Why The Mesoamerican Leadership School is Needed

“Mesoamerica is a place with a historically well-organized indigenous movement,” Lichtenstein says. “But to keep the movement alive and growing, it’s critical to develop leadership skills among the younger generations.”

Meanwhile, with deep poverty a common reality throughout indigenous Mexico and Central America, young people are migrating away from their home communities towards big cities, where their indigenous cultural identity can easily be assimilated and lost.

“If the youth don’t step forward, there’s a chance the movement will not have a future,” Lichtenstein says. “Building territorial leadership starts with raising consciousness around place and identity. And that’s what the Mesoamerican Leadership School is doing. And they’re doing it extremely well.”

Diriam Walker, a Miskito woman from the town of Puerto Lempira on the northeastern coast of Honduras, says she feels privileged by her enrollment in the school, because the education has given her a deeper understanding of what a leader should be, and how she might assume that role in her own community.

“A leader needs to be loving. A leader needs to be respectful,” says Walker, 29 years old. “It’s important to listen. People don’t realize how much listening is a part of leadership,” citing her national government’s clumsy response to the COVID pandemic as just one example of tone-deaf leadership.

And according to Walker, leaders also need to be strong… because outsiders are constantly threatening coastal indigenous communities in Honduras.

“We have a lot of resources. We have valuable forests. There’s gold in our rivers. These people come to take what we have. There is no peace.”

As such, Walker says she drew tremendous inspiration in her formative years from Nacel Kiapa Panting, a Miskito leader from the community of Wampusirpi who died in 2019.

“He had vision,” Walker says. “He said the most important thing is land. He knew before others did that we needed to fight legally for our title. And once we got that paper—thanks to him—we were able to defend our homes.”

How the Mesoamerican Leadership School Works

Alvarado says that the workshops allow for great exchanges of ideas between indigenous communities who might otherwise not interact, allowing for the emergence of a greater collective wisdom.

“The youth in Uaxactun have so much forest,” Alvarado explains, pointing out that the community is situated in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a naturally protected region more than 8,000 square miles (2,090,667 hectares)—or slightly larger than the state of Massachusetts.

“But when we went to another community, the cooperative Union Mayaxca, they were trying to figure out what to do with their title. Because they can sell land from their title; they can do whatever they want with it… and what they realized was that the forests were part of their identity. Through the discussion, they came to realize that if you lose or sell your forests, you are losing or selling part of yourself.”

With RFUS and USAID support, the MLS has expanded to new geographies in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala, and has begun the design and implementation of new disaster risk management and advocacy methodologies and training modules. The hope is to pilot these modules with these new communities in 2023, hold a regional exchange to share lessons learned and refine teaching tools, which will then be incorporated across the School’s work regionally.

Learn More about the MLS in This Video