To aid research on 'Militarization and Extraction in the Afro-Indigenous Miskitu Coast of Nicaragua'

FERNANDO MONTERO, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in October 2016 to aid research on 'Militarization and Extraction in the Afro-Indigenous Miskitu Coast of Nicaragua,' supervised by Dr. Claudio Lomnitz. While the recent mapping and titling of Afro-Indigenous territories in the Moskitia region of Nicaragua and Honduras were officially portrayed as fostering the conditions for a meaningful Afro-Indigenous 'autonomy,' the process has been accompanied by the militarization of Miskitu coastal villages; the aggressive co-optation of newly formed Indigenous territorial governments by the ruling parties of both countries; and the settlement of Moskitia territories by Nicaraguan mestizo cattle ranchers and Honduran drug traffickers. These three contemporary phenomena represent three different forms of coloniality within national, so-called postcolonial orders: mestizo settler colonization of Afro-Indigenous lands mediated by government officials; indirect rule of Afro-Indigenous territory by means of political and economic co-optation; and Nicaraguan and Honduran military occupation. This dissertation examines the multifarious relationships between all three colonial forms, focusing on specific ways in which they either enable or clash with each other. The research shows that one of the pivotal developments in the Moskitia during the last decade has been the emergence of a small Miskitu middle class of public servants whose political intermediation is grounded on the social networks within which they conduct their work and the resources to which they have access in their particular territories. Their central role in the enactment of colonial governance, and their attentiveness to local knowledge, gives their political intermediation an unmistakably Miskitu bent that transfigures colonial forms irrevocably.