The last known attack dates back to March 26. On this day, two members of a Mayangna indigenous community settled on the Tuahka territory, in the northeast of Nicaragua, in the Bosawas biosphere reserve, the largest tropical forest in America after the Amazon, are killed during a surprise raid by settlers and cattle herders. The next day, a young man of the Miskito people and another Mayangna fall in turn under the bullets. On February 16, it was a Miskito teenager who was severely shot in the head. And on January 29, a group of more than eighty armed men completed four Alal in their community located a few kilometers away. A macabre list to which was added another ten missing after the attack.
Violence has continued to escalate in recent years against indigenous communities in Nicaragua, due to the invasions of Spanish-speaking "settlers" in search of fertile land at low cost, also rich in tropical timber and gold. But they have greatly increased in recent months, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis. The number of murders has almost doubled compared to previous years. "The pandemic acts like a smoke screen, worries Lottie Cunningham, lawyer and founder of the Center for Justice and Human Rights of the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast (Cejudhcan). As if the government and the local authorities, which support the colonists behind the scenes, were seeking to take advantage of the virus to mask the invasions of indigenous lands, the acceleration of which is becoming dramatic. "
Since 2015, dozens of indigenous people have been killed, others injured or abducted. Thousands of people have had to flee their lands to swell the poor and destitute neighborhoods of the surrounding cities. Out of the twelve indigenous communities (the country has 304), placed under the protection of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 1,002 Indians had to leave their habitat and abandon more than 32,000 hectares for extensive farming. In the Mayangna region alone, says the lawyer, there are now more than 1,500 settler families.
"A double fear"
"Fear is omnipresentsaid Anuradha Mittal, director of the Oakland Institute, a Californian think tank that just released on Wednesday April 29 a detailed investigation into violence against the natives, entitled "The failed Nicaraguan revolution." A double fear, even, that of the violence of the colonists and that of the virus, of which they know very little because of the lack of information and the confused messages of the government. "
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