37 There are examples of this type of solution in the same area of Awas Tingni with the neighboring communities of Francia Sirpi and Tasba Raya. What is sought is to identify the area they want to manage jointly, and in this way to carry out the legal process prior to an agreement among the parties. In some cases there will always be conflict. The vast majority of overlaps suggest the possibility of an agreement based on existing legal forms or a new legal instrument which recognizes what in actual practice is joint use and possession by two communities. No requests made by indigenous communities for the title deeds to the land to be individual have been found. Claims are almost always collective, as a group of members of a community claim collective possession and use rights. There is no individual possession nor a concept of such a type of right as regards title deeds; instead, what indigenous communities request is a collective title deed. k. Expert opinion by Roque de Jesús Roldán Ortega, attorney The expert witness worked at the Colombian Agrarian Reform Institute (INCORA) for 18 years. At INCORA, he worked for two years in peasant-farmer land titling programs, and for 16 in the office in charge of legalizing land in favor of Colombian indigenous groups. He worked as head of the National Directorate of Indigenous Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior. He has been an international consultant on indigenous legislation in several Latin American countries. He has carried out two consultancies in Nicaragua. In 1995 he did a consultancy for MARENA, and in 1996 one for INRA. The consultancy for INRA took place within the framework of a program for land administration in the Atlantic Region, which was carried out by that agency with support from the World Bank. The consultancy sought to determine the feasibility of land titling within the Biological Corridor Program conducted by MARENA under the auspices of the World Bank. He recently published a book under the title “Legality and Rights on the Atlantic Coast”, which is a critical review of the Nicaraguan legal system as regards the issue of the rights of ethnic minorities in the country, and it also refers to the attempt to reform the legal system pertaining to land in Nicaragua. In Nicaragua there are two indigenous sectors: one located in the Pacific region, strongly tied to the market economy and quite integrated to patterns of national culture, and the other located in the Atlantic region, which has strong features of its traditional culture. The demands of indigenous groups on the Atlantic Coast are based on historical reasons, due to millenary occupation of that territory by those peoples, since they were already there at the time of conquest or European occupation of that territory by the British and the Spanish. Archaeological and/or anthropological studies show that these peoples had occupied those territories for several centuries before discovery. This millenarian occupation is expressed in substantive actions by the inhabitants in that territory, by activities for their subsistence, such as hunting, fishing, and gathering. Nicaragua has signed commitments to recognize indigenous lands, such as the signing of the Harrison-Altamirano Treaty; there have been subsequent commitments to legally recognize indigenous lands, especially those adopted in 1987 as modifications to the Constitution and the “Autonomy Statute”. The policy for treatment of indigenous peoples in all countries of Latin America, since the discovery, was to seek an accelerated integration of these peoples into the life patterns of the rest of national society. That policy continued for a long time.