44 Wisconsin, Santa Clara, Aminrosita 1, Aminrosita 2, as well as the Eighteen Communities and the Ten Communities, as they are called. This has made it impossible to issue title deeds in an expeditious manner in response to the petition or claim by the Awas Tingni Community. However, the office headed by the witness has never denied that Community the right to land titling. As a consequence of the draft bill submitted by the Executive to the Legislative Assembly of Nicaragua in October, 1998, there have been a number of consultations with the communities and the authorities of the Atlantic Coast autonomous region, as well as with Nicaraguan civil society. During the period covering the sixties and seventies, the IAN issued 28 title deeds to the indigenous communities. After 1974, during the Government of General Anastacio Somoza, title deeds were issued for which he does not have precise figures, but according to the records of the Regional Titling Office, roughly 68,000 hectares were granted. The claim by the Awas Tingni Community is contradictory. Their request, according to the competent authority on geographical referencing and cartography in Nicaragua, which is the Nicaraguan Institute of Territorial Studies, INETER, covered roughly 156,000 hectares. No indigenous communities have received title deeds during the last 11 years, and in the year the witness has been at the respective institution, there has been no land titling in favor of indigenous communities, basically because the legal framework is incipient. Therefore, “it would be entirely inadmissible for the institution […] to officiously grant [indigenous title deeds] following criteria which perhaps would not be in accordance with the spirit [to be] reflected in the law”. The witness cannot specify the number of indigenous people there are in Nicaragua, but that information is in the documents of the 1995 census, although an inventory by the Office of Rural titling in 1991 listed 230 communities. 60 of these received title deeds from the Titling Committee for the Mosquitia; 7 additional communities were identified in a study by the University of Austin, Texas, under contract; 28 communities received title deeds during the IAN period, and 29 during the eighties, under the institution called MIDINRA. Therefore, according to this basic calculation, 124 communities have received title deeds. Regarding the claim by the Awas Tingni Community, the Office of Rural Titling undertook the task of documenting their case, as it was contradictory in terms of the area claimed, since Awas Tingni has boundary problems. In this sense, a document submitted by the Inter-American Commission to the Court includes a map with the location of an area of roughly fifty-some thousand hectares. The Institute of Territorial Studies digitalized and geographically referenced that information, and it gave a completely contradictory area. The fact that there is this legal action and that it has not yet been decided is an additional element which does not allow titling in favor of Awas Tingni, in an unofficial manner and following criteria which might contradict the spirit of a law which has not yet been adopted. There has been criticism of the report prepared by Theodore Macdonald, which refers to the methodological aspects of the study, as it favored oral sources and did not compare them to archaeological sources, nor were ethnographic techniques