A revisiting of Salvador Martí i Puig’s approach to globalization and the turn toward governance in explaining the roots and impact of the political mobilization of Latin America’s indigenous peoples since the 1990s recasts governance as a disciplinary regime that in the case of Nicaragua co-opted potentially radical oppositional movements into the neoliberal project that accompanied Latin America’s democratic transition. The discussion takes as its empirical case the autonomy process on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, which in its twenty-fifth year represents the most sustained devolution of power to indigenous peoples in Latin America. Una revisión de los estudios de Salvador Martí i de Puig sobre la globalización y el giro hacia la gobernanza como manera de explicar las raíces y el impacto de la movilización política de los pueblos indígenas de América Latina desde la década de 1990 reformula la gobernanza como un régimen disciplinario que, en el caso de Nicaragua, cooptó movimientos potencialmente radicales, convirtiéndolos en parte del proyecto neoliberal que se llevó a cabo a la par de la transición democrática de América Latina. Nuestra discusión se centra en un caso empírico: el proceso de autonomía en la costa caribeña nicaragüense. En su vigésimo quinto año, dicho proceso constituye la devolución de autonomía indígena más sostenida en América Latina.
This article reviews historical forms of localised government on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and contrasts them with the contemporary struggle to attain a communal form of autonomy undertaken by the region's indigenous population. It suggests that the contemporary autonomy process shares few features with the historical precedents of localised government which are commonly invoked to legitimise it. Instead, its roots can be located in the emergence of a Moskitian nationalism amongst the Miskitu which occurred to counter the assimilating impulse of an increasingly developmentally determined national state during the 1960s under the Somoza dictatorship, and then more thoroughly during the Sandinista revolution.
This article draws on the ideas of Anderson (1991) in discussing the role played by the National Literacy Crusade of 1980 in imagining the Nicaraguan nation. As the article demonstrates, the National Literacy Crusade had the potential to create a sense of communion with a mass of anonymous others that is, according to Anderson, the hallmark of modern nations. At the same time, it was also a project that sought to foster a particular national identity centred around the anti–imperialist and socialist nationalism of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.
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