Honduras Grants Land to Indigenous Group, in Bid to Help It Protect Forests

The title agreement, which gives the Miskito people ownership of almost one million hectares (about 3,860 square miles) of their traditional land, represents an acknowledgment of the rights of the most neglected citizens in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries.

“The title is just the first step,” said David Kaimowitz, the director of natural resources at the Ford Foundation, who has been working with the Miskito communities. “The title won’t guarantee that drug traffickers and oil palm growers won’t move in, but it gives them a handle to resist these incursions.”

It is also an action that Mr. Kaimowitz and other experts say will help preserve the region’s dense pine forests and tropical rain forests. Conservation groups maintain that indigenous people have been the best stewards of their own forests. Honduras is following Nicaragua, Belize and Panama, which have all handed over title to forestland to indigenous communities.

“That is our tradition; our duty is to protect the forest,” Norvin Goff Salinas, the president of a coalition of Miskito groups, said in a telephone interview.

In addition to the 970,000 hectares (about 3,750 square miles) turned over to Miskito groups, the government has promised an additional 800,000 hectares (about 3,090 square miles) in the Río Plátano biosphere reserve, part of the most important area of tropical rain forest in Central America.

The Miskito people base their claim to the land on their continuous occupation of the region and the stilted language of a Victorian-era treaty.

They are the inhabitants of the Mosquito Coast of legend, covering the Caribbean coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua, which was a British protectorate beginning in the 17th century.

In the 1850s, the British government signed treaties to hand the land over to the unstable countries emerging from the Spanish Empire. The Wyke-Cruz treaty of 1859 offered a ringing defense of the rights of the Miskito of Honduras, declaring that they “shall not be disturbed in the possession of any lands or other property which they may hold or occupy.”

For more than 100 years, though, it was their isolation, not the law, that protected them.

Over the past 40 years, the Miskito have organized to press for recognition of those long-forgotten rights. Their claims became increasingly urgent as large ranchers moved into their territory, clearing forests for pasture land.

“There wasn’t any legal support to complain to the government,” Mr. Goff said. “Now with the backing of titles, we can stop this agenda.”

To the northwest, powerful corporations owned by Honduran oligarchs have planted vast plantations of oil palm trees, prompting violent land battles.

The Miskito protested to press their claims, putting pressure on the government of President Porfirio Lobo, who struggled to assert legitimacy after he was elected following a 2009 coup.

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