The Structure of the Nicaraguan Settler Colonial Conjuncture

Abstract

Latin America is a settler colony (Castellanos 2017; Speed 2019), but the settler colonialism analytic is not modular. Latin American settler states are subject to U.S. imperialism, and this has shaped the structure of settler colonialism in both the North and South. Taking up calls to integrate the study of empire and capitalism into the study of settler colonialism (Byrd 2011; Speed 2019), this paper analyzes the relationship between settler colonialism in Nicaragua and the ongoing relation of economic, political, and military imperialism imposed by the United States on Nicaragua. Nicaraguan settler colonialism does not merely resemble United States settler colonialism due to its similar origin as a project of original accumulation; rather, United States imperialism has shaped settler colonialism in Nicaragua through material and ideological flows. I argue that the relationship between settler colonialisms in Nicaragua and the United States are mutually reinforcing: the United States has financed, militarily compelled, and ideologically justified settler colonialism in Nicaragua, resulting in further surplus value for United States settler capitalists. Based on data long-term, activist research, this paper briefly traces three key moments: U.S. diplomatic entreaties to impose its own legal theories of property on Indigenous people in what is now Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast (1830–1860); World Bank financing of agricultural colonization and cattle ranching in Nicaragua (1950–1979); and Anglo-North American mining companies’ expansion of land-intensive gold exploration techniques into Afro-Indigenous territories (2000–present). I demonstrate the role of each moment in shaping settler spatiality and Afro-Indigenous dispossession in Nicaragua.