DISCRIMINATION CONTINUES AGAINST CARIBBEAN WOMEN ON NICARAGUA'S ATLANTIC COAST

Afro-descendants live alongside the indigenous population of the area, comprised of the Miskito, Mayangna, Rama and Garifuna ethnic groups who have their own languages and cultural traditions. The indigenous people live on communal land along the coast and in the inhospitable inland zones of the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) and the South Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAS). In the far south, the Caribbean coastal region is also populated by black Creoles and mestizos who have moved from the Pacific region. This ethnic and linguistic pluralism distinguishes the Caribbean region from the rest of Nicaragua.

Summary of statistics

Indigenous and black women make up 52 percent of the 650,000 people living along Nicaragua’s  Caribbean coast, and they bear the greatest burden of gender and racial discrimination according to the rector of the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua (URACCAN). (source Alta Hooker for IPS) The indigenous population makes up between 10 and 12 percent of Nicaragua’s total population of 5.7 million. But there are no reliable figures for the proportion of blacks (URACAAN statistics). The black population is descended from Africans who arrived in British slave ships to the Caribbean coast of present-day Nicaragua and Honduras, a region that was in dispute between European powers during colonial times, and which remained the British protectorate of the Mosquito Coast until 1860.

  
·        'The councils of elders, rural judges, community leaders, indigenous political parties and the boards of companies in the Atlantic coast region are all 90 percent men," said Lottie Cunningham Wren. "That is how it has been for a very long time, and it is barely beginning to change," according to Cunningham, a sociologist and director of the Centre for Justice and Human Rights of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (CEJUDHCAN). She noted that racial discrimination affects both domestic employees and graduates from the region's two universities equally. The Atlantic coast universities, URACCAN, Bluefields Indian and Caribbean University (BICU), which has campuses at Bluefields (in the RAAS) and Puerto Cabezas or Bilwi (in the RAAN), and at additional locations.  'In the country as a whole, and especially in the Pacific, employers prefer women graduates from universities in Managua and the center of the country over young women graduates from our universities, in spite of the fact that their degrees are recognised by the National University Council (CNU) said Cunningham.

·        According to a 2005 report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), people in the two Caribbean regions have the least access to opportunities for development and education. In the rest of the country, 80 percent of the population has access to piped water, while in the Atlantic regions only 20 percent of indigenous people have potable water.

·        Forty-seven percent of all Nicaraguans live below the poverty line, but in the RAAN and RAAS regions, 79 percent of the population is poor, according to the UNDP study. In addition, productive sector employment has a skewed distribution, with 79 percent of the jobs being held by men and 21 percent by women.

·        A 2008 study on racism and ethnic discrimination in Nicaragua by Mirna Cunningham Kain of the Centre for Autonomy and Development of Indigenous Peoples (CADPI) conveys the impact of racism on gender relations through interviews with hundreds of women. "Gender discrimination is closely related to racism, because they both involve the dominant cultural group (mestizo men) who throw up barriers for others (women, indigenous people and blacks) on the basis of discriminatory prejudices about their inherent abilities and attributes," her study says.

Adapted from an Interpress report by José Adán Silva on March 20, 2009, entitled, “Nicaragua: Caribbean Women Face Double Discrimination.” Summarized by Maria Suarez Toro, Wings of the Butterfly