Is Nicaragua's 'great canal' project dead and buried?
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
Two-and-a-half years after developers "broke ground" on an ocean-to-ocean canal project that promised to create tens of thousands of jobs and double Nicaragua's annual growth figures, the multi-billion-dollar venture has yet to get off the ground, recent reports suggest.
Officially, the so-called "Gran Canal de Nicaragua" (Great Nicaraguan Canal) is still a go. Neither the government of President Daniel Ortega nor its Chinese partner in the project, an untested construction firm called Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Group (HKND Group), has said otherwise. And yet, there's no evidence that the project has advanced in any meaningful way since its launch in late 2014, when HKND Group's chairman, Chinese telecom mogul Wang Jing, traveled to Nicaragua for a confetti-covered kickoff event (NotiCen, Feb. 5, 2015).
The ceremony was always more symbol than substance. Wang might have waited for work to begin on one the project's two deepwater ports, or for excavation to commence on the canal itself. Instead he broke ground on a single, out-of-the-way access road. Still, the message was clear: HKND Group was ready and raring to go; ready to get its hands dirty; ready to turn Nicaragua's generation-sold dream of an inter-oceanic canal into a reality. "There's no turning back," the billionaire investor said later that night during a follow-up event with President Ortega.
All these months later, there doesn't seem to be any moving forward. In mid 2014, HKND Group wowed the public with talk about the project's scale and scope. It said the canal would be between 230 and 520 meters wide; stretch 278 km from the mouth of the Rio Brito, on the Pacific coast, to the end of the Rio Punta Gorda, on Nicaragua's Caribbean side; and be open for business as early as 2020 (NotiCen, Oct. 23, 2014). To date, not a single meter of the canal has been dug. Nor has work begun on any of the numerous side projects--hotels, cement and steel factories, a free-trade zone, an international airport--that were supposed to accompany the canal. Even the lonely access road Wang visited in 2014 appears to have been abandoned.
"It remains unpaved and is only used by horses from nearby farms," the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency reported late last month. "[It's] just a dirt road that in winter is difficult to travel because it turns into a muddy track."
Unanswered questions
IPS reporter Jose Adan Silva traveled to both of the canal's projected end-points and saw nothing to...
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