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Pearl Watson: A Woman, A Plan, A Canal.
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December 7, 2001
A Woman, A Plan, A Canal
Watson, a 57-year-old nurse who runs the community health clinic, has become
a local activist with an international audience. “The Rama indigenous people
have been on the land for longer than anyone can remember,” says Watson,
who visited the United States on a speaking tour in October. “The black
people have been there since slavery times. We live in harmony together there,
but the government is trying to flood us off our land.” About a thousand indigenous Rama and people of mixed African and Miskito ancestry
live in Monkey Point, which sits on the south Atlantic coast about 200 miles
east of Managua. And though there is neither road access nor electricity in
Monkey Point, there is a valuable deep-water harbor that would serve as the
loading and unloading point of the “dry canal.” For years the government has been negotiating with two corporations vying to
build the project: SIT Global (Sistema Intermodal de Transporte Global) and
the favored company, CINN (Consorcio del Canal Interoceanico de Nicaragua),
a consortium based in Managua but headed by a New York-based lawyer, Don Bosco,
and backed primarily by Asian and European investors. The Nicaraguan National
Assembly granted exploration rights to CINN in 1999 and even established conditions
for a future contract for construction of the railroad. The government has touted
the project as an economic boon that could bring tens of thousands of jobs to
Nicaragua. “They say the dry canal is the salvation for Nicaragua, but we would only
have development for very few people and international investors,” Watson
counters. “All these big countries and big businessmen are going to get
three times richer while the people of Monkey Point get three times poorer.” Though Monkey Point would be a major hub of the operation, Watson and her community
were never consulted and, in fact, first heard about the plan via radio and
TV in Bluefields, a nearby town. “For several years the government and
the two companies have been negotiating to build in the territory of the Rama
and ethnic Creole people without their consent,” says Maria Louisa Acosta,
a public advocate representing Monkey Point. With Acosta’s help, the community has filed two lawsuits against former
President Arnoldo Aleman and Attorney General Julio Centeno Gomez for having
backed the 1999 authorization of exploration rights, which Acosta says violates
both Nicaraguan law and the nation’s constitution, which protects indigenous
land rights. “The indigenous see that they have a right to their resources,”
Acosta says. “The government doesn’t respect their rights to live
as they have lived forever.” In 1900, the government of Jose Santos Zelaya handed out land titles to his
cronies in a ploy to seize control of land along the route of a canal proposed
more than a century ago. A 1988 law under the Sandinista government rendered those giveaways illegitimate.
But recently the bogus, 100-year-old titles have materialized as foreign investors
excited by the prospect of the “dry canal” have tried to stake claim
to those lands. At the same time that the government has advocated the construction of the
east-west railroad (which would be buffered by a free-trade zone), it has also
accepted a World Bank grant of more than $7 million to fund an Atlantic Biological
Corridor, a project promoting conservation in the north-south swath of rainforest—two
seemingly contradictory projects. Though there have been other canal proposals in the past, Watson believes this
time it’s really going through—and that international backing of her
community and other Atlantic coast communities is crucial. “The country
of Nicaragua is not poor; it is the administration that keeps us poor,”
Watson says. “We have lobster, green turtles, fish, the forest, different
animals. We want to get sustainable work. We can do anything as a community.
We have good minds, but we don’t have the strength. That is why I am here
[in America] looking for support.” |
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earl
Watson always votes alone. Outnumbered among the corporate and government interests
on the commission planning a coast-to-coast railroad across Nicaragua, Watson
is trying to save her native community of Monkey Point, where the proposed project
would begin. The 225-mile, high-speed railroad promises to expand global commercial
traffic exponentially, but it threatens to rob Watson and her community of their
land and way of life. 