Nicaragua’s Chinese Canal: Behind the Audacious $40 Billion Bid to Build a Rival Panama Canal
Nicaragua’s Chinese Canal: Behind the Audacious $40 Billion Bid to Build a Rival Panama Canal
AS/COA’s Eric Farnsworth asserts his skepticism on the proposed construction of a Nicaraguan Canal: “expense is going to be significant and success is far from guaranteed.”
More than 150 years ago, U.S. businessmen and politicians plotted the creation of a canal through the isthmus nation of Nicaragua that would link the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Now, according to Nicaraguan officials, what Americans like the powerful Vanderbilt family (and later former President Theodore Roosevelt) once dreamed, a Chinese consortium intends to make real.
On Thursday afternoon, the Nicaraguan government of President Daniel Ortega muscled into law a sensational 50-year concession that grants a little-known private Chinese company the authority to “design, develop, engineer, finance, construct, possess, operate, maintain and administer” the Great Nicaragua Canal megaproject. Estimated to cost $40 billion, it includes an interoceanic canal, an oil pipeline, an interoceanic “dry canal” freight railroad, two deepwater ports, two international airports and a series of free-trade zones along the canal route. The canal would be at least twice as long as the Panama Canal and wider in order to accommodate the newest generation of supertankers. An executive representing the enterprise suggested that it would be the biggest such project in Latin American history….
Civil-society groups also worry that Ortega’s Sandinista politburo and their new Chinese business partners intend to essentially create a privatized enclave in the middle of Nicaragua — one that will be governed for the next 50 to 100 years by their self-styled Canal Commission, regardless of which government is in power in Managua. “Nicaragua is not for sale. Nicaragua belongs to all Nicaraguans and is not the private property of Ortega and his family,” reads a declaration signed by 21 civil-society organizations.
But as questions surround the venture, so does cynicism. Nicaragua has long sought to leverage its unique geographic position, but political turmoil and shallow commitments have doomed more than a century of mooted projects to failure. It’s also worth noting the current Chinese backers won’t have the same drive and hubris as the Americans who built the Panama Canal — construction started there in 1904 only after Washington had meddled with regional politics and sent in a warship bristling with armed marines. “I’m skeptical,” says Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas in Washington, referring to the proposed Nicaraguan megaproject. “There’s already a canal. The expense is going to be significant and success is far from guaranteed….”
