Regional autonomy and communal lands of the South Caribbean Nicaraguan to the canal project

Abstract

The regional autonomy of the Nicaraguan Caribe is strongly based on special and ancestral forms of indigenous and Afro-descendant land tenure, since these special forms are ideologically, culturally and historically different from any other that the national government has recognized in ordinary laws. Then, in addition to the indissoluble symbiosis ‘communal land- regional autonomy’, canal laws not only reveal an obvious tension with ethnic rights over land per se, but also with the autonomous regime, whose legal construction is given by a State that declares itself as constitutionally multiethnic.