The Case for Native People’s Self-Determination:
The inalienable human rights for the Miskitu Coast
Along Central America, bordering the six Republics ( Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador), are the Miskitu people – the native inhabitants. A once prosperous sovereign nation just a few centuries ago is reduced to poverty, loss of culture, poor education, tainted natural resources, and politically and economically charged violence. We want to end that and restore that proud sovereign nation in hopes to be able to help other indigenous populations in similar situations!
To do so, we must get justice from the United Nations, big industry from various countries, poachers and the President of Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega) accountable for historic and ongoing damage to Miskitu natural resources and lives. As if they weren’t there, the Miskitu people are not even compensated nor in discussion in regards to the use of their natural resources which have now become polluted and unhealthy. The age-old fishing industry that Miskitu natives pride themselves over is under more pressure to perform leading to unsafe diving conditions. Violence for land stealing and industrial development affects many towns preventing them from regaining self-sufficiency. Culture is dying as libraries are burned down and Miskitu pride is met with hostility – ethnic cleansing has become the weapon of choice for Daniel Ortega to carry out his plan to construct the Nicaraguan Canal across all of Nicaragua, affecting not only Miskitu and other native groups but his own Nicaraguan citizens.
The Nicaraguan/Chinese Canal and dishonest big business also threaten some of the most fragile, pristine and scientifically important marine, terrestrial and lacustrine ecosystems in Central America. Some 240 kilometers north of the most likely route of the canal lies the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve — 2 million hectares of tropical forest that is the last refuge of many disappearing species. Less than 115 kilometers to the south is the Indio Maiz Biological Reserve, with more than 318,000 hectares of tropical dry forest. Worse still, the probable canal route cuts through the northern sector of the Cerro Silva Natural Reserve.
An international community of conservationists, scientists and sociologists need to join the concerned citizens and researchers of Nicaragua in demanding two things. First, independent assessments of the repercussions of this mega-project; and second, that the Nicaraguan government halts the project should the assessments confirm fears that this canal will yield more losses than gains for the region’s natural resources, indigenous communities, and biodiversity.
Join our cause to cease the indifferent attitude of industrialization and enforce regulations and fines, end genocide, and atrocities of the Miskitu inhabitants. Save your fellow human beings, these rare and precious ecosystems, endangered species, and prevent further climate change.
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Why Should You Care?
*As intelligent compassionate and humane human beings, we aspire for greatness through self-sacrifice, not at the sacrifice of others.
*We speak about the history and what we could have been done, had we been there… Well… you are here!
*History repeats itself only because we have been indoctrinated to believe ourselves powerless to change the world! Yet it has always been the masses who have changed the world and those who rule from a place of privilege and inexperience have had to adapt in order to remain in their “high” places.
*Today you are one of those people in pages of history you might have condemned about their inactions.
*We tolerate injustice as long as it is not happening to us. What if the tables were turned? Would you like some help perhaps to be saved?
*We are coming into a new age and turning away from 600 years of hate, brutality, and racism. although liberated and indigenized many nations carry on the indoctrination of bigotry and oppression. We must continue to re-educate and help them advance.
*Empathy combined with service is as rewarding as winning the lottery.
*Karma, (what you do comes back to you) have been scientifically proven
*. We cannot say that the past is in the past when it still affects our and present.
* Our current global state is the outcome of the errors of a time past where hatred and degradation ruled men and women.
*We are the present and creators of the future.
*All original people who are genetically connected to and stewards of the earth have a place on this planet and the right to choose and live as their inalienable and territorial rights demand it! It is not about who has the money or not but your convictions and belief in what is right just and for the highest good of all.
*We all have the right to enjoy, evolve, preserve, advance and be healthy. We can’t eat money and drink oil. Their fight is our fight. When we die we only leave a legacy for future generations, all other material possessions including our physical bodies we leave behind. But our essence and the good we bring to the world stay.
*The Miskitu—Are the original native tribes of the Central America land mass and its rainforest that expands from San Andres Providence, to Belize, Guanacaste, Grey Town, Awan Rio Coco, besides Honduras and Nicaragua through the five republics and a few Caribbean islands—are in danger of being wiped out, along with protected rain forest known as the “Lung of Central America”.
FWJ (fourth world journal) Editor in chief wrote :
Development is the byword of “progress” in the world that has been swept over by starry claims of neo-liberal economics. In this issue, we focus on the governments of Nicaragua and China pushing forward the development of a new canal across Central America cutting through the Miskitu and Rama territories in utter disregard of these nations’ consent. This “progressive change” comes more than twenty years after a ten years war against the Miskitu, Sumo and Rama peoples prompted by greed in Nicaragua’s capital Managua headed by Daniel Ortega. We see the influences of economic change in India on Fourth World peoples and the consequences of those changes on the millions of Fourth World peoples’ lives and property in reports appearing in Intercontinental Cry Magazine , The Guardian , Aljazeera and The Ecologist .
… The PR Chinese government has begun plans to build a high-speed railway across Central Asia to Europe through hundreds of Fourth World Territories. The destruction to these peoples and their territories can only be measured by the levels of destruction suffered by many nations as a result of more than 70 years of “development”—expansion beyond the capacity of nature to renew. The lifeways, philosophies, sciences and knowledge systems of Fourth World nations are under perpetual stress and violence from state and corporate development energized by neo-liberal economic concepts that are neither workable nor sustainable—for any of the world’s populations. Rolling back the unsustainable “development madness” of states and corporations seeking to expand their power and enrich the 1,810 billionaires (Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/
The Miskitu—Are the original native tribes of the Central America land mass and its rainforest that expands from San Andres Providence, to Belize, Guanacaste, Grey Town, Awan Rio Coco, besides Honduras and Nicaragua through the five republics and a few Caribbean islands—are in danger of being wiped out, along with protected rain forest known as the “lung of Central America”.
In 2013, the Government of Nicaragua approved the concession for a 173-mile canal to the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Group (HKND). As the Western Hemisphere’s second poorest nation, Nicaragua has attracted the promises of economic growth that may come as a result of the Canal Project. This would be to the detriment of the Miskitu people and their rainforest.
The Canal would bisect 16 watersheds, 15 protected areas, and 25 percent of Nicaragua’s rainforest. The impact of this mega project is already negatively unfolding with deforestation of biodiversity, contamination of watershed services, and displacement of thousands of Miskitu people from their indigenous communities. The internal refugee numbers are alarming and growing daily.
In 1996, Law No. 217 was enacted to standardize the use and conservation of the environment and natural resources of Nicaragua. Under the terms of Nicaragua’s “autonomy law” – or Law 28- indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples were awarded the right to the preservation of their cultures and languages, self-governance, and resource control and declared that communal lands were inalienable, meaning they could never be sold, leased, donated or taxed. However, the development of Nicaraguan Canal threatens the biodiversity and people of this once peaceful rainforest land mass.
Amidst the decline in the agricultural industry, large, land-owning cattle ranchers have consolidated their own land holdings in the country. In some cases, these ranchers pay the colonos to settle indigenous lands in order to eventually control the land for themselves. Nicaraguan cattle ranchers also supply settlers with weapons, and many have flipped large swaths of land, selling the property to large agro-industrial businesses, and shamelessly even to narco-traffickers.
The Nicaraguan government has quietly supported the exchange of fraudulent land titles and dispossession by the Colonos through its promotion of extractive industries and mega-projects in Muskitia. The FSLN government has approved mining and forestry concessions to companies such as HEMCO mining, a Colombian company, and ALBA Forestal, a logging company that operates under the protection of the state institution MARENA (Ministerio del Ambiente y Los Recursos Naturales). ALBA Forestal, launched in 2009, is a joint Nicaraguan-Venezuelan company controlled by President Daniel Ortega and the FSLN. As such, the company operates with little transparency and has contributed to the rapid deforestation of the Mayangna Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, an area that is considered to be the “lungs” of Central America.
Miskitu Nation Foundation (MNF) calls upon the international community to help save our climate by restoring original farming traditions, respecting the sovereignty of indigenous peoples, where thriving bio-diverse ecosystems and traditions are honored and protected.
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