On January 25th, a well-known Tuahka Indigenous leader was killed. Camilo Frank Lopez was shot in the forehead while he was leaving a local bar with his cousins. Lopez was the Tuahka Indigenous Territorial Government Prosecutor.

Nicaragua’s Caribbean region was never colonised by the Spanish, and to this day several  indigenous peoples, of whom the most numerous are the Miskitu, who have their own language are found along the whole of the misnamed ‘Mosquito Coast’ from Honduras to southern Nicaragua.

While they observe many cultural traditions their lives are otherwise not very different from those of the ‘mestizo’ (mixed race) peasant farmers found across rural Nicaragua, including the Caribbean. They do, however, retain a long standing hostility towards governments in Managua, which have often ignored them. The Miskitu lands, along with those of other indigenous groups, are threatened by the advance of the ‘agricultural frontier

21 deaths in two years resulted from land conflicts, Camilo Frank Lopez, a community leader was one of them. land disputes of the kind found in the north-east corner of Nicaragua are unfortunately common in many countries which have an agricultural frontier.