Expat Community > Nicaragua

iguanalover
Joined 2013
Posts: 1041

buyer beware

9 years ago

There has been lots of advise on this forum and in other places about really taking time to look around if you want to buy a house or land in Nicaland. This article talks about a local scandal that has been in the news for the last couple of weeks. The names of the accused have been listed, something my husband loves, they were all local lawyers. Be careful about what you look at and check things out thoroughly before you do anything.

The Nicaraguan Supreme Court last week suspended the licenses of five lawyers because of their involvement in the illegal sale of 580 square miles of indigenous land to settlers from other parts of Nicaragua. This came days after the National Assembly removed the legislative immunity from Deputy Brooklyn Rivera, of the indigenous YATAMA Party for his involvement in the sales. Protests over the invasion of settlers into land that has been titled to indigenous Miskito communities became violent in recent weeks and have resulted in seven deaths in the month of September.

On Sept. 23, Prosecutor General of the Republic Hernan Estrada announced that he will investigate the illegal sale of indigenous land and prosecute those responsible. Estrada said that he had met with Rivera in the past [evidently in 2010] and told him that these illegal activities of his close associates had to stop but apparently the warnings had no effect. Rivera, whose YATAMA Party has at times been allied with the Sandinista Party, denied that he had been warned about illegal sale of land and said that there were “hidden interests” behind the sales. He said that it was the government that had permitted the incursion of non-indigenous people into the area. Rivera has been replaced in the National Assembly by his alternate, Noé Coleman, who is a faculty member at the joint campus in Bilwi of the Moravian and Indian & Caribbean Universities.

A presidential commission made up of Prosecutor General Estrada, Attorney General Ana Julia Guido, and the Supreme Court is widening its investigations into the land sales. Estrada said that the government indicted and convicted corrupt lawyers and notaries a few years ago and annulled the land sales that they had certified as legal. Twenty-three indigenous communities have received communal title to their traditional lands and by law this land cannot be sold, bought or given away and can only be leased. Bayardo Arce, adviser to President Daniel Ortega, said, “Someone defrauded the buyers and someone defrauded the Miskitos by selling their land and so what are we seeing now? Confrontation between Nicaraguans. We obviously have to investigate this in depth and take corrective measures because if we don’t what we’ll have is war over land about which there should be no discussion—it belongs to the Miskitos.”

The political opposition called for the forming of a commission independent of the government to investigate land sales, illegal timber trafficking, and the deaths and injuries suffered by indigenous leaders in recent weeks. The Sandinista Renovation Movement said that it would petition for a visit to Nicaragua of Victoria Tauli Corpuz, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, to investigate “the situation of the Miskito people, their rights and the situation of conflict and instability in the communities.” (El Nuevo Diario, Sept. 23, 24; Informe Pastran, Sept. 23, 24)

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