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McCray joined community leaders in a recent tour of their territory and witnessed significant new destruction: a road opening up a previously inaccessible area and large areas logged, burned, and cleared for agriculture.
“We’ve made every effort to convince them that in reality the reserve is at risk,” but the Nicaraguan government has done nothing, she says. Rama and Kriol communities have created their own patrols to document illegal settlement and other activities. They have also developed a community ranger program. But the remoteness of their posts can lead to greater vulnerability; McCray said that after one ranger’s family was attacked by settlers, the family decided to move, too frightened to pursue their case with the police.
Amaru Ruiz, president of Fundación del Río, an organization founded to preserve southeast Nicaragua, including the Río San Juan Biosphere Reserve, has documented churches, schools, and roads built illegally within the reserve. Ruiz attributes their presence to “municipal public policies to establish people within the reserve” carried out by local officials with tacit approval of the central government. He says these officials are among those profiting from the illegal sale of protected lands.
Ruiz, now living in Costa Rica, is one of the tens of thousands of dissidents who fled Nicaragua in 2018. After the government revoked its recognition of Fundación del Río as an organization that year, threats against him increased, he says. Most of Fundación’s members have been threatened, he says, and its radio and educational programs in Nicaragua have ceased. Recently, the caretaker of a small forest preserve owned by Fundación del Río was threatened by local authorities who want to take it over, Ruiz says.
Since 2012, Nicaragua has received nearly $6.5 million from the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility’s Readiness Fund, part of the U.N.-created, World Bank-funded program REDD+ (Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) that provides funds for developing countries to create, and eventually implement, forest preservation plans. According to the Nicaraguan government, the country has carried out planning elements including training state agencies and holding “consultations” with Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, but needs an additional $5 million from the fund to finalize its plan. The minister for national policies, Paul Oquist, recently told a Nicaraguan climate change conference that the government’s fundamental strategy is forest preservation in the Caribbean region, which the government designated a critical “carbon capture zone” under its REDD+ program.
Yet Ruiz charges that the government’s participation in REDD+ is really about extracting resources under the guise of conservation. He says the Ortega government “has shown environmental concerns don’t interest them.” The Alliance of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples of Nicaragua (APIAN) also criticized the program, saying the government has “promoted the advance of the agricultural and cattle ranching frontier through the forests that form part of our traditional territories” and fabricated “agreements” with Indigenous communities to comply with REDD+ requirements.
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原文来源：https://undark.org/2020/09/16/nicaragua-deforestation/
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