Denial of indigenous land claims is hardly new. It has been endemic in Latin America since the 16th century. However, until quite recently, whenever Latin American Indians "did" anything with regard to land, they largely stood alone. That is no longer the case.

On September 17, 2001, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the highest tribunal in the Americas, released its decision in the case of a small Mayagna (Sumo) community of Awas Tingni, located on the forested area of Nicaragua's Caribbean coastal regional. Since 1992, the community has sought formal recognition of its territorial rights in the face of encroaching international lumber companies. In its decision, the Court affirmed the existence of indigenous peoples' collective rights to the land, resources, and environment they customarily use and occupy The justices thus recognized the community's customary rights to property and judicial protection and declared that the Nicaraguan government had violated these granting concessions to a Korean lumber company to log on the Community's land without even consulting the community.

The Court declared, "for indigenous communities the relationship with the land is not merely a question of possession and production, but it is also a material and spiritual element which they should fully enjoy, as well as a means to preserve their cultural heritage and pass it on to future generations."

Thus, the Awas Tingni case effectively challenged vague or non-existent rules that have stalled efforts to recognize rights and title land for the community and Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast region in general. The court decision will reverberate throughout Latin America, where numerous and similar territorial claims have brought little, if any, government response.

"This victory shows that indigenous peoples now have the technology to document their land rights and the legal know-how to demand that they be enforced," said David Maybury-Lewis, Harvard University Professor of Anthropology and a founder of Cultural Survival. "In the future, nations that ignore this precedent will risk serious international embarrassment." The court decision strengthens the numerous organizations in the Latin American indigenous movement -now sweeping down from Mexico to Chile. The treatment of the Awas Tingni case, in turn, illustrates how indigenous concerns -previously regarded as simple "claims" by marginal people-have been elevated to internationally-recognized legal "rights." Indians now have powerful national and international legal mechanisms to press their claims.

Three from Harvard played long and critical roles in the development of the case and the subsequent trial. Lead attorney and Harvard Law graduate S. James Anaya, is - Professor of Law at the University of Arizona and a Program Affiliate at the Weatherhead Center's Program on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival (PONSACS). One of the community's expert witnesses was the region's foremost scholar on indigenous rights, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, of the Colegio de Mexico and former Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard. Prosecution witness and anthropological researcher for the case was PONSACS Associate Director Theodore Macdonald.

Since 1995, PONSACS, collaborating with Nicaraguan and US attorneys, the Indian Law Resource Center, and the Awas Tingni community, has drawn on anthropological techniques to identify and document the local understanding of and justification for land and resource rights in this landmark case. PONSACS' role was to document, through ethnographic research and community-developed maps, Awas Tingni's current and historical use and occupancy of its territory. Subsequently, researchers illustrated these patterns through reports and computer-generated maps (geographic information systems, or GIS).

The Awas Tingni project began when a joint Nicaraguan-Dominican lumber company sought logging rights on its lands after the Ministry of Natural Resources had declared the region as a "protected area." In May 1994 Awas Tingni leaders signed a trilateral agreement with the Nicaraguan-Dominican lumber company and the government of Nicaragua for lumbering on 42,000 hectares of tropical rain forest claimed by the community. The negotiations, under the eye of an international environmental organization and supported by legal specialists, led to a community-based natural forest management project that was economically beneficial, environmentally sound, and respectful of human rights. To strengthen compliance with the agreement, and to deal with any future disputes, the community members sought formal recognition of their territorial claims. PONSACS' basic research served initially as a "preventative" tool for the community, but later became the basis for litigation when in late 1995, and without informing the community, a large Korean corporation received a government lumber concession on their lands. The case eventually reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights after local recourse procedures were exhausted.

Similar indigenous concerns partially explain the upsurge in protests, strikes, uprisings, and marches by Indian peoples in Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Consequently, the Court's decision sets a far reaching precedent affirming indigenous land rights not only for the indigenous communities of the Atlantic Coast, but also for indigenous peoples throughout the hemisphere. Moreover, the decision, by specifying required actions to support broad laws, strengthens the rule of law throughout the region.

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