-Caveat Lector- Nicaraguan Jungle Foments Land Rights Battle Reuters 07-APR-99 TASBAPAUNI, Nicaragua, April 8 (Reuters) - During Nicaragua's war years, Alonzo Edwards and his neighbours took up arms to defend the beloved red earth handed down by their Indian ancestors. Back in the 1980s the Miskito Indians joined with the United States in a bid to overthrow the Marxist-led Sandinista government in Managua. Now they are prepared to resort to guns again, this time against the "gringos," as North Americans are called. Their target is a group of U.S. businessmen claiming title to a vast tract of jungle that is home to 12 indigenous farming communities along Nicaragua's remote Caribbean coast. "Many Miskitos fell during the war," Edwards told Reuters. "We never saw a single gringo fighting alongside us." A civil court judge is expected to rule this month on a lawsuit brought by Robert Edward Merrick Burlinson and associates over more than 140,000 acres (58,800 hectares) straddling the Prinzapolka River about 160 miles (260 km) northeast of Managua. The landmark case pits individual property rights against the interests of indigenous communities that have lived on the land for generations, raising thorny questions for the rule of law in this developing democracy. The debate has reopened centuries-old wounds over the historic disenfranchisement of Nicaragua's indigenous populations while focusing new attention on outsiders' exploitation of the area's natural resources. At the heart of the battle lies a swath of shimmering rain forest laced through by a silver-green ribbon of river, a place that lives and breathes for its Indian inhabitants. "This land is our mother," Miskito Roman Salinas said. "This is where we were born and where we grew up. It exists from the earliest times until the last." VILLAGE CALLED 'RED EARTH' The 1998 legal claim dropped like a bombshell on the largely illiterate residents of villages such as Tasbapauni -- "Red Earth" -- a riverside collection of raised bamboo houses that was burned to the ground during the 1980s civil war. "When they force us out of here where will we go?" Angelina Wilfred, a mother of eight, asked through a Miskito interpreter. "We'll run like animals." The plaintiffs asserted in the lawsuit that they purchased the property in 1974 from the Caribbean Shipping and Development Corp. of Panama for 1,310,176 cordobas (then about $187,000) in a transaction in New Orleans. Court documents describe plaintiff Merrick Burlinson as a Guatemalan national and the others as residents of Guatemala and Texas. Through their attorney, Denis Hodgson, they declined to be interviewed. "My clients have decided not to run a publicity campaign like the defendants have mounted," Hodgson said. The land's inhabitants, who number about 3,500, remember no owners except their grandparents and great-grandparents, though for some years before the 1979 Sandinista revolution a "gringo" paid to graze cattle on the land, they said. If a sale took place, it was done by hoodwinking uneducated locals, they contended. Furthermore, the long abandonment of the property throughout the revolution and the 10-year civil war that followed made any ownership claims invalid. "When they find the bones of a gringo who died in the war here, then they'll have a right to the land," Andres Sequiera, a community leader in Alamikamba, told Reuters. In 1997 a civil court judge apparently agreed, voiding the foreign owners' land title and handing the property over to community leaders. The plaintiffs contest that ruling. 'TIME IMMEMORIAL' Colonised by Britain, the largely undeveloped Caribbean region remains cut off culturally and economically from the urbanized Pacific coast, whose residents still are referred to here as "Spaniards." Indigenous Indian and Afro-Caribbean inhabitants number some 185,000, or half the population. It was a hotbed of opposition to the leftist Sandinista regime during the 1980s Contra uprising, with its own Miskito rebel force called Yatama, which disarmed only this year. Xavier Cruz, a lawyer for the Indian communities, said Nicaragua's constitution and laws creating semi-autonomous Atlantic regional governments recognise indigenous communities' inherent rights to lands they have occupied since "time immemorial." A century-old treaty with the British also delineates indigenous land rights, he said. Last year President Arnoldo Aleman proposed groundbreaking legislation to provide for titling of communal lands traditionally occupied by indigenous peoples in the region. But the equation is complicated as Nicaragua struggles to resolve thousands of disputes over property confiscated during the 1979-1990 Sandinista regime and show the world, including potential foreign investors, that a rule of law now applies. Cruz said the foreign claimants' real motive is to eliminate obstacles to deforesting the tract, which is rich in precious wood such as mahogany. Despite a presidential decree prohibiting the harvesting of rare wood, the Prinzapolka River has constant traffic in barges loaded with timber heading downriver to unload onto flatbed trucks for transport. 'THIS OXYGEN IS YOURS AND MINE' Residents say international companies hire them to cut and transport lumber. With no other source of employment, they take the work and watch as the forest is stripped of its riches. "The timber merchants pay the men practically nothing," Anita Mitchell, a Tasbapauni mother of seven, told Reuters. "Because we have nothing, we accept it to buy a little food." For Cruz, a native of the Caribbean region, the court case reaches beyond the rights of local communities to protection of the biosphere. "The interests here are yours and mine and all of humanity's," he said. "This oxygen is yours and mine and that is what we want to defend." Like him, the Miskito inhabitants see the land as a source of life and a guarantee for the future. "When we're hungry, we go out and hunt. When we need a house, there is the wood," ex-combatant Edwards said. "If they take it from us what's left?" local leader Hipolita Loria asked. "We must care for this land because it is our salvation." For now, they put their faith in a legal system that to many of them seems inscrutable. But whatever the judge's decision, they have no plans to leave the land. "Take care," shouted Henry Wadding as he stood on the riverbank at Tasbapauni and bade farewell to a visitor, "because this could become World War III." 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