Retracing Imperial Paths on the Mosquito Coast

Abstract

This chapter investigates the conflict on Nicaragua's eastern coast in the context of global critiques of the effects of both socialist and capitalist development on indigenous peoples. It explores the impact of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional's (FSLN) vision of social development through national integration on the indigenous and Afro-descendant desires for autonomy. The US government encouraged groups that would begin their own revolutionary movement in the east, causing fractures in the international solidarity movement cultivated by the FSLN. The chapter also recounts the struggles of Miskito activists and their international allies against the revolutionary government in Managua. It then analyses the Fourth World Movement outside the Cold War, which was made possible by new ideas about ethnic pluralism and environmental sustainability that were transforming international development and would impact indigenous rights struggles worldwide.