The indigenous Miskito people of Nicaragua’s rainforest survived privation during the civil war of the 1980s, but could climate change be about to signal the end of their ancient way of life?
Annie Kelly reports
Night was falling on the Rio Coco, the river that winds its way through the heart of the Nicaraguan rain-forest, when our boat pilot suddenly steered the dug-out towards the bank and announced that our journey was at an end – right there, right then.
We knew there was no point arguing. He may have been the best boat driver in the region, but he was also a former Contra officer, locally known as la Pantera (the Panther), and there was no way he was going to take us further up river.
A one-time guerrilla allegedly linked to murder and mayhem was not our first choice of pilot, but it had been our only one. We had negotiated the excruciating 12-hour road journey from the capital, Managua, through the coffee-scented highlands to start our seven-day river journey up the Rio Coco that would take us deep into the heartland of Miskito territory.
At this point in the year the 755km river that snakes through Nicaragua’s North Atlantic Region and forms a natural border with neighbouring Honduras should have been a swirling torrent, swollen with six weeks of almost constant rain. But, for the third year running, the rainy season had not come and the river in places was only one metre deep.
La Pantera might have been wanted in several villages for the ‘interrogation’ and subsequent disappearance of scores of Miskito during the bloody and brutal civil war between the Sandinista rebel government and US-funded Contra forces that wreaked havoc on Nicaragua’s indigenous communities in the 1980s, but he knew the river better than anyone and was one of the few able to negotiate a path up to Miskito villages in such perilous conditions.
The scars from that conflict are still painful, says Carlos Ling, our guide and programme officer for Oxfam’s Nicaragua office. ‘For many people in the outside world the civil war is old history, but for the Miskito it was a terrible time, they were the victims of many atrocities by both sides.’ Ling witnessed first-hand the brutal repression of the indigenous people by the Sandinista government and the war crimes committed by the Contras.
Miskito land formed the frontline in the civil war that followed the Sandinista revolution and overthrow of the US-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979. As US-funded and trained Contra troops crossed the Rio Coco from Honduras into Nicaraguan territory, the Miskito were caught in the middle.
‘Iwas a Sandinista, but what I saw during the war made me think deeply about my allegiance to the revolution and what I thought we stood for,’ adds Ling.
By the time we had parted ways with La Pantera and recruited some local boat pilots we had already been on the river for three days. Our boat was little more than a hollowed-out log with an outboard motor that made tortuously slow progress in temperatures that rarely dipped below 40°C. At some points we would only go a few yards before running aground, which meant clambering over the side, tepid river water filling our boots in minutes, to push the boat to deeper water.
With no roads for hundreds of kilometres, save a few crude dirt tracks carved into the jungle by logging companies, the river was the highway for the Miskito villages that perched along its banks.
But with petrol an increasingly precious commodity for such poor communities, the traffic on the river had dwindled to a few families travelling on crude wooden boats pushed by long poles.
For hours the purring of the outboard motor was the only sound to break the silence of the jungle as we crawled our way up the river, away from modern-day Nicaragua and deeper into Miskito territory.
As the village of Riati finally came into view, groups of children clad in faded Pepsi T-shirts swam like otters out to the boat to gawp at our cameras and sunburnt faces. One of them led us up to his wooden house to meet his mother, who cradled his baby sister on her lap as she told us of the increasing problems her community faces.
‘When I was young we were scared of the river, it was so fierce, now it’s like a stream and this has brought many problems for us,’ she says. ‘My husband hasn’t been able to grow crops for two years and the water we drank when we were younger is now making our children sick. Women are dying in childbirth because we can’t find the plants we used to use to cure them any more.’
The Miskito make up the large majority of Nicaragua’s 85,000 - strong indigenous population, who mainly live in the semi-autonomous North Atlantic region, their communities buried deep in vast swathes of largely impenetrable rainforest.
Descended from African slaves and indigenous Indians, the Miskito were traditionally fierce warriors and their brutal suppression by the Sandinistas has bred a deep-set suspicion of the national government, a feeling that has been consolidated by decades of discrimination and neglect at the hands of successive administrations.
In May Daniel Ortega, ex-Sandinista guerrilla and head of the newly elected FSLN government, became the first Nicaraguan president to visit the Miskito, bringing with him 1,000 bags of grain as a gesture of reconciliation and a promise of furthering relations with the indigenous population.
But over the following weeks Ortega’s grain lay rotting uselessly in storage facilities. Without rain the land was so hard that nothing could be planted.
Village elders in Riati paint an apocalyptic vision of the future for their people. ‘For hundreds of years we have looked after the land and it has looked after us,’ says Mario Gonzalez, a wizened, white-haired Miskito elder. ‘Now it is being destroyed and we are being destroyed with it. Without the land we are nothing.’
The Miskito believe they are being cursed for failing to protect their land. Many of the people live on crops such as maize and rice grown on a few hectares of land, but a rapidly changing climate is wreaking havoc on their ability to survive. Isolated from modern farming methods, and with a belief system based intrinsically on the natural cycles and rhythms of the jungle, the Miskito are woefully equipped to deal with the repercussions of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns.
The natural signs, such as flowering avocado trees, schools of silver fish and white cranes, that have traditionally told the Miskito when the rains are coming and when to plant their crops are no longer working.
Mass deforestation, water contamination from illegal logging and gold mining and grinding poverty are slowly eroding their ability to feed their families, and many villagers are becoming increasingly dependent on hand-outs from foreign aid agencies or seeking work in the illegal logging companies that are destroying large tracts of the forest.
‘For years these people have been coming here with trucks and guns and taking the trees,’ says Levi Marcellus, a Miskito farmer, as he surveys his few acres of barren soil. ‘They destroy our land and bring cattle. They pollute the water and poison our water with mercury from the goldmines and they give nothing back and there are so many we can’t stop them.’
Last year the Nicaraguan government hastily imposed a logging ban on the removal of certain types of wood from the jungle. The people here say it has been ineffective, only pushing the loggers deeper into the forest.
The Miskito’s situation is only likely to get worse. Climate change research has predicted that temperatures across Central America will rise by 1°C-3°C and rainfall will decrease by 25 per cent by 2070.
In an indication of what is to come, last summer the Miskito took the full brunt of Hurricane Felix as it slammed into Central America. Aid agencies say many villages had to be evacuated and many people are still unaccounted for.
In the town of San Carlos, one of the largest Miskito towns in the region, I strike up a conversation with community leader Lucas Marciano, as he oversees the distribution of another delivery of government-issued grain.
He says he is worried increasing reliance on outside help will erode the indigenous cultures and traditions his forefathers had fought so hard to protect.
‘We are proud people, we don’t like relying on the government and foreigners for our livelihoods,’ he says, as he watches villagers carry away sacks of grain. ‘For hundreds of years we’ve defended our land against the Spanish, then the Sandinistas and Contras and now the loggers and oil companies. This is our land but now nature has turned against us, I don’t know how we will survive.’
Intrepid option
Mainstream tourism is practically non-existent in Nicaragua’s Autonomous North Atlantic Region, but intrepid travellers can find ways of travelling the Rio Coco.
Flights from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, to Waspam, the de facto capital of the Miskito river communities, take place three times a week and travellers can also access the town by bus from the more accessible town of Bilwi.
Edge of the forest
The Rio Coco is on the northern edge of the Bosawa Unesco Biosphere Reserve, the 20,000sq km expanse of protected rainforest that is the home to many of Nicaragua’s indigenous communities and trips up the Rio Coco and excursions into the Bosawas reserve can be organised from Waspam.
