 One of the main debates around Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) is that multilingual, inter-ethnic societies challenge the western ideology stating that societies are “internally homogeneous” entities that have sharp divisions between each other based on linguistic and cultural markers.Since the IBE model in Nicaragua was largely designed on this ideology, its design and implementation by the Nicaraguan state (and NGOs) does not accommodate communities that are “mother tongue bi-multilingual”, for it constrains people living in inter-ethnic multilingual societies to choose a limited set of cultural and linguistic-identity markers.Freeland (2003) explains that the IBE program in Nicaragua constitutes a remarkable improvement in contrast to the cruel assimilationist Spanish-monolingual schooling model applied to indigenous populations.