Chapter XI

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Ninety-five years of rarely interrupted civil strife have left Nicaragua in a condition which offers little hope for the early re-establishment of peace and good government. The advances made along these lines between 1863 and 1893 were to a great extent nullified during the Liberal regime, when the continual attempts at revolution, followed usually by barbarous treatment of the people of Granada and other Conservative centers, not only revived and intensified the old localistic spirit, but aroused a turbulent spirit and a strong taste for factional strife among the people of all classes. Within a few years after 1893, it would have been impossible for either party to acquiesce in the rule of the other as the Liberals had acquiesced in the Conservative regime of the “thirty years,” for the subordination of any sense of justice to political considerations in the conduct of the government and in the courts made the opponents of the party in power so insecure in their property and in their personal liberty that they were ready to support almost any revolutionary movement which promised an alleviation of their condition. The only creed of public officials and professional politicians seemed to be the promotion of the interests of their faction and the abuse and subjugation of their political enemies. These conditions were little changed by the advent of the Conservatives to power in 1910, because the new authorities, who had grown up under the oppression of Zelaya, with the worst features of his administration constantly before their eyes, apparently could not resist the temptation to avenge themselves upon their former rulers on the one hand and to attempt to recoup their losses at the expense of the nation on the other. The political morality of all parties had been so debased that a restoration of the clean and moderate regime of the “thirty years,” of which many of the older generation in Granada had dreamed, was no longer possible.

The fertile lake plains, laid waste time after time by revolutionary armies, are no longer the “Mahomet’s Paradise” which travelers had described in glowing terms in colonial times. After the declaration of independence, the energies of the ruling class in each section of the country were entirely occupied in endeavors to maintain themselves in power or to overthrow administrations controlled by their enemies. The harassed landholders continued to cultivate their plantations as well as they could in the intervals between civil wars, but the political situation of the country soon became so hopeless that there was little incentive for them to attempt to repair the damage wrought by each successive outbreak or to engage in new agricultural enterprises. The indigo plantations which had made the people of the province wealthy under the rule of Spain were abandoned some time before the invention of aniline dyes made them unprofitable in the other states, and the famous cacao of Nicaragua, which was formerly an important export, is now grown in quantities little more than sufficient to supply the local demand. The only important products of the lake basin today are plantains, corn, beans, sugar, and cacao, which are planted for local consumption, and cattle, which are still raised in large numbers, notwithstanding the losses inflicted on ranch owners by foraging

## parties and bandits.

Outside of the hot plains of the interior, there have until recently been few settlements of importance. The climate of the mountains to the northwest and southeast of the lakes is much more suitable to European colonization than that of Granada and Leon, but the latter cities, situated as they are on what was formerly the transisthmian commercial route, have always been preferred as a place of residence by the creole families. The majority of the towns which were established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the regions of Matagalpa, Jinotega, and Segovia were soon destroyed by the fierce mountain Indians or by pirates who came up the rivers from their bases of operations on the East Coast; and those which survived, with few exceptions, are today but little more than straggling villages. In the _sierras_ between the lakes and the Pacific, there were at the time of the conquest a number of Indian villages, but their growth was discouraged by the fact that the lack of rivers and springs made it difficult to secure even drinking water in the dry season. Neither district received much attention from the government until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

During the last twenty-five years, however, a number of coffee plantations have been established both in the departments of Matagalpa and Jinotega, and in the mountains near Managua and Granada. These are not so large nor so well equipped as those in other countries of the Isthmus, and their product is much less than that of Guatemala or Salvador, but their development has nevertheless greatly increased the commerce of the country. It has not, however, affected general economic and political conditions so much as it would have if the majority of the plantations were not owned and managed by foreigners. Nicaraguan citizens hold only a part of the properties in the southwestern _sierras_, and those in the North are almost entirely in the hands of Germans, Englishmen, and Americans. The natives have participated less in the prosperity due to the new conditions than in any of the other countries where coffee has become the principal national product.

The Matagalpa and Jinotega districts have a large Indian population, living in little settlements scattered through the mountains. These tribes were not subjugated by the colonial authorities until nearly two centuries after the establishment of Leon and Granada, and even at the present time, when most of them have adopted the Spanish language and religion, they show little admixture of white blood. At the time of their pacification they received large tracts of land from the crown, which they still hold in common and apportion at regular intervals among their members. As the extent and the exact boundaries of these grants have never been definitely settled, they have been a cause of constant friction between the native communities and the white planters. The officials of the central government have often carelessly sold land belonging to the Indians to the coffee growers as a part of the public domain, and the planters themselves have in some instances taken possession of the property of the aboriginal communities without any right to do so. Projects for the surveying of the Indian lands and for the sale of those which their owners do not need to the coffee planters have for some time occupied the attention of the authorities at Managua.

The labor situation in the northern coffee belt presents considerable difficulties. The Indians, who see little advantage in exchanging their free life in their own villages for one of toil on the plantations, do not furnish the regular and dependable supply of workmen which are indispensable for the proper cultivation of the plantations, although they do not refuse to work for a few days when they have need for a small sum of ready money. Under Zelaya, an attempt was made to solve the problem by the passage of a peonage law similar to the _Ley de Trabajadores_ in Guatemala. This system seems never to have borne so heavily upon the Indians as in the latter republic, but it at least gave the planters a means for securing a regular force with which to work their properties. Further aid was furnished by the recruiting of laborers by force during the harvest time, when many Indians from Matagalpa were even forced to travel for many days on foot across the hot plains of the interior to work for friends of the administration in the _sierras_ south of the lakes. The labor laws were abolished by the Conservative administration, however, and since 1910 the planters, unable to enforce contracts which they make with the Indians, have often had difficulties in harvesting their crops. Their position has been alleviated somewhat by the fact that the local authorities have in many cases illegally enforced the old law; but the uncertainty of the labor situation has greatly discouraged the extension of the plantations and the introduction of new capital.[17]

The East Coast, which is for all practical purposes farther from the cities of the interior than it is from New Orleans, has only within the last quarter century become an integral part of Nicaragua, for until 1894 it enjoyed a sort of independent existence under British protection as the “Mosquito Kingdom.” This was a fictitious state of half-breed Indians and negroes, who had from early times maintained commercial and to some extent political relations with the nearby settlements of English pirates and woodcutters, and through them with the governor of Jamaica. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the attention of the world was first called to the possibility of constructing an interoceanic canal by way of the San Juan River, these relations were made the pretext for the establishment of a protectorate over the entire eastern portion of Nicaragua and for the seizure of Greytown, at the mouth of the San Juan, which had never even been in the domain claimed by the Indians. The territory which was thus brought under British control was in reality governed, not by the savage and degenerate native chiefs, but by the British and other foreigners who had settled along the Coast. The United States from the first refused to recognize the protectorate, and protested vigorously and in the end successfully against the violation of Nicaragua’s sovereignty. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, signed in 1850, bound both powers not to colonize, occupy, or exercise dominion over any part of Nicaragua or Central America, but the British government refused to admit that this obliged it to withdraw its protection from the Mosquitos, and the continued occupation of Greytown, as we have seen, was one of the causes which led the people of the United States to support the filibustering expeditions of Walker. In 1860, Great Britain agreed to abandon the protectorate on condition that Greytown should be made a free port, and that the Indians should be given a reservation in which they were to be free to govern themselves in accordance with their own usages. This meant that the foreigners on the Coast were practically to be at liberty to manage their own affairs without interference by the native authorities. The arrangement was unsatisfactory from the first, for the residents of Greytown and Bluefields objected to every exercise of Nicaraguan sovereignty, and Great Britain upheld them in their attitude, and thus in fact continued to exercise a protectorate over them.

Matters came to a crisis in 1893, when Zelaya made a war with Honduras the pretext for sending an army into the reservation and seizing the control of the government. The Indians and the foreigners on the Coast protested strongly against this action, but Great Britain, wearied of the difficult and equivocal position in which her relations with the Mosquitos had placed her, refused to uphold them. They had, therefore, no choice but to submit. In 1894 a convention called by the Nicaraguan commander and dominated by him voted for the complete incorporation of the reservation into the Republic as the Department of “Zelaya,” and the Republic has ever since exercised complete jurisdiction over the former “sambo” kingdom.

Like other sections of the Caribbean litoral, the East Coast of Nicaragua is inhabited chiefly by Americans and English-speaking negroes. Its principal product is the banana. Bluefields, which is the administrative center and the seaport, is connected with New Orleans by a regular line of small steamers, and has far more commercial and financial relations with the United States than with the interior. During the Liberal regime, many important concessions were granted for enterprises in the newly incorporated territory, which later became a source of no little embarrassment to the government. In some cases the higher officials made grants which were actually harmful to the community as a whole, for their own personal profit, while in others large tracts of land were ceded or special privileges were granted to unscrupulous promoters who had little intention of carrying out in good faith the obligations which they assumed, but who appealed to their own governments for aid whenever they became involved in disputes with the native authorities. Some of the monopolies established, and

## particularly the exclusive right which one company received to operate

steamers on the Bluefields River, caused great discontent on the Coast itself, and led the foreign colony there to take a prominent part in organizing and supporting the revolution of 1909, by which Zelaya was overthrown.

The means of transportation between the various sections of Nicaragua are as yet very primitive. In the interior, they are by no means bad, for it was comparatively easy to build a railroad from Corinto, the chief port on the Pacific, to all of the important cities of the lake region and to the coffee district west of it; and the lakes themselves afford a cheap means of transportation to the regions around their shores. Matagalpa and the northern departments, however, depend upon the rudest kind of cart roads, and are almost inaccessible in the rainy season. Communication with the Atlantic Coast is still more difficult, especially at present, for the steamer service which formerly existed on the San Juan River has been allowed to deteriorate, and the overland route to Bluefields involves several days of traveling through a sparsely settled tropical forest on mule back. Preparations are now well advanced for the construction by American capital of a railway from Bluefields to Lake Nicaragua, which would make travel from the East to the West Coast comparatively easy. Another road is planned from the main line of the Pacific Railway to Matagalpa, and it seems not improbable that this and the Bluefields line may eventually be connected, so that it will be possible to cross the Republic from one ocean to the other.

The execution of these projects, and in fact Nicaragua’s whole prospect for the immediate future, depend upon her relations with the United States. Since 1911, both the political affairs and the economic development of the country have not been entirely in the hands of her own citizens, for the government at Washington, in its efforts to promote peace in Nicaragua and in Central America, has entered upon a course which has forced it on several occasions to intervene decisively in the internal politics of the country, and two firms of American bankers, as a result of their financial assistance to the government, have gradually assumed control of the customs houses, of the railways, of the currency system, and even of the internal revenues of the Republic. The course of events which has brought this to pass will be described in