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INDIAN LAW from Indian Country Today
by Philip Burnham copyright.

            Armstrong Wiggins is an organizer, not a lawyer. But he does know that justice has a price. And sometimes going to jail is a part of it. A Miskito Indian, Wiggins grew up in Karata, a small town on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Educated as a boy by the Moravian church, he went to the United States and studied on scholarship at the University of Wisconsin – a man of ambition intent on one day returning south.

            “Non-Indians think that indigenous people cannot become educated, come back, lead their people, speak three languages [or] understand and struggle for their own rights,” Wiggins said. “Either you have to be a Communist when you do that or become a right-wing CIA agent – because you’re educated in the U.S.”

            Since 1981, he has worked for the Indian Law Resource Center, a nonprofit organization devoted to establishing national and international legal standards for protection of Native peoples across the hemisphere. Coordinator for Central and South America in ILRC’s Washington, D.C. office, Wiggins has worked on cases in Belize, Nicaragua, Honduras and Brazil while consulting with Native leaders across Latin America about land and economic rights. The ILRC led the fight for Awas Tingni, a Mayagna (Sumo) Indian community in Nicaragua that decided to stand up to illegal logging of its ancestral lands. When Nicaraguan courts ignored the village’s complaints, the ILRC, which accepts no government funding, managed the case up the judicial ladder to an international forum.

            In 2001, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that Nicaragua had failed to demarcate traditional Sumo territory when granting logging concessions and ordered Managua to recognize, title, and respect indigenous lands. More importantly, the decision had bite. The national government paid $30,000 for legal fees and another $50,000, after consulting with the community, to build a hostel in Puerto Cabezas where young people attending high school and university can lodge. Awas Tingni has no educational facilities beyond the sixth grade.

 The legal battle demonstrated that “indigenous people have a right to develop their own laws according to their history and according to their culture,” said Wiggins, who co-supervised the case for the ILRC. “They have a right to own their land collectively. And they have a right to their resources, surface and subsurface.”

            Wiggins isn’t enamored of old ideologies. He was jailed for a month as a political prisoner during the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in the 1970s. In 1981, before joining ILRC, he was locked up again after a violent scuffle with Somoza’s successor, the Marxist Sandinista government. “I’ve been tortured by the physical torture of the right-wing system and by the psychological torture of the left-wing,” he said matter-of-factly, adding that the Sandinistas were assisted in their labors by the former Stasi (secret police) of East Germany.

            During the Sandinista years, the Miskitos suffered violence and massive relocation. The Managua government, fighting U.S.-financed Contras, sought to control a region that has long rejected their centralized power of church and state. “We were used as cannon fodder between the Reagan administration and the Cubans and the Soviet Union,” Wiggins declared, describing a bitter struggle that divided both the indigenous and human rights communities at the end of the Cold War.

            The Miskitos, present in the area for some 2,000 years, are the largest indigenous group on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. Having mixed with slaves and their descendants, Wiggins said, they number about 300,000 today in a region larger than El Salvador.