land, and frequently the lands belonging to one village were superimposed on lands belonging to another. Furthermore, the FAO-INFONAC study cited earlier recommended a

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program to promote the industrialization of all the natural resources of the Coast and to stimulate export agriculture, particularly cattle raising: • Establish a general program for the entire Coast region in order to make use of all its resources and to systematize their commercialization in a rational manner; • Make use of existing resources, give special credits for a period of 10 years to private capital which wishes to establish large cattle ranches on the Atlantic Coast; • Authorize the regulated exportation of cattle on the hoof on the Atlantic Coast in order not to affect the market for chilled meats from the Pacific; • Intensify cattle raising in other areas of the country in order to increase the exportation of cows to the Atlantic Coast.

IAN and Agrarian Colonization Instituto Agrario Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Agrarian Institute, IAN) was the first government agency to take on the development project on the Coast in the context of the agrarian reform law (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, April 19, 1963). This agrarian reform, like other similarly inspired laws passed in other countries of the region in the same period, had as its political goal the integration of lands considered marginal into a strategy of colonization. The law, in effect, aimed at the "incorporation of new lands," the "diversification of production," the "industrialization of the countryside," and "fostering small rural businesses," as well as creating rural schools, providing farmers with modern technology, improving housing in the countryside, organizing the market for farm products, and giving credit assistance; in general terms, what would later be known as the "integrated strategy for rural development." The law also postulated the organization of farm cooperatives and the "transformation of Indian communities into production cooperatives." The following types of land were affected for the purposes of this law: (1) national lands "which are suitable [for cultivation]"; (2) community lands and lands that were the private property of municipalities and autonomous institutions; (3) lands to be acquired by the IAN; (4) privately held lands that do not fulfill the social function of property (Article 18), defined as those lands that were left fallow, uncultivated, insufficiently cultivated, or not exploited by their proprietor over a period of two years (Article 19). Later in this chapter, I will explain how the points emphasized here conflicted with the kind of agricultural land use practiced by Indian villages and previously established mestizo farmers and would ultimately lead to many of these groups losing their land. The most important project carried out through the IAN was the Proyecto Rigoberto Cabezas (PRICA), which would come to include more than 988,400 acres in the municipalities of Rama (in the department of

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Zelaya), Villa Sandino (then Villa Somoza, in the department of Chontales), and Morrito (in the department of Río San Juan). The project, begun in 1963, aimed at settling 4,000 farm families, who would go into export cattle production (approximately two-thirds of the land in this project was for this purpose) and the production of vegetables and grains. PRICA had a fair amount of foreign financing; the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), for example, loaned the project $8.3 million. But from the beginning the impact of the project on the people involved in it was very slight. The underlying idea of the project was that it would be carried out in unpopulated territory, but this was not the case. During the 1950s and 1960s, major changes in land tenure had taken place that the project's planners either were not aware of or did not take into account. A large number of farmers in the departments of Boaco and Chontales had been gradually moving east, attracted by the availability of land, employment on U.S. banana plantations and in rubber camps, and cultivation of the perennial herb raicilla. Moreover, 400 farm families affected by volcanic eruptions in other regions of the country had moved into the area of Nueva Guinea. Thus, when the PRICA began, a large part of the region had already been put to use. In practice, the major effect of the project was to create an important labor and land reserve for export agriculture. PRICA made small producers dependent on the large cattle raisers of Boaco and Chontales. The small farmers were incorporated into cattle production through a system of land rental to raise beef cattle or to produce milk and milk products. In the first case, the farmers had to run all the risks of cattle production in its more labor-intensive phases; but after the calves attained a certain size, these were "finished" on large cattle ranches close to the export slaughterhouses, or else sold to exporters of live cattle. In the second case, small farmers were subordinated to the buyers who took the milk to processing plants; or, in the case of farmers living far from the market, the milk was processed as cheese on the farm. In every case, this arrangement also allowed small farmers to produce basic grains and contributed to the clearing and preparation of new pastureland. As new land began to be used for market production, the small farmers were once again pushed off to lands even farther away. In this sense, the real role of the families participating in PRICA was to open up agricultural territory for later appropriation by large landowners. The policies carried out by IAN in this part of the Coast thus reinforced the natural tendencies of agrarian capitalism. Another IAN project in the same period was Tasba Raya (New Land, in Miskito). The project was located west of La Tronquera, in a wide-leaf forest area. IAN, with the collaboration of the Moravian and Catholic churches and the Partido Liberal Nacionalista (Somoza's Liberal Nationalist party), founded

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a farm colony composed of four settlements that together covered over 741,300 acres. The goal of the project was to solve the problem of the lack of agricultural land for the Miskito villages located downriver on the Coco River, these villages had been forced to move off the northern bank of the river when a 1960 International Court of Justice ruling assigned that area to Honduras. The project was also used to relocate some of the villages on forestlands where INFONAC was trying to develop its forest preservation programs. Finally, some families affected by the periodic flooding of the lower Coco River were also relocated. The Indian farmers who had been relocated adapted well to the surroundings. Land clearing was done collectively, as were the first rice planting and the planting of fruit trees, and steps were taken to collectivize the production process. However, at a certain point the Somoza government decided that the project was excessive, because of the possibility of conflicts between the people in the settlements and the government. The French technicians who were working on the project were expelled from the country, accused of subversion; later the cooperative model was abandoned, and the families were given individual parcels of 123.5 acres each. A third IAN farm colonization project was the Proyecto Siuna, covering 86,485 acres and involving 800 families. The project's boundaries were the highway to Puerto Cabezas and the Silby, Kipo, and Prinzapolka rivers. The project created conflicts with the mestizo farmers who had earlier moved into the area and with some Sumu villages. The IAN plan was to give parcels of 50 manzanas (87.5 acres) each to the colonists; the farmers who were already working part of this land were relocated or had their lands parceled up into lots of 86 acres each and given to the new colonists. Between 1964 and 1973, IAN gave land titles for 2,594,550 acres to 16,000 families. All the titled land was on the agricultural frontier, the fertile western regions, with a high concentration of farmers, were not affected. The Programa Nacional de Titulación (National Title Program) operated only in the departments of Nueva Segovia, Jinotega, Matagalpa, Chontales, Río San Juan, and Zelaya; more than half the titled land was in Zelaya. The geographical distribution of this land makes it clear that the program's essential goal was to lessen the pressure of small farmers on the land in the west, where cotton growing was taking land away from farmers who were growing basic grains, and to move these farmers to the agricultural frontier. CODECA

Although neither the agrarian reform nor the agency that carried it out— IAN—had the Atlantic Coast as their explicit sphere of operations, land affected by the reform was that of the Eastern region. In 1965 a government agency was created that was specifically charged with dealing with the Atlantic Coast: the Comisión para el Desarrollo de la Costa Atlántica

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(Commission for the Development of the Atlantic Coast, CODECA), an agency of the Ministry of the Economy. Little documentation was left by this agency. According to the decree that created it, its goal was to "increase cultural, agricultural, cattle-raising, industrial, commercial, road-building, and health activities on the Atlantic Coast." To do this, it was charged with diversifying the crops raised in the region and increasing the export production of cattle and other livestock, as well as setting up industries to process the region's raw materials. CODECA initially planned an ambitious set of infrastructure and production projects (see CODECA 1966). However, it does not seem to have been very functional; according to the vice president of the Republic and, at the same time, minister of the economy (and therefore the highest authority of the commission), CODECA was "only decorative" (Argiiello Cardenal 1966:2-3). In any case, it does not seem to have had a role comparable in importance to those of INFONAC and IAN during the 1960s and 1970s.

Modernizing the Legislation on Natural Resources In contrast to the total permissiveness characterizing the government's initial attitude to foreign companies and its tolerance of the predatory exploitation of natural resources, in the 1950s the government began to take legal measures to regulate extractive activities, guarantee a minimum of rationality in the use of natural resources, and generate a higher local added value for these products. There is clearly a great distance between the letter of these laws and what the Somoza regime actually did, and in the meantime a large part of the wealth produced by the country's natural resources ended up in the bank accounts of the foreign companies and of the Somozas and their associates. But it must be noted that this reorientation at least implied a change of emphasis; moreover, it points up the contradiction between a state conceived of as the patrimony of the ruling family and a state that could actually defend the interests of capitalists as a class. The principal legal measures were the following: 1. The General Law on the Exploitation of Natural Wealth (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, April 17, 1958) declared that the state was the legal owner of those natural resources that "have no other owners" and set conditions guaranteeing their rational exploitation through a system of licenses and concessions for exploration and exploitation. The law applied generally, with the exception of lands and waters that would be regulated by special laws, and set up the framework within which specific laws would be written for each type of resource. 2. The Special Law on Fishing (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, February 7, 1961) regulated the different types of fishing; established closed seasons for turtles and established a system of licenses and rights according to boat

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capacity. It prohibited transferring fish from one boat to another on the high seas without prior authorization and made the installation of a processing plant in the country a prerequisite for the granting of a commercial fishing license. 3. The Special Law on the Exploration and Exploitation of Mines and Quarries (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, March 24, 27, and 30, 1965) abolished the Mining Code of 1906. It created the Comisión Nacional de Minería (National Mining Commission), charged with regulating the exploration and exploitation of these resources. Such activities would be carried out under concessions; the exploration period could not exceed five years, and the concession area could not be greater than 193 square miles; the exploitation period of a given concession could not exceed fifteen years, and the maximum area was 7.7 square miles; but in both cases, the time periods could be extended. The law imposed different kinds of taxes and set the terms for government participation at up to 30% of the profits from production and capital in the company receiving the concession. 4. The Law for the Conservation, Protection, and Development of the Forest Resources of the Country (La Gaceta, Diario Oficial, October 21, 1967). This law, at least in the letter, demonstrates a change in concessions policy and official concern with the level of degradation of forest resources. It declared the conservation, protection, and development of the country's forest resources to be of "national interest" and established direct government participation in their exploitation by means of the creation of reserves. It made, for the first time, a classification of lands that could be exploited; reduced the maximum land area of the concessions; made the installation of processing plants for cut wood a prerequisite for the granting of licenses, as a way of adding value to the exported product; imposed taxes; and set maximum periods for exploitation licenses.

Development Projects What follows is a rapid review of the relatively wide range of projects designed or developed by the government in this period. This listing may help give a better understanding of the government's viewpoint in its approach to the Atlantic Coast in the 1960s and 1970s. 1.

2. 3.

Infrastructure projects, including building a port for foreign trade; constructing the Rio Blanco-Siuna and Puerto Cabezas-Rosita highways; improving secondary roads; constructing the Rama-Pearl Lagoon port complex; constructing the Bluefields-Puerto Cabezas intercoastal canal; and providing rural electrification; Communications projects, such as extending the national telephone network to the Coast; Agriculture and agroindustry projects: the building of grain storage

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houses in Waspam and Bluefields; the Tierra Dorada (Kukra Hill) sugar plantation and banana and pineapple plantations; a model slaughterhouse for the Coast; the construction of shrimp-drying plants for export; banana plantations on the banks of the Coco and Escondido rivers. Few of these projects were ever fully executed; most of them never got beyond the planning stage. But even as bureaucratic fantasies, they give evidence of a modernizing, dynamic conception of the role of the government, which contrasts with the passive permissiveness of the preceding decades. Furthermore, after the revolutionary triumph of 1979, many of these shelved projects served as the basis for the Sandinista approach to the Atlantic Coast.

Cooperative Organization and Community Development During the 1960s, the government and several nongovernmental agencies, Nicaraguan and foreign, introduced programs for cooperative organization and community development. These strategies were similar to those recommended in the same period in Latin America and the Caribbean by agencies and programs of the U.S. government—USAID, American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the Alliance for Progress, and others. The main ventures of this sort were the following (in addition to others, like Tasba Raya, which have already been mentioned):2 1. ACARIC, Asociación de Clubes Agrícolas del Río Coco (Association of Farm Clubs on the Coco River), was created in 1967 by Capuchin priests and Moravian pastors. Its goal was to organize several dozen Miskito farm clubs on the river so farmers could protect themselves against the abusive practices of the Chinese and mestizo merchants in the area and improve living conditions in the villages through the development of environmental hygiene, preventive health measures, and so forth. ACARIC brought together almost fifty villages on the Coco River, but it failed in 1974 because of a heavy dependence on tied credit, poor administration, and corruption in some of its leadership. 2. CASIM, Comité de Acción Social de la Iglesia Morava (Committee for Social Action of the Moravian Church), was created in the late 1960s. It organized some cooperatives in the northern part of Zelaya: one to grow cashew nuts in Wasla, others for running rice threshers in Sisfn and Musawás. In the latter two cases, the villages had problems with the administration and maintenance of the equipment; in Sisfn the thresher was never installed. 3. FUNDE, the Fundación Nicaragüense de Desarrollo (Nicaraguan Development Foundation), supported the creation of several production and

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consumption cooperatives in the early 1970s in the Pearl Lagoon area: Tasbapauni (copra), Orinoco and Marshall Point (fishing), and Karatd (copra and fishing). 4. IAN promoted such endeavors as production cooperatives in Nueva Guinea, commercialization cooperatives in the Tasba Raya project, trading cooperatives on the Plata River. 5. The Ministry of Agriculture and Cattle Raising also promoted the creation of farm clubs in different parts of Zelaya. Cooperative projects were generally accompanied by programs to train local leaders in education, health, and other fields and to improve living conditions in the area. In this respect, there was a fair amount of activity around the training of midwives, cooperative organizers, housewives, local judges, teachers. However, various factors prevented a consolidation of a strong cooperative movement. One of these was the incorporation into a single organization of groups with very different and even opposing interests; this, for example, is what happened in the San Isidro cooperative in Siuna, which put small and middle-level producers together with merchants and transportation owners. Another factor was the introduction of large amounts of money into communities with little cash flow, which led to internal conflicts and occasionally gave rise to corruption. At other times, the administration of equipment was used as a power base by which to strengthen some individual's political position within the community. In some cases, the equipment was too sophisticated or complex for the people in the community to handle. In general, cooperative relationships were strengthened more through events taking place inside the community than through the incorporation of experiences from outside. Moreover, the ambivalence with which the Somoza regime (particularly its local agents, the National Guard and the rural justices) viewed these projects is one of the reasons they failed to produce results. The regime, in fact, vacillated between accepting these experiments as part of a strategy of anticipated reform that would forestall greater conflicts and seeing them as a breeding ground for "subversion." In spite of specific failures in the development of cooperative organizations themselves, these experiments did not take place in a vacuum, nor were their effects confined to the short term. In a sense, these attempts put together certain real, if unformulated, concerns of the people involved, above all in the Indian villages hard hit by the recession, the relocation from Honduras, and natural disasters (floods, hurricanes, and the like). At the same time, they introduced new ideas and concepts into the region, and their successes and failures helped pave the way for the more permanent kinds of organization that would arise in the 1970s.

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CHANGES IN THE POPULATION AND THE ECONOMY Between 1963 and 1971, the total population of the department of Zelaya grew from 88,963 to 145,508, an increase of 63 percent, while the total population of Nicaragua increased 22 percent. As a result, the participation of the Costeño population in the national total grew from less than 6 percent to almost 8 percent between the two censuses. Even more spectacular was the growth of the economically active population, which increased by 6.4 percent for the entire country, while in Zelaya it grew more than 37 percent, and the economically active agricultural population there increased by 51 percent. A comparison of the 1963 and 1971 censuses shows that during the period between these Zelaya was the only department with an absolute increase in the number of rural salaried workers (from 5,279 to 7,442), whereas the number of employers remained the same; the number of workers per employer increased from 11:1 to 17:1. The same results obtain with respect to the economically active agricultural population: Between the two censuses, the number of workers per employer grew 50 percent, from 8:1 to 12:1. It may be assumed that the relatively rapid expansion of the large landowning sector involved an absolute increase in the need for wage labor. The number of self-employed agricultural workers grew 40 percent between 1963 and 1971, and the number of unpaid family members grew 38 percent; the two occupational categories, which together in 1963 constituted 66 percent of the economically active agricultural population in Zelaya, grew to 90 percent in 1971, possibly as a result of the expansion of the agricultural frontier through immigration, both spontaneous and planned. Comparing the two censuses, a CSUCA (Confederación Universitania de Centro America) research project found that in Zelaya the increase in the amount of land actually dedicated to production was quite low in comparison with the amount of land held by landowners; this further supports the conclusion that there was heavy monopolization of land. According to the same CSUCA study, only 30 percent of the increase in land used for agriculture could be attributed to the increase in the number of small and middle-level producers, whereas the other 70 percent (976,260 acres) had fallen into the hands of large landowners after small farmers had cleared and prepared the land for agriculture (CSUCA 1978:253-254). Tables 3.1 and 3.2 offer a general perspective on the transformations that took place in Coast agriculture during the 1960s. These changes cannot be explained solely as the effect of policy measures adopted in the 1950s and 1960s; natural disasters (the hurricanes and floods that affected wide areas of the Coco River) also had their effect. But a significant number of these changes can undoubtedly be attributed to the government's new policy approach. In the first place, there was an appreciable increase in the number of holdings (54 percent) and, above all, in the amount of land under cultivation

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Table 3.1 Department of Zelaya: Changes in Agricultural Structure in the 1960s

Municipality

Bluefields Com Island La Cruz del Río Grande Prinzapolka Puerto Cabezas Rama Cape Gracias a Dios Waspam Zelaya, TOTAL

Farm Units (number)

Area of Farm Units (thousands of acres)

Cattle (head)

1963

1971

1963

1971

1963

1971

978 67 997 1,331 77 1,995 1,498 733 7,676

1,043 131 1,857 2,692 790 5,840 78 483 12,914

68.6 1.0 115.3 41.5 9.3 214.8 5.9 11.8 468.2

88.4 1.4 281.3 246.2 96.0 48.8 1.2 11.2 774.5

7,086 5 9,515 7,633 2,424 12,335 4,514 4,416 47,928

7,740 95 13,259 21,270 2,140 66,426 2,473 3,597 117,000

Source-. Republic of Nicaragua, Secretary of Agriculture, agricultural censuses, 1963 and 1971. Table 3.2 Department of Zelaya: Changes in the Average Distribution of Land Area and Cattle in the 1960s Municipality

Bluefields Com Island La Cruz del Río Grande Prinzapolka Puerto Cabezas Rama Cape Gracias a Dios Waspam Zelaya, TOTAL

Average Area per Farma

Average Herd per Farmb

Average Herd per Manzanab

1963

1971

1963

1971

1963

70.15 15.35 115.72 31.20 12.06 107.70 3.94 16.20 55.97

84.41 10.00 151.47 91.47 121.56 93.98 15.71 23.31 98.72

7.2

7.4

0.10

—

—

—

9.5 5.7 3.1 6.2 3.0 6.0 5.0

7.1 7.9 2.7 11.4 31.7 7.4 9.0

0.08 0.18 0.26 0.05 0.76 0.37 0.09

1971 0.08 —

0.04 0.08 0.02 0.12 2.0 0.30 0.09

Source: Republic of Nicaragua, Secretary of Agriculture, agricultural censuses, 1963 and 1971. a In manzanas (1.75 acres) b Number of head of cattle

(172 percent) and of cattle (166 percent). The average area per farm and average number of cattle per owner also grew, but the relatively small average number of cattle per ranch remained the same. In other words, cattle raising in this region remained relatively extensive. Large-scale cattle raising was basically concentrated in the neighboring departments of Boaco and Chontales; these herds moved each year in the dry season toward the municipality of El Rama in the department of Zelaya in search of natural pastures. The average area per farm tended to become more homogeneous: the dispersion coefficient fell by almost 28 percent between the two censuses,3

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but this coefficient increased more when related to the number of cattle per unit of surface area (the dispersion coefficient grew 77 percent) than when related to the average herd per ranch (an increase of 72 percent). Insofar as it is possible to reach some conclusion from these figures, they could suggest a strong differentiation with respect to the intensive or extensive nature of Coast cattle raising. We may also distinguish between the changes that took place in the Coco River area (the municipalities of Puerto Cabezas, Waspam, and Cape Gracias a Dios) and those on the agricultural frontier (the municipalities of El Rama, Prinzapolka, and La Cruz del Rio Grande). The census figures for the first area show an agricultural crisis during the 1960s: a decline in the number of farms, in their surface area, and in the number of cattle. This was clearly a result of floods, hurricanes, and the relocation of part of the population outside of the area. In contrast, on the agricultural frontier the amount of farmland grew, as did the average size of farms and cattle herds, in absolute figures as well as in comparison to the rest of the department. The situation in the municipality of El Rama is interesting: The increase in the number of farms and cattle herds was greater than increases in the surface area under cultivation. There was, therefore, a decrease in the average area per farm, but the average herd size grew, per farm and per land unit. Cattle raising remained extensive in nature, but the number of cattle per manzana went from 1:20 to 1:8. The slight reduction in the average amount of land per farm in El Rama and the relative concentration of cattle per farm suggest that most of the best land had been occupied early on. The pressure from the modernization of agrarian capitalism created contradictions on three levels: 1. A contradiction emerged between this modernizing capitalist project as a whole and the kinds of land and natural resource use that had been developed by mestizo farmers who had already settled on this land and by Indian villagers. In the first case, IAN's colonization and titling programs came into conflict with the land rights these farmers claimed on the basis of the work they had put into their land. This situation arises frequently on the agricultural frontier. The farmers who begin to work these lands on their own initiative—in the sense that they are not part of a government program— have to clear previously virgin lands and make different kinds of improvements; from their point of view, they have a right to this land because of the labor they have invested in it. IAN's colonizing programs generally paid no attention to these farmers' rights and forced them to move farther east or, when this was not possible, took away some or all of the land they were working. In the second case, the forestry programs took over Indian communal lands, did not recognize preexisting land rights, and exerted a negative pressure on the kind of use made of natural resources.

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This contradiction is expressed in regional terms as a confrontation between the Pacific and the Atlantic, and in ethnic terms as a conflict between the mestizo, or "Spanish," ethnic group and the Indians. In fact, this conflict is not new; what is new is the modernization of the regional and ethnic contradictions that have been present throughout Nicaraguan history as far back as the colonial period. 2. No less important is the fact that the expansion of this type of capitalism transfers to the Atlantic Coast the conflict between agrarian capitalists and small farmers and farm workers that had already arisen in western Nicaragua. What from a regional perspective appears to be one single problem of territorial usuipation shows up on this level as a complex set of class contradictions, which results in the subordinate players in the conflict being dispossessed of their land in the same way and through the same mechanisms as those used to dispossess small fanners in the Pacific. 3. The arrival of small farmers who had been pushed off their lands in the Pacific region further displaced certain Indian villages, which were pressured into abandoning their lands, thus heightening interethnic conflicts between Indians and mestizos. These conflicts were particularly acute in the mining region and, to a lesser extent, on the Coco River—in the latter case, through the expansion of cattle raising by mestizo landowners. In the south, the low population density and the large amount of available land did not generate the same kind of conflicts, or at least not with the same violence as in other places. The expansion of the agricultural frontier as a result of this process had a serious impact on the tropical forest, similar to that in other countries in the region (see, for example, Williams 1986). In 1963 the departments of Zelaya and Río San Juan together had 6 percent of the total number of cattle in the country; in 1972 this figure had reached 12 percent. In 1965 Zelaya had 7 percent of the land used for growing corn and in 1977 almost 20 percent (Slutzky 1981). According to some estimates, the eastward advance of the agricultural frontier caused the destruction of approximately 296,520 acres of tropical forest per year (Jenkins 1980), further aggravated by the fact that the high ecological cost was never translated into an appreciable improvement in living and working conditions for the farmers brought in from the Pacific.4 An analysis of the census data shows that economic growth on the agricultural frontier contrasts with recession on the river. This was caused by several factors, some of which have already been mentioned: the vulnerability of regional production to the erratic fluctuations in international prices; the resulting closures of the main foreign companies, also caused by negative ecological conditions; a reduction in salaried employment; the impact of the 1960 relocations and increased demographic pressure on scarce resources; the destruction caused by the 1971 hurricane; and others.

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The developmentalist initiatives of the state may be viewed in this light; they were attempts to reintroduce growth into an economy that was in a recessive phase. The general success of these attempts was slight: There was little development, and concessions continued to be granted on strictly neocolonialist principles. But the growth of certain new industries, such as large-scale fishing, dynamized the economic life of southern Zelaya, especially in the area of Bluefields, Corn Island, and Pearl Lagoon, and further differentiated this area from the mines and river areas. Fishing: Large-scale fishing began in 1953 when Alberti Seafoods, a U.S. company, obtained a contract to fish for shrimp and other shellfish off the Atlantic Coast. In the 1960s and 1970s, large-scale fishing grew rapidly; several companies were established, especially with U.S. and Somoza capital. Production was primarily for export, and the main market was the United States. Despite some protective legislation, there was great deterioration in the fish population, particularly shrimp and lobster, because of the lack of effective state controls; there were no closed seasons. Fishing required little investment and provided high profits. Between 1958 and 1978, eighteen commercial fishing licenses were granted in the Atlantic, but as of the last year of this period there were only six processing plants in the country. A comparison of these figures shows the irrational way this resource was managed: "Floating" licenses, for firms without their own processing plants on land, were granted, in spite of a law that explicitly prohibited this practice. This led to the existence of a fishing fleet far greater than the availability of the resource it was exploiting (see Urroz Escobar 1980). Wood. The closure of NIPCO (the Nicaraguan Long Leaf Pine Lumber Company) in 1963 left hundreds of Miskitos, Sumus, and mestizos without jobs. The company had been founded in 1945 in Puerto Cabezas, and in less than two decades its predatory practices had exhausted 741,300 acres of savanna pine forests. In the 1950s it had come to produce half of all the lumber exported by Nicaragua. Exploitation was so intense that in 1963 Nicaragua became a net importer of wood products for the first time in its history. In 1969 ATCHEMCO was established in La Tronquera, close to Waspam. The new enterprise was involved in the extraction of resins and oils from the pine forests felled by NIPCO. In the same year Industrias Forestales de Centroamirica Sociedad Andnima (INFOCASA) was established with Spanish capital and began to produce industrial-quality wood. The firm took over 1,737 square miles belonging to the area of Krukira, violating Indian communal lands. There were many other similar cases, but in brief, according to the Nicaraguan Central Bank, in 1975 concessions granted to lumber

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companies in Zelaya covered 27,000 square kilometers (10,426 square miles)—something over 40 percent of the total surface area of the department. Tuno. In 1955 the U.S.-owned firm Wrigley's set up a tuno processing plant in Waspam. Tuno, the raw material for the production of chewing gum, was collected by teams of Miskito and Sumu workers who turned it over to the company to be processed. No measures were taken to replace this resource; for this reason, workers had to go farther and farther away to get to resinable trees as the productive capacity of those trees closest to the villages decreased. In 1979 the plant decided to close down because of the triumph of the revolution. Mines. Activity in the three large mines on the Coast was unequal but generally declined. The Rosita Mine (copper), property of the U.S. firm Venture Limited, was bought in 1962 by the Canadian company Falconbridge, which had large investments in ferronickel mining in Central America and the Caribbean. In turn, in 1973 Falconbridge sold Rosita to the U.S. company Rosario Mining Resources, which was also active in Honduras and the Dominican Republic. In 1975 the mine closed because of insufficient copper production, but it reopened in 1977 when sufficient reserves of gold and silver were found. La Luz Mine in Siuna (gold) was acquired by Falconbridge in 1960. Activities were interrupted in 1968 when the company's dam collapsed, partly flooding the mine. Approximately 3,000 people were put out of work by the closure, most of them Indians. In 1973 the mine was acquired by Rosario and in 1978 returned to operation. Finally, the Bonanza Mine (gold, lead, zinc), property of Neptune Mining of the United States, continued operations unchanged. During the 1960s and 1970s the government, through the Nicaraguan Central Bank and private consulting firms, studied the existence of new deposits of gold and other metals (copper, lead, zinc, iron) and stones (quartz, neumatite, limestone, and lutite). The decline in mining production is reflected in the sharp fall in employment, provoked mainly by the closure of the Siuna mine. Between 1963 and 1971 almost 60 percent of mining jobs in Zelaya were lost (approximately 1,800 workers). Oil Concessions. In the last ten years of the dictatorship, the state granted thirty-four exploration concessions for almost 14,826,000 acres. Of these, thirty-two (94 percent, for 13,343,400 acres—91 percent of the total concession area) were on the Atlantic Coast. Table 3.3 shows the heavy concentration of these concessions in the hands of a few large companies.

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Table 3.3 Main Petroleum Exploration Concessions on the Atlantic Coast in the 1970s Concessionary Franks Petroleum Texaco Caribbean Western Caribbean ESSO Chevron/Philips Union Oil TOTAL

Number of Concessions

Area®

Percent of Totalb

4 5 5 3 2 3 22

1304 3213 936 2177 1719 1453 10,802

9.7 23.9 7.0 16.2 12.8 10.8 80.4

Source: La Gaceta, Diario Oftcial. a

In thousands of acres •Total area of the Atlantic Coast

CONTRADICTIONS AND LIMITATIONS OF THE DEVELOPMENTALIST APPROACH Starting in the 1950s and particularly in the 1960s, the Nicaraguan government played an active role on the Atlantic Coast. By building infrastructure, directing and financing development projects, and using economic, fiscal, and financial measures in general, the government worked for the geographical and ideological integration of the Atlantic with the Pacific regions, attempting to create a market involving the Atlantic Coast's land, labor, and capital and, at the same time, generating external economies for the capital invested on the Coast. During this period, the Coast continued to be, for the Somoza regime, the same vast reserve of exploitable wealth that it had been during the enclave period. In 1974, at the height of the d e v e l o p m e n t a l approach, Anastasio Somoza Debayle (the son of the first Somoza) said of the Atlantic Coast: There is an abundance of work and subsistence for all Nicaraguans who love peace and work. Once again I repeat to the young people of the countryside who are suffering because all the land is occupicd, that here are the Atlantic Coast and the Coast people wailing for them to come to make it part of our country and to make the most progressive and the greatest agrarian reform in Latin America. [Somoza Debayle 1974:11]

But even so, the productive capacity of this treasure trove was seen as a patrimony to be administered, protected, and eventually renovated by the government; the government was even given a role in the exploitation of its resources. In other words, the Nicaraguan government was taking on, at least partially, the role of a properly capitalist government. This developmentalist approach had, however, clear limitations, even in comparison with other developmentalist strategies in Central America. The first limitation was the relatively weak participation by Nicaragua in

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the Central American Common Market and in the competition for foreign investment. Nicaragua's economic structure was relatively undeveloped and offered a weaker and more primitive investment platform than, for example, Costa Rica or Guatemala.5 The control exercised by Somoza and his clique over the most growth-oriented sectors of the Nicaraguan economy further limited the range and effectiveness of the developmentalist approach. A second limitation on this approach was the voracious acquisitiveness of the old landowning class and the new Somocista bourgeoisie (civilian and military). The developmentalist concept was that a kind of rural middle class would be created on marginal lands through capitalist "democratization" of the access to private ownership of land; plus, efficient conditions for production would be created through colonization, cooperativization, and, in general, the provision of enough resources. This idea ran into conflict with the unchecked lust for land of both the old and the new landowning classes, who rapidly took over the lands prepared by farmers who had migrated to the area or had been relocated through colonization projects. Third were the limitations of government institutions, which were basically part of the booty passed around among the ruling clique. To the extent that capitalist modernization necessitates increasing the government's regulatory capacity, government institutions must become more differentiated and rationalized so that they can function more effectively and efficiently. But the Nicaraguan government of the 1960s and 1970s was still too much a captive of the Somozas and their associates; it was more the property of a small group of capitalists than the representative of the capitalist class in general. Thus it happened that despite legislative concern for regulating the exploitation of resources, the ruling clique maintained its policy of making extensive self-concessions. Out of sixty-five decrees and resolutions dealing with natural resources on the Atlantic Coast promulgated during the last thirty years of the Somoza regime (1950-1979), forty-seven, or 72 percent, consisted of concessions granted to the Somoza family, close family friends, and high officials of the National Guard. This last point shows up the contradiction between the two conceptions of the state that coexisted in Nicaragua in this period. On the one hand, there was a class state, the modem capitalist state, and on the other, a patrimonial state, the direct and unmediated property of the holders of political power— the Somoza dictatorship's state. This contradiction is the basic cause of the tensions arising around the efforts of the modernizing bureaucracy and the international development agencies—including those of the U.S. government—to bring about a more rational exploitation of natural resources, a diversification of the productive system, and expanded access to land, in order to reduce the level of social antagonisms. These initiatives were generally limited by the rapacity of the Somoza dictatorship and by its use of political power to make money, increase the family fortune, and do favors for cronies.

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The developmentalist approach also contributed to the aggravation of a number of ethnic and regional contradictions and increased the number of areas in which these were felt. This became especially the case in the forestry projects, which took over some Indian communal lands. The approach to land adopted by IAN was the result of experiences with the capitalist type of agriculture that predominated in the Pacific but which had little to do with the conception of land held by Costeflo Indian villagers and mestizo frontier farmers. What to IAN were national lands—"fallow," "empty," or "insufficiently cultivated"—were, in fact, to the Indian villagers and even to a large number of mestizo farmers who had migrated to the region in the 1950s, lands being cultivated in the most efficient way given the prevailing ecological, cultural, and financial conditions. IAN's concept of "national lands" had a very precise meaning that reinforced the developmentalist, modernizing approach promoted by the government in that period. IAN's perspective on intensive agriculture came into conflict with the existence of an itinerant frontier agriculture. In frontier agriculture, farmers cultivate only a small part of their land in any given period, depending on the amount of resources they have or, more concretely, on the number of workers they can mobilize. The rest of the land, which to IAN might appear to be unused or empty, is really reserve land that will later be put into production, while the land under cultivation up to that point will be left fallow to allow it to recuperate naturally. Therefore, an important part of the land considered by IAN to be unused or insufficiently exploited was affected by the agrarian reform and was taken away from farmers—Indians or mestizos—who were actually cultivating it in the correct manner. This contradiction aroused many complaints and protests to IAN by those affected, especially in the mining area. Moreover, the projects sponsored by IAN were explicitly oriented toward the organization of colonies and cooperatives and to the transformation of the Indian villages into cooperatives (Article 89 of the agricultural reform law). Although both villages and cooperatives are associative modes of production, they are organized on different principles. The village is structured on the basis of kinship; one belongs to it or not depending on one's family relations. The cooperative is structured upon a rational and contractual basis, and one participates in it voluntarily through an agreement. The forced introduction of cooperative organization came into conflict with deeply rooted cultural elements and added to conflicts in land use already mentioned. Although the successes of the cooperative movement were few, because of the overall political limitations of the project and the fact that it was controlled by the landowning class and the Somocistas, ignorance of the modes of productive organization characteristic of the Indian groups created additional obstacles that were difficult to overcome. The experience left a residue of antagonism, or at least a lack of confidence, which would affect the

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initial stages of the Sandinista agrarian reform. These attitudes were most widespread among those sectors of the Costeño population that in principle stood to benefit most from the revolutionary project. In addition to these economic and developmental contradictions there remained the historic contradictions between the ethnocentrism of the Nicaraguan state—the mestizo culture of the dominant class projected as the national culture—and the ethnic and cultural multiplicity of the Coast. Many government officials felt their particular culture was superior to that of the Coast's people. The inhabitants of the Coast continued to be seen as nomadic, wild tribes. This disdain and stereotyping were a continuation of the ethnocentrism of the Nicaraguan state that had lasted more than a century. In 1961, one of the intellectual representatives of the modernizing tendencies of the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie recommended: "It is time for the state to start a plan to integrate these rich lands, whose inhabitants have lived in total abandonment and in moral and material poverty, without any concept of family, religion or faith, in complete ignorance of the world and its civilization."6 In 1970 the (Somocista) newspaper Novedades (April 23, 1970) described the inhabitants of northern Zelaya as "migratory" and "savage." As a result of this combination of ethnocentric ignorance, prejudice, and arrogance, there was also a general disdain for the languages of the Costeño people and communities; these were viewed not as languages but as dialects—and, therefore, as second-class languages that ought to be eradicated. As a document put out by the Comisión para el Desarollo de la Costa Atlántica maintained, "The Rama Key dialect is very mixed with English, the use of this dialect is exclusively oral and essentially guttural.... The dialect of these [Miskitos] contains many Spanish and English terms . . . the Sumu group . . . has maintained the purity of their dialects and customs" (CODECA 1966: emphasis added). Faithful to this conception of reality, the government continued its policy of nationalization by means of language and schools. The most systematic action in this sense was the Proyecto Piloto de Educación Fundamental del Río Coco (Pilot Project for Basic Education on the Coco River). Promoted by the Ministry of Public Education with technical assistance from UNESCO and external financing, the project combined literacy and basic education with community development (MEP 1960). Before the 1950s, only the Moravian Church had shown concern for education in the Coco River villages, basically in connection with its pastoral work. Public education began to be systematized in the municipalities of Waspam and Cape Gracias a Dios during the pilot project; from 1955 to 1967, twenty-four public schools were established in different villages. From an anthropological perspective, the project's primary goal may be seen as the gradual deculturalization of the Miskito villages and their integration into mestizo social life; from an economic point of view, the

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goal may have been related to the government's interest in giving a basic education to lumber company workers. Finally, community development activities do not seem to have been very effective in overcoming some of the most serious hygiene problems of the villages (see Moreira 1958). But, on the other hand, a relatively large number of Indians from the Rio Coco who became leaders after 1979—revolutionaries and oppositionists—went through this project in one way or another. Creole English was the language that could best resist this "civilizing" onslaught for forced acculturation by means of obligatory education in Spanish. It was Creole, but it was also English and thus a strategic language for communicating with the growth centers of economic activity on the Coast: the mining and fishing companies and their managers. This may be one of the reasons for the higher position of the Creoles in the Costeño occupational hierarchy in comparison with the Miskitos and the Sumus. It must be said, however, that the Somozas' political discourse was less wounding to Coast sensibilities than that of the government bureaucracy. They not only recognized that at least there was a civilization on the Coast, as well as potential markets, but also used a tone, sometimes paternalistic, sometimes picturesque, that contrasted with the language and attitudes of the bureaucrats, the bourgeoisie, and their political and literary representatives: "The riches of the sea, the fertility of its lands, its navigable rivers and its open, hospitable, and loving people, are the virtues which adorn your Atlantic shore (Somoza Debayle 1974:11; emphasis added). In fact, both Somozas (father and son) had an ambivalent attitude toward the Atlantic Coast. They supported government Hispanization projects publicly in Managua; but whenever they traveled to the Coast, especially to Bluefields, they spoke to people in English and made a great show of their excellent relations with foreign companies and the U.S. government. It is possible that this ambivalence made many Costeños distinguish between the government bureaucracy and the Somozas. In any case, the paternalistic tone and the developmentalist-cum-folkloric approach of the Somozas contrasted with the arrogant behavior of the mestizo civil servants with whom the people had to deal every day. The overwhelming effect of the capitalist state on the Coast—its people and their cultures—reinforced the historic ethnic and regional conflict between the Pacific and the Atlantic, "Spaniards" and Costeños, and caused the Costeños to see mestizos as a homogeneous bloc. Positing the conflict in regional terms and giving priority to its ethnic and cultural dimensions made it very difficult for Costeños to see the underlying class nature of the conflict—that is, that the workers (salaried workers, farmers, and fishermen) of the different ethnic groups reinforced, through their exploitation and their mutual confrontations, the reproduction of capitalist domination. This is a relatively common occurrence in frontier regions in general (see for example,

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Ifligo Carrera 1983). This contradiction served to reinforce the domination of the Pacific bourgeoisie and the foreign companies, but the situation exploded only after the triumph of the revolution. THE 1960s RECESSION AND THE ACTIVATION OF THE COSTENO POPULATION Crisis and Differentiation Since the early 1960s, on economic crisis has been felt in the northern areas of the Atlantic Coast, caused by the exhaustion of forest and mining resources. The closure of NIPCO in 1963 and the Siuna mine in 1968, as well as the continuing exportation of all the profits to Managua and out of the country, aggravated the situation. The economic crisis began well before the fall of the Somoza regime.7 In 1966 the Atlantic Coast accounted for 9 percent of the total exports of Nicaragua; in 1975, for 5 percent. Decreases in the exportation of copper, wood, and cattle were the main reason for this reduction, which could not be compensated by new export items (shellfish, resins, lead, and zinc). Copper, which in 1966 accounted for 59 percent of the Coast's exports, fell to 2 percent of Coast exports in 1975; in this period, shrimp and lobster grew from 19 percent to 53 percent of all the Coast's exports. In 1975 shellfish and resins accounted for 75 percent of the exports of the region. The United States was almost the only market for these items. Many different factors combined in the 1960s and 1970s to create the conditions for a change in the perceptions and attitudes of the Coast population. First was the economic crisis itself. The closure of the companies and resulting unemployment forced the Indian workers to go back to their villages, or else to look for other activities in the areas where they had been working for a salary. Their return to the villages increased demographic pressures on local resources; this pressure was already high because of the relocation of the villages of the northern banks of the Coco River, which had been adjudicated to Honduras by the International Court of Justice in 1960. Traditionally, in the river villages the more fertile lands on what was now the Honduran side had been under cultivation, whereas the lands on the southern banks were used as pasture for small-scale cattle raising. In turn, these small-scale cattle raisers were being displaced by mestizo cattle ranchers who were advancing on communal lands, encouraged by government policies promoting the development of commercial cattle raising for the domestic market and for export. Both factors combined to lower yields for village crops and to increase the villagers' dependence on the merchants and on transport owners on the river. Many Sumu and Miskito miners turned to farming in the mines area but ran into land tenure problems with farmers who had previously been woiking in the area or who had arrived

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with IAN's colonization programs and had to adapt to a kind of agriculture quite different from that they had done in their villages. In every case the income they could generate from these activities was low, even in comparison with the salaries they had earned in the mines. In addition, the economic transformations and, particularly, new capitalist activities changed the way of life of many villages. The best-known case may be that of the seacoast villages that fished for turtle. During the 1970s, U.S. companies began to supply credit in advance to Miskito fishermen so they could catch turtles all year long and not only on a seasonal basis, as they had traditionally done. The result was that people got into debt and had to catch even more turtles to make their payments. In addition, the villagers became dependent on the cash income from the sale of turtles to buy food and other goods, having ceased other activities in order to spend more time fishing. Thus, even as the turtle population dropped rapidly, it was necessary to do more fishing in order to maintain the flow of money income into the villages. This also generated tensions and conflicts within the villages, because now turtle meat was sold instead of being given away or exchanged for other goods, as had been the practice in the villages (see Nietschmann 1973 for Tasbapauni, and Cattle 1979 for Sandy Bay Sirpi). The situation had worsened for many fishermen; their debts mounted rapidly, and it was difficult to repay these. But for others, possibly a minority, the new situation made it possible to make money and eventually to save. The fact that at first the difference between rich and poor was slight is irrelevant. In a relatively homogeneous social situation, as seems to have been the case in the villages up to the 1950s, small material differences— having two canoes instead of one, for example, and being able to lend the second one out in exchange for part of the catch—may have had a strong social impact. But in some cases, economic differentiation within the villages became relatively marked, as in the villages in Pearl Lagoon and on the mouth of the Rfo Grande de Matagalpa. Research conducted in the early 1970s by Cattle in Sandy Bay Sirpi (near the mouth of Rio Grande de Matagalpa) provides elements to appreciate the development of socioeconomic differentiation among villagers. For example, the average ownership of cattle was 1.4 head per family, but 55 families of the 67 living in the village had no cattle, and there were families owning more than 15 head. The same differences were recorded for pig ownership (an average of 2.5 per family, with one-third of the families owning none and some owning up to 10 pigs) and chickens (Cattle 1979:42). The progress of the Coast economy in these years accelerated the process of internal differentiation within the villages. Just as the expansion of turtle fishing eroded traditions and generated differences in the villages involved in this type of fishing, on the Coco River the sale of surplus

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rice allowed some Miskitos to start small stores in their own villages, both in combination and in competition with the Chinese shopkeepers. According to a CIERA research project, by the end of the 1970s most of the shopkeepers in the Coco River villages were of Miskito descent. It is not known whether the behavior of these Indian shopkeepers was different from that of the Chinese and mestizo merchants, but, as is indicated by the research project, in general the Indian shopkeepers were strongly rejected by the other members of the villages, to the extent that they lost, from the villages' perspective, their ethnic identity (CIERA 1981:123). In some Miskito villages on the coast south of Puerto Cabezas (for example, Wawa Bar), a marked differentiation appeared—in some cases to the point of being expressed in overt conflict—between the men who had been able to obtain jobs with the foreign companies and those who had remained subsistence farmers or fishermen. On the basis of this differentiation, the beginnings of social stratification within the ethnic group could be noted. Therefore, in the course of a decade, changes occurred in all spheres of the lives of these people: in their place of residence, their economic situation, and relations among villages; between the villages and government agencies; and within the communities themselves. These changes affected the entire Costeño population, but in different ways and to different degrees. The crisis affected the Indian villages in the north more than it did Indians and Creoles in the south. Although on the Coco River and in the mining district Sumus and Miskitos lost their jobs because of the exhaustion of resources and the closure of the companies, the expansion of industrial and export fishing in the Bluefields-Pearl Lagoon-Corn Island area opened up new possibilities of employment and income and made for new growth in the local economy. During the 1960s, U.S., Somocista, and Cuban capitalists—the latter having left Cuba because of the triumph of the revolution there—began to settle in the Bluefields area, basically because of fishing activities. In the latter part of the 1970s small businesspeople from Jamaica, frightened by the nationalist policies of the Manley government, established themselves in the Coast communities of Pearl Lagoon and the mouth of the Rio Grande de Matagalpa, some only temporarily, others in a more or less permanent manner. Fishing, by its very nature, is an activity with strong multiplier effects. Its growth helped raise activity levels in a wide variety of sectors: construction and repair of boats and fishing implements; unloading, processing, and storage; maintenance of equipment; transporting and supplying fuel. In addition, some sand companies were established, and the Kukra Hill sugar mill started operations. Trade between Bluefields, Corn Island, Pearl Lagoon, and Barra del Rio Grande on the Atlantic Coast and Jamaica, Gran Cayman, and the east coast of the United States grew

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rapidly. Money, and in particular dollars, began to circulate again, reactivating local commerce. In the early 1970s many Bluefields families had at least one member living in the United States or in English-speaking countries in the Caribbean Basin who generated hard currency (Gordon 1985). In the north, in contrast, and particularly in the mines and on the river, the climate was rather one of generalized depression. In this context, the community promotion campaigns sponsored by the Catholic and Moravian churches and by governmental and nongovernmental agencies constituted a space within which the expectations and frustrations of the people could be expressed, regardless of their immediate results. These programs contributed in activating the forces and the preoccupations that were beginning to arise in the villages; they emphasized the effectiveness of combined action by the people involved and in some way helped to train some local people. Moreover, the activities of these institutions and the development of their programs brought some of the more energetic local people into contact with the outside world, allowing them to incorporate new experiences and new demands into their work. Costeño students began arriving at the universities of the Pacific (Managua and León). But, at the same time, the development of these community programs and the administration of study grants, among other things, caused many young people to prefer Spanish to their native language, because opportunities to study, to improve oneself, and to leave the area for other places were greater for Spanish speakers. In addition, the young people lost interest in agriculture and viewed activities in the service sector as more attractive. This led them to undervalue their native language and caused some conflicts to arise with members of the older generations. Transformations in the Moravian Church The Moravian Church was also undergoing a process of profound change in this period. The broad and decisive influence of the church in all aspects of Coast culture caused these changes to affect the way in which people began to think of their way of life. The process of "nativization" of the church, which was to culminate in 1974, raised expectations on the part of the Miskito inhabitants of northern Zelaya, combining with and reinforcing the general dynamic of the region. The "nativization" of the Moravian Church was the set of steps taken to put Nicaraguan leadership in charge of the church and lessen its subordinate relationship to the U.S. church. The process began in 1949, a hundred years after the arrival of the first German missionaries; in 1962 the first Nicaraguan bishop (of Creole origin) was elected, and the the Moravian Mission in Nicaragua became the Moravian Church in Nicaragua, at the level of a "province." In 1968 the first national treasurer was named, and the seat of the

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treasury was relocated from Bluefields to Puerto Cabezas. In 1969 the Biblical Institute of Bilwaskarma got its first Nicaraguan director (also a Creole). In 1971 four Nicaraguans formed part of the Directive Board elected by the Provincial Synod of Puerto Cabezas, and in 1973 Joseph Kelly, from Pearl Lagoon, became the superintendent of the church. In the same year, the directorship of the important Moravian School of Bluefields was assumed by a Nicaraguan. In 1974, upon celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Moravian Church work in Nicaragua, the Provincial Synod of Bluefields elected for the first time a Directive Board composed exclusively of Nicaraguans (Wilson 1975). The emancipation of the Nicaraguan church from U.S. leadership meant that it became necessary for it to rely on its own financial resources to compensate for the reduction of funding from the United States. Therefore, the church viewed with interest programs for the social and economic strengthening of the Indian villages and of the Coast as a whole, because this would lead to greater financial contributions by the villages. As already mentioned, the church openly supported the formation of ACARIC, and Moravian pastors took positions in it. Nativization also raised expectations among pastors of Miskito origin that they would have a greater say in the affairs of the church. But, in fact, nativization led to a greater institutional influence of Creole officials. At the end of the 1970s, for example, the vast majority of Moravian pastors were of Miskito origin, but all the bishops save two were Creoles or "mixed." Furthermore, the Miskito pastors went only as far in their studies as the Biblical Institute of Bilwaskarma (the equivalent of a high-school education), whereas the Creoles could continue studying in the seminary in Costa Rica (the equivalent of college). In spite of this, the Miskito villages of the Coco River were still one of the main financial stays of this "Creolized" church. At the end of the 1960s the Comité de Acción Social de la Iglesia Morava (CASIM) was established to develop social action programs on the Coast, although it only commenced operations a decade later. The main approach of CASIM's programs was similar to that promoted by governmental and private agencies in the region during the same period: community development, leadership training, environmental hygiene, etc. CASIM's reach was relatively limited, but the creation within the church of an agency specifically dedicated to these questions points up a change in the relationship between the church and the society and a new approach to temporal matters. It would not be correct to say that the Moravian Church first began to concern itself with the affairs of "this world" in this period. Every church is concerned with these matters, and in the preceding chapter I described the church's intense involvement in worldly affairs. What was new

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was, rather, the appeal to a more active approach to pastoral work and the development of a reformist conception of society, in the sense that a reformist approach implies the possibility of changing worldly things for people to live better and dedicate themselves more fully to religious matters. It might be thought that an earlier involvement of the Catholic Church in these programs encouraged the Moravian Church to take the same path—as seems to have been the case with Moravian support of ACARIC. But it is important to emphasize the change implied in this new attitude in relation to the church's previous position, whereby the things of "this world" were formally renounced. Finally must be mentioned, if only briefly, the influence of the personality and the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., and black nationalism in general. Both these elements doubtless had more influence on the Creole population than on the Indian groups, but I would like to point out here the role of the Moravian Church in creating the conditions, or at least the occasion, for the encounter of some sectors of Costeño youth with this half-lay, half-religious ideology. The circulation of Creoles between southern Zelaya, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, and the eastern United States set the stage for the church's pastoral work to open up in this direction. The basic aspects of black nationalist thinking and its forms of political action—in all their many variants—were already familiar to many Creoles, because of the goings and comings of workers (sailors, fishermen, professionals, and students) between the Coast and the United States and because of the English-language media. Some workshops and seminars held by the'church in the mid-1970s in the Bluefields-Pearl Lagoon area, and the possibility for some Creole pastors to continue their theological studies in Costa Rica, put some energetic members of the Creole community into contact with this manifestation of the U.S. black movement. This contact would later allow the younger generation to strengthen its ethnic identity, create a basis for communication with older Creoles who had experienced the presence of Garveyist ideology on the Coast, 8 and reactivate the memory of the decisive participation of the Creoles in the Liberal Revolution of 1926. It may be supposed that, in turn, this reencounter with the historical memory of the community, and with the new waves of Creole thinking and acting (especially in the younger generation), reinforced by black nationalist ideology, consolidated the "social" orientation of the church. There were, therefore, changes in the leadership of the Moravian Church, changes in its sources of funding, and changes in its way of relating to "this world." These changes, at the same time, generated expectations and frustrations in the northern areas, especially among the Miskitos, reinforcing their feelings of isolation, now also within the Moravian Church. The church

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intervened in the new aspects of the social dynamic on the Coast, supported them, and partially influenced the direction they were to take. But the differentiation at the macro-social level—the unequal impact of the crisis, recession in one area and boom in another—was reproduced within the church. In particular, the subordination of Miskitos in the Coast ethnic hierarchy was reflected in church structures.

The Beginning of Ethnic Mobilization This broad and unequal set of transformations in the social life of the Atlantic Coast during the 1960s and 1970s formed the setting for the first manifestations of the ethnic movement in the region. In the four years between 1974 and 1978, the three main Costeño ethnic groups created their own organizations to promote their specific demands. The Alianza para el Progreso de Miskitos y Sumus (Alliance for Progress of Miskitos and Sumus) was created in 1974, based on ACARIC's experiences on the Coco River. The organization arose as the result of the combined action of Capuchin priests, Moravian pastors, and some officials of the U.S. Peace Corps to curb INFONAC's takeovers of Indian communal lands, confront the merchants to get better prices for agricultural products, find solutions to the problems of transportation on the river and lodging in Waspam (which affected those who arrived on business from the villages), improve the organization of tuno collection and obtain better prices by getting rid of the middlemen. It was also intended to participate in government programs in the region to make them more effective. From the beginning, many Moravian pastors took part; a great number of ALPROMISU activists in the Coco River villages, and a large percentage of its directorate, were pastors, mainly Miskitos. However, as the organization grew and began to establish relations with the newly formed international indigenist movement, its center of activities was transferred from the river to Puerto Cabezas and the northern savanna, with the increased influence of a group of young Miskito professionals mainly living in the towns—most of them in Puerto Cabezas. This displacement also implied a change in ALPROMISU's issues and approaches. The growth of the participation of young professionals living in the city coincided with and encouraged a gradual increase in more explicitly indigenist demands, or demands that could be more easily related to the indigenist movement than the socioeconomic demands posited at the beginning. The integration of these young professionals into the organization also coincided with increasing demands that local administrative positions be held by Miskitos, given their greater familiarity with the region and the problems of the people. These professionals, moreover, were part of the

ALPROMISU.

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sector of technically and professionally trained Miskitos who had the capacity to take on these positions. ALPROMISU's relations with the Somoza government were ambiguous and would later cause internal criticism within its leadership and, after the triumph of the Sandinistas, a questioning of the legitimacy of the organization and its eventual breakup. ALPROMISU's president, Hertha Masanto de Downs, was at the same time the president of the Ala Liberal Femenina (Women's Liberal Wing), a women's group of the Somozas' Liberal party. Also, the Somoza regime tried to coopt ALPROMISU's leaders and accepted their demands of a greater role in local government; they were offered a seat in the national congress and the position of treasurer in the municipality of Waspam and given some funding to support some of the organization's projects. But ALPROMISU could never obtain legal recognition from the Somoza government, and its activities were always kept under the vigilant observation of the local National Guard. ALPROMISU's relations with the Somoza regime were bitterly criticized by some young members of the Movimiento Estudiantil Costeño (Costeño Student Movement, MEC), an emerging group of Costeño university students at the National University in Managua. MEC students denounced the leadership's corruption, its lack of combativeness against the government, and its low profile on ethnic demands as evidence of the leadership's cooptation by the government (see for example, Rivera 1981). This position was later to be shared by observers with ties to the Sandinista Revolution. According to Jenkins (1986:189-190), the villages were never truly represented by ALPROMISU, and behind this organization "there moved the strong economic interests of the Somocista congresswoman Alba Rivera de Vallejos, who was the main intermediary in the purchase of tuno from the Indians." There undoubtedly were good relations between the Somoza regime and some members of ALPROMISU's leadership, but it also seems true that the organization as such was closely watched by the dictatorship. Of course, it would have been necessary for ALPROMISU to establish certain contacts with the government in order to make an effective attempt to satisfy the peoples' demands and solve their problems. In this sense, the criticisms made by MEC members and their insistence on ALPROMISU's allegedly close relations with the dictatorship were possibly part of a strategy to delegitimize the organization with the Sandinista Revolution and to prepare the way for their own organizational project, at a time when the revolutionary government did not seem willing to accept any kind of Indian organization. The Somoza regime, for its part, occasionally took it upon itself to discredit ALPROMISU's leaders, circulating the rumor in the villages that they squandered money on trips out of the country. Whether or not this was

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true—and these things are always hard to judge—the fact remains that ALPROMISU's active participation in international meetings and activities contrasted with the low profile it assumed inside the country after an initial period of enthusiam and expectation.9 Just before the triumph of the revolution, the organization went through a period of marked inactivity. Its concentration on the regional ethnic problem—despite MEC's criticisms about its lack of militancy on these questions—and its ambiguous relations with the dictatorship did not allow it to take on an active role in the wide coalition of social forces who joined with the Sandinistas just after the insurrection. This lack of definition about the conflict that was tearing apart all of Nicaraguan society was the final straw compromising the organization's legitimacy and gave further arguments to those inside and outside ALPROMISU who were searching for other forms of expression for ethnic demands. The National Association of Sumu Villages, known in Sumu as Sumu Kalpapakna Wahaini Lani (SUKAWALA) was founded in November 1974 in Bonanza and originally grouped together twenty-one villages. This organization was the result of the work of some Capuchin priests and Moravian pastors, several nongovernmental agencies, and technicians with an interest in supporting the specific demands of the Sumus and promoting development programs. Although ALPROMISU called itself an organization of Miskitos and Sumus, in fact Miskito hegemony was total in it, in the composition of its leadership, the origins of its activists, and its viewpoint on the topics with which it dealt. Therefore, it was thought necessary to support an organization for the Sumus that would promote the specific demands of the Sumu villages. One of these demands was for a solution to the dramatic problem of water contamination by the mining companies. The use of rivers to eliminate this industry's waste products contaminated the waters with chemicals such as cyanide as well as heavy metals and had terrible effects on the people, their resources, and the entire ecological system. Many Sumus died from this contamination, and large parts of the forest were turned into deserts, without any effort by the Somoza government to force the companies to put an end to this situation (see Dolores 1985). The new organization had the support of CASIM and CEPAD (Comité Ecuménico para el Desarrollo, Ecumenical Committee for Development), but it was never very active. It was difficult for SUKAWALA to start development programs because of lack of funding or conditions on funding that limited its range of activity. In some cases, the foreign companies operating in the mines area were the ones administering funding for SUKAWALA projects, when these projects were supposed to solve some of the social and ecological problems created by these same com-

SUKAWALA.

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panies. Moreover, the Indians' petitions were not accepted by government agencies.10 SUKAWALA never gained the dynamism and national renown that ALPROMISU had. In addition to the factors mentioned earlier, other elements may have had an effect: the greater physical isolation of the Sumu villages, the smaller size of the Sumu population in comparison with the Miskitos and the Creoles, and its much weaker involvement in Moravian Church structures. sicc. The creation of the Southern Indigenous and Creole Communities was one of the effects of the renovations introduced in the Moravian Church as a result of nativization. The founding of Indian organizations in northern Zelaya and in the mines area had no direct impact on the Bluefields-Pearl Lagoon area, with its basically Creole and Garifuna population. However, the expectations raised by the appearance of ALPROMISU set an example for the people in the south, reinforcing the renovating tendencies inside and outside the churches. The first Creole organization was actually OPROCO (Organización para el Progreso de la Costa, Organization for the Progress of the Coast), but little information remains about it. It was formed in the late 1960s, with an emphasis on community development and social betterment. Its ethnic dimension was present more in the ethnic identity of the people to be served by its activities than the way those activities were designed or the kinds of questions with which it dealt. One of its main goals was to extend social services to the rural area between Pearl Lagoon and Bluefields. This goal brought the organization into contact with the respective agencies of the Somocista state; some members of OPROCO's leadership also had positions in the local government in Bluefields. These ties caused the organization and its leaders later to be accused of collaborating with the Somoza government. Little information is available about SICC as well. It seems to have begun as a result of some workshops for young religious leaders (Moravians and other Protestant denominations) held in Pearl Lagoon by CASIM and CEPAD in mid-1976. These activities were an outgrowth of the development of community and social action programs that had begun to seep into Moravian Church structures. The participants in these workshops were to continue their work of sensitization and community action in their respective parishes. In these activities of projection and dissemination and of reflexion on the sociocultural context of pastoral woik, many of these young leaders came into contact with black nationalist ideology and with the figure of Martin Luther King, Jr. At the same time, their contact with the people showed them that certain aspects of this ideology were known in Bluefields.

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Moreover, some pastors who had studied at the Puerto Limón seminary in Costa Rica had books and information on these issues and brought additional elements into this process of cultural renovation. Many of these young people and the people with whom they worked began to identify themselves as blacks, not as Creoles. In turn, their contact with the older residents of Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon, and Com Island allowed them to recuperate the historical memory of the people and their participation in the social struggles of the past. They "discovered" the influence of Marcus Garvey and Garveyism in Nicaragua, as well as General Hodgson and the Costeños' participation in the Liberal revolution of 1926. In this period, the movement took on the name of SICC; the reference to Indian communities alluded to the Rama villages in the bay of Bluefields and the Garifunas of Pearl Lagoon and, at the same time, showed the combination of an ethnic viewpoint with the regional scope of the movement. In contrast with the Indian organizations in the northern part of the Atlantic Coast and particularly with respect to ALPROMISU, which began with explicitly socioeconomic demands and later switched to wholly ethnic ones, SICC was from the beginning a cultural revivalist movement, an attempt to recuperate an ethnic identity that had been denied by the dominant culture; socioeconomic questions seem not to have been of particular importance. The 1960s had brought an important economic reactivation to the Bluefields-Pearl Lagoon-Corn Island area; new employment opportunities largely related to Costeños' traditional economic activities and the expansion of urban services made for a general improvement in the people's living conditions. Moreover, the large number of Costeños living in Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and the United States, as well as trade with foreign fishing boats, maintained a certain flow of the imported goods that were an important part of people's way of life. In contrast, the higher educational level of the black/Creole population compared to the Indian groups made them particularly sensitive to their exclusion from higher-level positions in the local government. The arrogant behavior of mestizo local officials and their disdain for Creole English and other cultural features of the people came into conflict with the reaffirmation of black/Creole identity and reinforced the importance of cultural demands in the more active segments of the population. The union movement. As in the rest of Nicaragua, the union movement on the Atlantic Coast was small, weak, and confined to towns: teachers' unions in Waspam and Bluefields, longshoremen's unions in Puerto Cabezas, various trade unions in Bluefields, and a union of mechanics and tractor and truck drivers in Bluefields. When the Somoza regime could not prevent the creation of unions, it sponsored a system of parallel unions. For example, at

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the end of the 1970s in Puerto Cabezas there were three longshoremen's unions: the Sindicato de Estibadores y Mueller os de Puerto Cabezas (Longshoremen's Union of Puerto Cabezas), the Sindicato Democrático de Estibadores de Carga de Puerto Cabezas (Democratic Cargo Workers Union of Puerto Cabezas), and the Sindicato de Muelleros Portuarios y Oficios Varios de Puerto Cabezas (Union of Port Workers and Other Trades of Puerto Cabezas)—all for no more than 1,000 workers in this area. NOTES 1. The expulsion of farmers from the western region and the change in the use of land toward agroexports reduced the country's capacity to produce basic grains (mainly corn and beans). Nicaragua began to import basic grains on a large scale at the same time that the agroexport model was being expanded and modernized. 2. A more extensive treatment of this subject may be found in Jenkins (1986); see also Cornejo (1974) and Aguilar Lozano et al. (1978). 3. The dispersion coefficient measures the relationship between the standard deviation of the values of a variable and the arithmetic mean of the same values. 4. Most farmers, in fact, remained subsistence producers of corn and beans, with decreasing yields. The reason for this is the fragility of the tropical rain forest ecosystem and the few alternatives offered by present scientific knowledge. The replacement of the forest by pastureland or intensive-type cultivation (pineapple, cacao) demands a large amount of money and technology that small producers do not possess (see Taylor 1970, Budowsk 1980). Moreover, there is always a marked contrast in adaptation to the demands of life in a humid tropic climate by spontaneous migrants and by migrants participating in official colonization programs. The first group is generally more successful, more motivated, can choose where they want to live—usually close to friends who can help them. The second group, despite the assistance they are given, tend to become disillusioned or to succumb to the many difficulties of life on the frontier: see Caufield 1984:190 ff. 5. At the end of the 1970s, direct foreign investment in Nicaragua was estimated at less than $120 million at most (see Vilas 1986, Chapter 2). 6. Cárdenas (1961). The same author recommended "changing the names of cities which are now named after pirates and of memories of their piracies, to national names." 7 . 1 demonstrated in an earlier study (Vilas 1986, Chapter 3) that there cannot be said to have been an economic crisis in Nicaragua before 1978. The regional crisis in northern Zelaya in the 1960s was rather a result of the growth of the general Nicaraguan economy in this period. 8. On this, see Wuenderich (1986b). 9. ALPROMISU had participated actively in the meetings and organizations of the emerging international indigenist movement. ALPROMISU delegates went to the meeting in which the World Council of Indigenous Peoples was created, in October 1975, as well as to the one where

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the Regional Council of Indigenous Peoples was formed, in January 1977. On this occasion, the ALPROMISU representative was named president of the new organization and, as such, an executive member of the World Council. 10. For example, in 1977 Lutheran World Relief gave SUKAWALA, through CEPAD, funds for the project Levantamiento Indígena Montán-Río Oriental de Nicaragua—also known as Proyecto LIMON—with the goals of literacy, training health workers, and agricultural and community development. The funds, however, were managed by the Neptune Mining Company of Bonanza.

The Atlantic Coast and the Sandinista Revolution

THE DEVELOPMENT OF R E V O L U T I O N A R Y

CONDITIONS

The Sandinista revolutionary struggle focused on the overthrowing of the Somoza dictatorship as one stage in a broader and more profound process of national liberation, social emancipation, and broad popular participation. The struggle against underdevelopment and dependency and the constitution of a popular national state were the basic goals of the revolution. In this context, the FSLN approached the Atlantic Coast as a regional version of the general problem of external dependency and economic backwardness but failed to take account of its ethnic specificities vis-à-vis the Pacific and central regions. The exploitation of the Coast's natural resources by foreign companies, its historic ties to the international expansion of colonial and neocolonial powers, the general economic backwardness of the region, and the high rates of illiteracy, malnutrition, and infant mortality took precedence in the Nicaraguan revolutionary viewpoint. Thus, the Coast was subsumed under the general problem of exploited and oppressed classes and social groups, notwithstanding its peoples' socioeconomic, cultural, and historical specificities and their marked internal differentiation. The revolutionaries' goals, which emphasized national liberation and socioeconomic development, were to be achieved with the peoples of the Coast in the same way as with the workers and peasants of the rest of the country. This viewpoint was reductionist and incomplete. The different social organizations of the Costeño groups, the articulation of production relations to the kinship system, the different modalities of legitimation and exercise of authority, ideological and linguistic differentiation, and different historical processes were reduced to a geographically distinct manifestation of the problem of economic backwardness. The revolutionaries' lack of knowledge about the ethnic question led them to privilege the Costeños' most obvious material traits: They were poor farmers and mine and lumber company workers, exploited by foreign capital and merchants. At the same time, certain cooperative productive practices based on reciprocity (such as panapana) and certain characteristics of village life were interpreted as survivals of primitive communism. This partial approach to such a complex question may be explained by

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several factors. Some have to do with Nicaragua's specific reality and the way contradictions arose within it to create the possibility of a revolutionary strategy. Others are of a more general nature, having to do with questions such the formation of revolutionary thinking and practice in economically backward capitalist societies. We shall begin with the specific aspects. From the 1950s through the mid-1970s, the Nicaraguan economy went through rapid capitalist and widespread growth and change. First, the extraordinary cotton boom; later, industrialization in the context of regional integration; and finally, the expansion of export cattle raising generated a new bourgeois sector and dispossessed thousands of peasant families of their lands. Part of the rural labor force was proletarianized and another part was expelled, either to the cities—where unemployment confined it to an everwidening tertiary sector—or toward the agricultural frontier. In the course of less than a single generation, more than two-thirds of the economically active population of the country, and almost all agrarian workers, were caught up in these violent transformations; they lost their lands and their sources of subsistence and were forced to migrate; in short, their lives and futures were drastically altered. The Managua earthquake killed a number of those who had escaped the other crises or who had regained part of their losses, and ruined many others. All this occurred in the general context of intense capitalist exploitation, frequent repression by the National Guard, and the generalized corruption of the Somoza regime. As I pointed out in a previous study, this violent and rapid capitalist transformation created the objective conditions for a revolutionary option in Nicaragua (Vilas 1986: Chapters 2 and 3). Despite its enormous scope and depth, however, this process was concentrated in the Pacific and central-northern regions: only 40 percent of the country's territory but with more than 90 percent of its population and productive capacity. The Atlantic Coast participated only tangentially in this social earthquake, acting as a frontier and an escape valve for some of the contradictions generated by the violent capitalist expansion. This spatial and human concentration of the most important contradictions for the development of the revolutionary process made it a logical choice for the FSLN to orient the basic thrust of its activity toward the place where the forces that later would bring down the dictatorship were in fact developing. Therefore, it is not simply a matter of "the revolution not being fought on the Coast," as is often said, but rather that the necessary conditions for the revolution developed outside the Coast. During the three decades between the Liberal revolution of 1926 and the execution of the founder of the Somoza dynasty in 1956, the dynamic center of dependent capitalism in Nicaragua moved off the Atlantic Coast toward the west, and enclave capitalism gave way to agroexport capitalism with a very high level of involvement by the domestic agrarian and financial bourgeoisie. At bottom, the greater development of the FSLN's struggle in this