36
is an entity which has been granting concessions to lands and resources which
belong to them, for which reason it is seen as a threat to their interests.
The witness is aware of the territorial claim by the Awas Tingni Community. His
sources of knowledge on Awas Tingni include the ethnographic study carried out by
Theodore Macdonald and the respective documents. The work by doctor Macdonald
applied a set of methodological criteria similar to those applied in the diagnostic
study carried out by the Central American and Caribbean Research Council. As
regards cartography, professor Macdonald’s work is similar, in terms of its rigor and
content, to the study on 128 communities included in the aforementioned diagnostic
study.
The ancestors of the current inhabitants of Awas Tingni always used and possessed
this territory. In prior times they were a population that lived in different places.
With the arrival of the Moravian Missionaries at the turn of the century, which is
documented in the daily press, there was a process of “nucleated settlement” of
those inhabitants, first in the Community of Tuburús, in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. In 1945 the Community of Tuburús moved to Awas Tingni, for several
reasons. The forebears of that community had lived in this territory since ancestral
times, despite the fact that there had been a process of “nucleated settlement”. The
sites for subsistence, such as hunting and fishing, and the key sites which have
spiritual or cultural value, are a factor defining the traditional territory. There are
key sites that are spiritual sites and are located within the area claimed.
The indigenous communities closest to the Awas Tingni Community are not of the
same Mayagna ethnic group. They are the communities of Tasba Raya, which are
Miskitos, and the Ten Communities, as they are called. There is documentation
pertaining to the arrival of the communities of Tasba Raya, Francia Sirpi, Wisconsin,
Santa Clara, and so forth, in the sixties, and more recently the arrival of Awas
Tingni. The Ten Communities have been in the area of Awas Tingni for quite some
time, but they are quite distant from each other.
It is very common for there to be overlaps in all the areas included in the diagnostic
study. There are overlaps throughout the Atlantic Coast. The overlaps are areas
that the inhabitants of two communities that claim the same area use jointly, in
some way. This is not necessarily in a conflictive sense. There are no title deeds
granted over the area claimed by the Awas Tingni Community. There are titles of the
Ten Communities, but this is a small percentage, and there are no overlaps with
what these communities already have title to. Actually those lands are not yet titled,
but there is a project to title them. Reference is made to projection by each
community, which would be the basis for a subsequent process which has not yet
taken place.
The data for the Awas Tingni Community have been analyzed in connection with their
land claim, and it has been found that the extent of the claim by Awas Tingni is
precisely intermediate in terms of the range of claims by other multi-communal
blocks included in the diagnostic study. Each communal block in turn has some
overlap with the neighboring community.
What has been found to function as a righting mechanism for the management of
these overlaps, since they are communities that claim use and possession of the land
without denying its use by other communities, is the legal recognition of that shared
land, whether joining and creating a single territory among the two communities, or
through a legal instrument which explicitly recognizes the area as one that is shared.