On the Hard Red Road: As a Road Cuts Into Their Rainforest Home, the Mayagna People Consider How Much Modernity They Really Want
The road through the jungle from the gold-rush town of Bonanza to the tiny Mayagna settlement of Sunawas is dead straight. If you know Nicaragua at all this would strike you as very odd. Another striking thing about this particular highway is its colour. Here, where it rains 340 days a year and the eye is bombarded by a primal tangle of every kind of green, the Bonanza-Sunawas road is defiantly red.
When I travelled along it eight years ago the first phase of construction was underway. The road promised to tunnel 8.3km through an antique vegetal tumult of lianas and granadilla, ceiba and mahogany trees into one of the last surviving tracts of lowland rainforest in Central America. A second phase was planned to extend the route another 10km or so from Sunawas to Musawas, on the fringes of the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve — an area about the size of El Salvador, home to about 15,000 Mayagna Indians and, excepting the Amazon, the largest expanse of pristine rainforest on the planet.
Phase one was to cost 4.5 million córdobas, just under $200,000 (or around £120,000). It was an unfeasible sum for the Nicaraguan government, so 95 per cent of the funds were provided by the Danish government’s development organisation, DANIDA, with the remaining $10,000 raised by the local municipality. Both the national transport ministry and the local authorities were in favour of the project, which would open up a previously remote area, halving the journey time from Musawas to Bonanza, and making it easier for locals to take their goods to market and ferry the sick, elderly and pregnant to the nearest clinic. Mayagna community leaders were also broadly positive. But there were those who worried that the road might change their lives in unpredictable ways.