The situation indigenous Mayangna communities face is an example of the way the current government promotes a public image of solidarity: while this government did provide legal title to indigenous communities for the first time, it only provided the legal document and not the government backing for the effective exercise of those property rights. It has repeatedly turned a deaf ear to brutal, armed attacks of settlers on Mayangna communities in their own homes and lands, as this report details. Furthermore, there are clear connections between the new wave of settlers and gold mining interests with links to the government.
Voyage to Mayangna hell: “Here a pig is worth more than one of us!”
By Divergentes December 10, 2021
Violence shows no mercy with a community condemned to extreme poverty: in the last two years at least 23 indigenous have been murdered. DIVERGENTES visited the territory where the Mayangnas send out a desperate cry: “they are even plucking out our eyes.” A nightmare that is happening in the midst of which there seems to be a new struggle over gold in the protected lands of BOSAWAS, one of the largest ecological reserves of the continent. Poverty, negligence, hunger, sickness and violence. An incursion into the hell experienced by one of the oldest indigenous communities in Central America on their own sacred lands.
Alvin Smith goes into the pit for days to extract gold. We are on the Kimakwas mountain where up until a few years ago the quiet of the place was barely interrupted by the typical sounds of the countryside: a swollen stream, the noise of the birds, the leaves of the trees blown by the wind and even the steps of an animal moving through the forest. Now, on this site in the midst of the largest forest in Central America, Smith hears gunshots nearly every day.
The last time was six days ago in the morning of Saturday October 2nd. Along with other Mayangna gold miners, one of the indigenous ethnic groups in the BOSAWAS Biosphere Reserve, they sheltered behind the mud and the trees until the shots ended. Four days later, at 4am on Wednesday, on that same mountain, Martiniano Macario, 41 years of age, was killed by gunfire. The photo shows machete wounds on his neck. “They kill them terribly,” says Smith, 26 years of age, and adds, “If they only wanted to kill them, they would shoot them and that would be it, but no. They cut up the body, they cut off their balls (testicles) and burn them.”
Alvin Smith – short with dark skin and solid body – since 2018 is also a volunteer forest ranger for the communities located north of the Waspuk river, in the Sauni As Mayangna territory area. One of the places where the majority of the 23 murders of Mayangna and Mískito indigenous in the last two years were recorded, at the hands of invaders who are called “settlers”. The 12 who died last year place Nicaragua as the most deadly country in per capita terms, according to the Organization Global Witness, that collects data on the murders of land and environmental defenders. The data for 2020 was double that of the previous year. Up until the beginning of October 2021 11 murders acknowledged by the National Police were registered, even though national ecological organizations counted at least 13. It is one of the most critical and quickly deteriorating places. The bodies of the indigenous have been burnt, mutilated and chopped up. “It is horrible what they do to our brothers,” states Smith, while he touches his thin mustache and adjusts his red hat.
Outside it is already dark. Today is October 8th in the Musawas village, the Mayangna capital. A cloud of mosquitos lurks while the journalists leave one house, lighted by a flashlight, for Alvin Smith to take a dug-out canoe with a motor with which he navigates to his community, located north of the Waspuk river. He lives there with his wife and three children. “I want to defend this land for them,” says Smith, raising his voice, revealing two gold crowned cuspids.
It does not matter much to Alvin Smith that he lives in one of the poorest zones of Nicaragua. Where 94% have serious deficiencies in terms of housing, in overcrowded conditions, with sewage problems, illiteracy rates higher than 30% and without economic capacity. “Our biggest concern is that they would kill us,” replied Smith.
These lands provide the Mayangnas with beans, rice, bananas, cassava, taro to eat and fatten the pigs, hens and calves. The rivers provide them with fish, water for washing their clothes, bathing and moving to other communities. The mountains give them even gold to sell and buy materials, and thus be able to build or reinforce their shacks that every so often fall down because of the hurricanes that batter the Caribbean. “We have everything here,” says Smith, and he finishes off saying, “if they take this land away from us, where will we go?”
***
The Musawas village is located at the beginning of BOSAWAS, an ecological reserve of more than 20,000 square kilometers. A space of jungle in the Northern Caribbean of Nicaragua which is as large as El Salvador. It occupies more than 15% of the territory of Nicaragua and provides 264 million tons of oxygen per year, which contribute to regulating the climate of the world. It forms part of the Mesoamerican biological corridor and at the same time is the second largest tropical jungle in the American continent, only behind the Amazon. That is why it is considered the Patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO. Those who live here are considered defenders of this space and there should be more concern about those who die here.
To get here from Managua, the capital, requires more than 15 hours in an all terrain vehicle. Up until a few years ago it required navigating one hour in a motorized ferry from the mining municipality of Bonanza or walking for eight hours through forest, mud and mountains. Now, the largest mining company in the zone opened up a road on which one can travel in vehicle in approximately three hours, from the urban area of Bonanza. The truck that transported the journalistic team crossed two rivers which had swollen with the rains of the season. Lastly, at 8pm a motorboat had to be taken to cross the 300 or so meters of the Waspuk river.
What is seen along the way are postcard like jungle scenes: grey sky with full clouds over an intense green of trees and more trees that are sprouting on dozens of mountains. The temperature drops at night in the clear areas where the vegetation has already been cleared and the earth has a terracotta color. Women wash clothes on the shores of the rivers and some men use the water to wash gold, the gilded metal over which violence has been unleashed in this place in recent years.
“One of the principal economic activities which is carried out here is mining,” says Pedro Justo Jacobo, an agronomist from the Mayangna community of Sakalwas, which is just a few meters from the municipal capital of Bonanza. “But the invasion of settlers is exterminating us, they are murdering us,” says Jacobo, 36 years of age, who is one of several Mayangnas who have graduated from universities.
Jacobo is an evangelical. Tall, thin and with prickly hair, today he is participating in a meeting which some missionaries who arrived in Musawas from Managua have called. “We do not know how to stop this invasion,” he explains, after leaving a Christian missionary board meeting where he insisted that the biggest problem of the Mayangnas in these days is lack of security. “Here there are virgin mountains, a lot of natural wealth that we can turn into money to attract development to the communities,” he states.
These virgin riches are those that have attracted the invaders, like wood bores, since forever: felling of trees, mining and large spaces of forest cut for ranching and the advance of agriculture. Now it seems that a new bloody fight is being experienced over gold. This metal is what the economic elites acquire in moments of uncertainty: armed conflict, international tensions or economic crises, because it precisely provides them a safe investment. For being sought or demanded on the international level, its price goes up. In Nicaragua this meant that in 2020 it became the biggest export product, with 665.1 million dollars generated, in a country whose wealth has sunken more than 14% since the political crisis erupted in 2018.
But the search for gold has existed here for some years. In 2017, for example, the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, Nicaraguan leaders, created the Nicaraguan Mining Company through which it get involved in the business through private companies. Just in the first year of its approval, the lands under concession increased 116% throughout the country. 61% of those lands are found in the area around the BOSAWAS reserve.
“We are surrounded,” says the chief Nerio Tela Palacios, in Mayangna language, while another indigenous translates. The chief is 76 years old and is an authority of Musawas. He has copper skin, almond shaped eyes, and wears a trucker hat that he does not remove even to scratch his head. According to his calculation, of the 1,668 square kilometers of the Sauni As Mayangna territory, the invaders have stolen 80% of it. “If the Government does not believe us, they can come here and we can take them to where the settlers are installed in the building where they are,” states the chief.
When the locations or motives for the deaths are reviewed is when one has more clarity about what is happening on these lands. DIVERGENTES confirmed that three of the 23 murders in these two years were Mískitos and 20 were Mayangnas. 11 of them died in places of informal miners, that is, in mines where gold is mined in a traditional, small scale way. The other murders happened for different circumstances, among them forced displacement, taking over their cattle or wood, and even like in any war, dying in the midst of a firefight among unknown people.
This year things have been made clearer: just one indigenous of the 11 who have been murdered did not die in a gold mine. The numbers continue providing clues: since the rise of gold in the zone, the population has increased five-fold. The mines have areas of exploitation that are regulated by state authorities. Nevertheless, small miners dig in pits located on protected lands to later sell to large miners that dominate the territory. Once again the fight over gold, once again death, once again the hand of the strongest is raised: the one who has more weapons, the one who has no scruples.
Since the pandemic is still not under control, Nicaraguan miners calculate that gold exports will get to US$750 million this year. Maybe this ambitious goals might have something to do with the fact that more indigenous are murdered; maybe the virus that came from a province in China is arriving in another way to the most remote mountain of Nicaragua.
A boy from Musawas keeps looking suspiciously at the journalists and asks them, “Why are you walking around with masks?” and before one can answer him, responds, “Here the virus does not exist.”
***
The word mayangna means “we are children of the sun”. It is the term with which the population as well as their language is identified. Mayangna the man, the woman, boy, girl who speak mayangna. There are historians who state that these indigenous, as well as those from other ethnic groups in Nicaragua, Mískito and Rama, are descendants of Chibcha groups that came from Mexico. Others, that their origins are the Chibchas from Colombia because of certain similarities in language and customs.
The Mayangnas were one of the most numerous populations of Central America prior to colonization. Their territory included from the Rio Patuca in Honduras, crossed the Nicaraguan sierras and went to the Rio Rama. The last census estimated that the population is barely some 35,000, scattered over some 8,000 square kilometers of forests, rivers and mountains.
***
Two sweaty boys are dragging a small pig. They pull him from the neck with a rope. He is still not squealing but the sound that is coming out of it seems one of desperation. They get to a small rise of land that exists next to the Moravian Church of Musawas. They tie him to a post. It is the place for slaughtering. One of the boys pulls out a machete that shines in the distance. He chases the animal until he reaches it. He impales it and now the squealing cannot be ignored. The pig appears to be drowning in a death rattle. Now they throw boiling water on it, peal it, open it up, cut it and take out its entrails.
Alongside the Moravian Church evangelical pastors are meeting who arrived in these days in Musawas. “We came to pray for all the murders of our brother Mayangnas,” says Christian Bucardo, the only Mayangna from the entourage of missionaries. Bucardo is a lawyer and specialist in indigenous rights. In addition to bringing sacks of clothing, rice, sugar and beans for his friends in Musawas, he gave a talk on the property problems. “They have to put locks on these communities, because here this is as open as a baseball field,” says Bucardo, and adds, “whoever wants to come in, comes in a takes over.”
Nicaragua has on paper one of the most progressive laws of the continent, granting titles and determined that these lands cannot be taxed, cannot be mortgaged, inalienable and imprescriptible. It is Law 445 or the Communal Property Regime of Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Communities of the Autonomous Regions, which was approved in 2003 during the government of Enrique Bolaños. The last stage provided for remediation, in other words, the ordering or removal of non indigenous people who, for different reasons, live on these lands. “Since the remediation has not been done, this is what has brought in chaos and the bloodshed,” says Bucardo, who thinks that this, in addition to the fight over the gold pits, is causing the deaths.
“Why do you think the remediation has not been done?”
“Lack of political will. Lack of financing and the autonomous communal and territorial system is politicized.”
The problem is even ancestral: some communal authorities are corrupted and sell properties that they cannot sell. Thus there are settlers with property purchase documents with the signatures of the indigenous themselves. “The government has the competent authorities, the Police, the Army to put this in order,” says José Jirón Taylor, a judge administrator, a communal authority who was present in the meeting with the missionaries.
The last report of the community forest rangers in the Sauni As Mayangna territory revealed that among those implicated in the buying and selling of these protected properties are some Mayangnas, even though most are settlers or invaders and lawyers and notaries. Among the consequences that the document details are the deaths of 17 Mayangnas, the burning of 15 homes and the destruction of 40,000 hectares of forest.
Outside the church, under the bell tower, is Nejemio Smith, an inhabitant of Musawas. Nejemio is tall, plump, and with upper teeth caped with silver. As the squealing of another pig can be heard and it begins to drizzle, Nejemio says that two years ago some men shot his nephew Heberto Bruno Simeon. He and his entire family filed charges in the Police, they went to the Prosecutor´s office “and nothing happened”, says Nehemio. “There was no investigation nor follow up, rather they gave a safe pass to the murderers. They freed them.”
“The Police came?”
“They came, but to take our weapons away from us, the ones we used to go hunting…They accused us of having pistols or rifles, but how are we going to be armed if we can barely afford a slingshot?”
The chief Nerio Palacios is close by, and interrupts the conversation to tell what for them is the law here: impunity. He says that he had identified seven attacks, in which he has captured settlers, turned them over to the Police and afterwards he found out that they were released. One note from La Prensa from December 5, 2017 mentions that Palacios, as a member of a patrol group, turned in 8 settlers to the Police of Bonanza. “We gave them those people who were usurping land so that they might resolve the problem and they did not do that, so, it surely means they are not in agreement with us,” says the chief.
For these Mayangnas there is an allegory that they repeat about what is happening: the butchers of the pigs cannot show up in the city with the slaughtered animals without a permit. If they do not have it, they are fined or are even thrown in jail. “But if a Mayangna dies it is like nothing happened: it remains in impunity,” says Nehemio and adds, “Pigs are worth more than Mayangnas.”
“How would you resolve this?”
“ I want to talk to the government, because those who are in the zone are not doing anything for us, so I think that it is important to dialogue with the government. The government is like our father, so it is that it cannot allow them to continue to kill us. I want that dialogue to put forth what I am feeling.”
Here everyone knows one another. Here the gunshots are heard for several blocks. Here they do not hesitate to say that those who are carrying out these deaths are from the Isabel Menese Padilla gang, alias “Chabelo.” According to the National Police themselves, this was the group that on January 29, 2020 carried out the massacre in the Alal community, where four indigenous died, two ended up wounded – one of them was left paralyzed- and burned 16 homes. On February 12 of last year the authorities presented Lester Isaías Orozco Acosta, alias “El Choco” as the only one arrested from the gang. Nevertheless, the indigenous leaders of Alal denounced that “El Choco” was freed four months after the massacre.
The settlers, say the Mayangnas, “are people from the Pacific”, generally demobilized from the war of the 1980s: counterrevolutionaries or Sandinistas who they placed on these territories after the peace accords. “People who know weapons,” says the chief.
“My friends and brothers died. They killed us and burned down our homes, our clothing, they did not leave us anything,” tells Martin Miguel Dixon, a judge administrator of Alal. Miguel says that six people close to him died in these attacks. “We feel bad because when they kill us, we are dead and they machete us, cut off our arms, cut our heads off and leave us tortured like that,” states Miguel. “They even take out our eyes.”
“Why do you think there is no justice?”
Miguel Dixon, a small statured man, with a pained and dry face, but that does not crack when he speaks, responds, “The government applies justice for their race, but when it happens to us, nothing happens. It could resolve this with the Army and the Police and it does not do so. I think that it is racism, because since it is not their race, they punish us and do not solve the problems for us.”
Miguel clarifies that “I am not against the government, but I would like to dialogue with them to find a solution.” Meanwhile he looks at the road that he will have to take for one hour to get to his community on foot. Miguel describes it, “here there is like a tiger that comes out to devour its prey and continues killing us.”
“Are you afraid?”
“We are not afraid, because if we had a defense, we could confront them…We are men just like they are.
On returning, close to the church, the two boys continue pealing the pig. Their brother, a three year old child, runs to see. They move him away several times so he does not get dirty. The child is wearing pants, no shoes and is coughing. They pick him up and sit him down by force under the doorway to the house. From there he gets up to urinate, while watching how just a few meters away the wound that they made in the carcass of the animal fills all the soil with blood.
***
The massacre on August 23, 2021 in the mining mountain Kiwakumbai has been the bloodiest in the indigenous territory since records have been kept. The National Police acknowledge nine indigenous murdered and two women raped: one 41 years of age and the other an adolescent.
The horror and disgust over what some people are capable of, at times is summarized in few words:
“They did not kill my son just once, they tortured him, they shot him in the stomach and then they hung him like Christ, they tortured him and killed him, it was very ugly and very evil what they did to him,” said Wilmor Waldan, the father of one of those murdered.
“A woman from Musawas who was fishing in the area was tied up and her husband and her two sons in law were killed in front of her. Later they let her go and left her with a message: “No Mayangna should come here because they will be killed,” pointed out the report from the Center for Legal Assistance for Indigenous Peoples (CALPI).
“My 12 year old nephew told me that they tied up his hands and feet to a tree and told him that they were going to show him a movie (the massacre of his relatives) and then they were going to talk,” expressed a relative of one of the people murdered.
The mayor of the Sandinista Front in Bonanza, Alexander Alvarado Lam, did not respond to calls to talk about this massacre. But days later he showed up at the highest point of the Kiwakumbai mountain, accompanied by pro-government journalist with the mission of refuting “the false versions of the communications media.”
That day, Alvarado, a stocky, brown skinned man, appeared in the mining camp that was left abandoned after the massacre. There, in front of the rugged landscape, he said that the murders occurred over “questions about money.” He explained that there are groups who sell land in an illegal way. “So, there is land, there is a lot. One point of work at times has up to three or four owners. So grievances come, it is true. And that is how the situation happened.”
***
Levy Rosales is a Mískito doctor who arrived with the evangelical mission this weekend to Musawas. He brought medicines to cure Mayangna children. In the home of the pastor of the Moravian Church he put together a type of clinic, which consists of a chair with a table full of medicines. At midday on Friday, October 8th, Rosales took a break to address the welcoming event of the missionaries, while the women Mayangnas began to arrive, with their children in their arms, for medical attention.
Around the home of the pastor, two women are exasperated with the cries of a seven month old child who does not stop crying. It is not simple tantrum, something hurts, the mother says, with her eyes wide open. “He has a fever, mucus, a cough and something hurts,” she says in Mayangna, and adds, “I came because I want them to give me medicine.”
In Musawas there is a health post that almost never has medicines, according to the neighbors. This is nothing new in the country, but in lands where there are no pharmacies, nor money, no cell phone signal and two buses per day, it is at the very least terrible. The Mayangnas make concoctions based on plants as their only cure. “And pray, pray a lot,” says the woman who is carrying the little boy.
Poverty is a word that can mean something different for each one of us. In Musawas it means walking barefooted due to lack of shoes; living in wooden homes with holes in the roof where rain water leaks, and it rains daily. Going to latrines located a few meters from the home and bathing with a bucket of cold water in half walled construction of worn out tree-trunks. If some outsider drinks the water, it gives them diarrhea, if they bathe in the river, their skin breaks out. They sleep on the ground, in hammocks or on wooden boards. “They are the best for the spinal column” says pastor Rosales, a cheerful swarthy man, pointing out the bed on which he spent the previous night.
A lot of rice is eaten, few beans, a lot of bananas and at times some little animal. “When possible pork,” says Erenisio Zeledón, a teacher in the school of Musawas. “But the men do not even want to go to the crops and the women now go less to the river to wash clothes because they are afraid,” says Zeledón.
They perforated the jaw of 15 year old Diajara Lacayo Wilson with a bullet last year. She has a scar on her face and it is difficult for her to eat. Meanwhile 16 year old María del Carmen Taylor Ingram was kidnapped by settlers. Pain spreads through Mayangna lands like the darkness at 8pm in this village, when the electric energy is cut. At that hour, those who have them use flashlights. Because if you look at the sky you will not find the moon nor stars: everything is covered by mist.
“Who is helping you?”, the journalist asks the teacher, Erenisio Zeledón.
“No one, here people come in from all over, from Europe and the United States and they tell us that they want to help us and they never do it. They say, “What do the Mayangnas want?” and we respond that we want to improve our homes, so they say to us, “Not that, because you would lose your identity,” so we tell them that we need money to produce on our land and they respond “not that, because you will destroy the ecosystem,” and we have been doing this for years.
Zeledón is a strong man with an Asian looking face and shaved hair. While we talked on the second floor of his home, built of wood planted in the mud in the Los Cocos neighborhood in Musawas, he says, “So it is that we continue in this poverty and neglect.”
The rain pecks at the houses. It is not an overwhelming nor deafening rain. Instead they are drops that seem to caress the roofs. They lessen the stench of the latrines and pigsties; wash away garbage and everything looks greener. The pastor Levy Rosales returns to provide treatment in his improvised clinic. He asks about the child who does not stop crying. The small one rests in the arms of his mother. He falls asleep from tiredness and weakness. The doctor gives the mother a remedy that will help to cure the child´s cough and tells her to apply wet washcloths to lower the fever. The acetaminophen that he brought was left forgotten in the vehicle that was not able to cross a river. “In two hours I will look at him to see how he is doing,” says Rosales. To see how he is doing, to see if he does not get worse, like nearly everyone in these places.
***
Some kilometers before arriving at Musawas, the Mayangna pastor Christhian Bucardo stops the pickup in which he is traveling and gets down with two other pastors to pray in the middle of the mountains. Far away amidst the mist can be seen the Kiwakumbai mountain, where in August of this year there was the worst indigenous massacre. “We have found that there is a lot of witchcraft which operates here,” says Bucardo, who kneels down with his arms raised to pray. “That is why we, the servants of God, come for the liberation of the territory that is in the hands of Satan and that is causing these massacres,” he adds.
“In the name of Jesus we dismantle all strategy of corruption. We cancel it! We annihilate it! We destroy all works of evil in the name of Jesus!” shouts pastor Bucardo.
At the same time, pastor Roberto Espinoza says, “We declare the revival in this territory, beloved Father. In the name of Jesus who eliminates all violence, for the widows, for the orphans, we deposit our faith…”
The pastors move their hands, like wanting to expel evil from the air, while their oral hodge-podge melts away in the middle of nowhere.
The religious had planned to spend two days and to talk with some hundred authorities of the communities of the Sauni As Mayangna territory. But the results were not what was expected. The first day less than forty people showed up for the meeting. According to the explanation of the people, some Mayangnas were away mobilized by the Sandinista Front, the party in power, because they were offered money to participate in some preparations for elections where Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo were elected for a fourth consecutive period. “You have to come here with money, brother,” says Bucardo, downcast and disappointed. “if I kill a cow here and put on a pot of coffee, you would have a ton of people here,” he says with a timid smile, while I show that I am somewhat surprised, and he responds, “I know my people, my brother, that is how it is.”
A Mayangna says that in Musawas all voted “under coercion” for the Sandinista Front. “If we do not vote, they can kill us.” He wears a white tshirt with pink, yellow and blue letters, with the slogan of the 39th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, because he works for a State institution. Later he pointed out to me the mound where they had butchered the pig. “it is more probable that there be consequences for that death than for the death of anyone of us.” At that time there was little left of the animal: only a trace of blood diluted in the weeds and some entrails that a skinny dog swallowed in one bite.