Chinese tycoon funding canal that would transform Nicaragua

BEI J I NG — Nicaragua has announced the route of a $42-billion Cdn canal that it hopes will break Panama’s monopoly on crossing between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans.

Digging a 280-kilometre canal from the mouth of the river Brito, through Lake Nicaragua and to Bluefields on the Atlantic coast, has long been considered impossible.

But President Daniel Ortega, together with a mysterious Chinese tycoon named Wang Jing, has presented the project as a chance to lift his country out of poverty.

Wang has insisted he has the money and the ability to complete the canal within five years and that construction will begin in December. But he did not return requests to speak about the canal Tuesday and, despite promising last year to reveal which investors were backing the project, has yet to do so.

Paul Oquist, an adviser to Ortega, said employment in Nicaragua — where half of the six million population lives in poverty — “would double thanks to the canal and its multiplier effect.”

But confusion continues to cloud the project. In January, Manuel Coronel Kautz, the president of the Nicaragua Canal Management Bureau, said construction would start in 2015. But Wang has since insisted that the December start date remains in place.

Eliseo Nunez, a member of congress for the Independent Liberal Party, said the announcement of the route was “a propaganda game, a media show to continue generating false hopes of future prosperity among Nicaraguans.”

Critics have said that signing over large areas of the country to Wang’s development company is a violation of sovereignty. The concession will see Wang own all of the canal to begin with, with one per cent each year returning to Nicaragua.

If the canal is completed, it will be able to handle larger supertankers than its older rival and will cut 1,300 kilometres of travel for ships sailing to the U.S. east coast.

Scientists say the plans will devastate the wetlands and ecosystems of Lake Nicaragua, the largest reservoir of fresh water in Central America.