26 In certain historical contexts, the rights of the human being can only be ensured and fully exercised if there is a recognition of the rights of the collectivity and of the community to which this person has belonged since he or she was born and of which he or she is a part, and which gives him or her all the necessary elements for a feeling of complete realization as a human being, which also means a social and cultural being. The counterpart to this statement is that, by violating the rights of a community to continue to subsist as such and to its reproduction as a unit and identity, a number of basic human rights are violated: the right to culture, to participation, to identity, to survival; this has been shown in a large number of studies on indigenous peoples and communities in Latin America. The international community and human rights law face the challenge of developing new concepts and new norms which, without in any way damaging or curtailing the individual’s human rights, are able to enrich the way of life of indigenous peoples by recognizing the social and cultural reality in which those rights are breached. e. Testimony of Guillermo Castilleja, Special Projects Director for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) In 1993, as Forestry Policy Officer of the World Wildlife Fund for Latin America, he began a project in connection with the Awas Tingni Community in Nicaragua. The main objective of that project was to support the Government of Nicaragua in the establishment of a contractual arrangement for the sustainable use of the “broadleafed” forests of the Atlantic Coast, specifically the Awas Tingni forests. This project was a response to an explicit initiative by Nicaragua requesting advisory assistance. Since 1991, the World Wildlife Fund has played an advisory role in Forestry Policy, specifically with the Natural Resources Institute (IRENA), as it was called at that time, which currently is MARENA, the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources. The immediate background of the Awas Tingni project was a concession made by the State to a Taiwanese company called EQUIPE, covering an area of roughly one million hectares on the Atlantic Coast. This generated a substantial conflict, which was ultimately resolved through cancellation of that concession by Nicaragua. A lesson learned from the EQUIPE concession was the need to develop forest utilization models which were truly viable and could be sustainable on a longterm basis. In the case of the Awas Tingni Community, it had initiated a contractual agreement with a company called MADENSA, Maderas y Derivados de Nicaragua, of Dominican capital, which established the basis for what might be a form of logging which involved participation by inhabitants of that region. Basically, what is not used, what is not claimed, what is not appropriately managed, is open, in the specific case of the Coast, to invasion by settlers, to transformation of the forests into agricultural areas, and that is how Nicaragua and other countries in the region have unfortunately lost many of their forests. For conservation of resources through logging activities it is necessary for three things to happen. First, the logging operation has to be technically sustainable, in other words, extraction must not exceed the forest’s capacity to regenerate naturally. Second, there must be the necessary elements for the operation to be economically profitable, that is, economically viable. Third, specifically in the case of the forests of Latin America where there are many rural population groups living around them, it is