Free Land as Counterinsurgency: Miskitu Resettlement, Agrarian Reform, and the Limits of Sandinista Democracy

• In Event: Lightning Session II

Abstract

Between 1981 and 1982, the nascent Sandinista government in Nicaragua forcibly resettled thousands of indigenous Miskitu farmers and ranchers, marching them over fifty kilometers south from the Honduran border. The Nicaraguan state justified this resettlement in the name of preventing further Contra raids on border communities and avoiding civilian casualties as the FSLN prepared a major counter-offensive against Contra forces. Billed as a temporary wartime evacuation, documents from various government organizations describe the project in sharply different terms. Housing and agrarian reform agencies’ internal reports reveal an explicit agenda of social engineering. The project was to be a permanent resettlement that would incorporate usually remote and dispersed Miskitu communities into a “rationalized,” settled cooperative farming regime organized according to the revolutionary ideal. Moreover, planners described the material and ideological success of agrarian reform as a way to recruit Miskitu to the revolutionary cause and combat their supposed “counterrevolutionary tendencies.” My paper asks how wartime resettlement was used to both advance an agenda of agrarian reform and constrain Miskitu movement and subsistence in the name of combating counterrevolution. I describe this process using the language of counterinsurgency, not to equate Sandinista warfare with right-wing counterinsurgency in the same period, but rather to understand how government restriction of civilian life was understood as an essential component of the war effort. This paper also asks how racialized assumptions about Miskitu land use informed policymakers’ efforts to reconstruct a new political and ecological order. I situate this analysis within a robust secondary literature that describes a long history of racialization accompanying material and political inequalities between the largely mestizo west and majority indigenous and Afro-descended east. Ultimately, my paper seeks to understand how competing ideals of land use and rural development can shape wartime refugee policy.

Author

• Brendan Collins Jordan, New York University, History Department