也许是要建运河，水必须先流 (perhaps for the canal to be built, the water must flow first)

(Tico Times)

(水到渠成: shuǐ dào qú chéng: literally, where water flows, a canal is formed; fig. when conditions are right, success will follow naturally.)

Work has formally begun on the controversial $50-billion Nicaragua Canal, which will be 172 miles when complete. This canal will actually serve as an alternative to the Panama Canal, and will be three times longer. 

It’s being built by the Hong Kong Nicaragua Development Group (HKND Group), which is headed by Chinese telecom billionaire Wang Jing. 

Most observers, especially here in the United States, think the new canal is a fool’s project, and that it isn’t really needed. Indeed, the project has already been beset by problems. 

But why would the Chinese waste so much money and time on such a massive engineering project if there is no advantage? The answer can be found if you examine China’s energy needs. 

The Chinese will have to hurdle some major barriers before they’re able to complete this project. 

First of all, there are environmental concerns. Nicaragua’s Grand Interoceanic Canal will have no choice but to run through the once-pristine waters of Lake Nicaragua. It also will pass through several protected nature reserve areas. 

HKND Group is considering six different routes through the country. But every proposed route has been met with protests from locals about the negative effects it’ll have. They’ve already eliminated using the natural waterway that is the San Juan River, a key part of the country’s national identity. 

Despite the protests, the company seems to have solidified a route, although the exact path could change still.

(Wall St Daily)

Such talk aside, the canal, and the upgrades to Nicaragua’s other economic and transportation infrastructure likely to accompany construction, will intimately link the futures of impoverished Nicaragua and powerhouse China. And like Panama before it, Nicaragua could find itself transformed from a relatively quiet Central American backwater into a geopolitical linchpin in the Western Hemisphere. 

But while Panama’s century-old gamble paid off, Nicaragua is an entirely different case, despite the apparent similarities. There is a big difference in the geopolitical and economic impact of opening the region’s first trans-isthmus canal—and opening its second. 

Which begs another question: Does Nicaragua, or the world, really even need this canal? Many think no. First, the gradual opening of shipping lanes in a warming Arctic over the next several decades may potentially slash distances and times needed to connect key Atlantic and Pacific ports via a northern sea route and eventually erode the strategic and economic importance of a second Central American canal. Second, the Panama Canal is already undergoing a $5 billion widening and infrastructure upgrade to accommodate larger ships. Panama isn’t afraid of Nicaraguan competition. 

Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan people stand to pay perhaps the heaviest price in the decades ahead, and their opposition has been loud. In 2013, as HKND’s little-known CEO wined and dined a Nicaraguan delegation in Beijing, Ortega’s government faced heated anti-canal protests in the streets of Managua. 

Protesters blasted the Ortega government’s lack of transparency in the canal negotiations, refusal to discuss long-term environmental impacts and hesitance to talk about compensation for Nicaraguans whose communities lie in or around the canal’s proposed path. Charges that Ortega has sold his country’s future to China have packed an emotional wallop in a country where foreign powers have meddled for centuries.

(World Politics Review)

A Nicaraguan delegation representing nearly 40 civil society organizations and political parties traveled to San José, Costa Rica, this week during the annual meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to generate regional support against the construction of a massive interoceanic canal there. 

The group of environmentalists and human rights organizers plan to present an open letter to the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry for CELAC leaders that decries a lack of transparency in the project and threats to indigenous land rights and Lake Nicaragua, also known as Lake Cocibolca. 

“This should be a great concern not only for Nicaragua but for the whole Central American region,” Suyen Barahona, national director for the Sandinista Renovation Movement, told The Tico Times. 

Luisa Molina, director of Coordinadora Civil, a human rights organization, said that Costa Ricans would also be affected by the environmental consequences of the Great Nicaragua Canal on Lake Cocibolca and the two countries’ shared watershed. 

On a local level, Molina said the canal would displace tens of thousands of people either from their land or their traditional way of life, from indigenous landholders to artisanal fishermen. 

“We want development for Nicaragua but we want the people’s voice to be heard because they were never heard, either in a referendum or a plebiscite,” Octavio Ortega, national coordinator for the Council for the Defense of the Land, Lake and Sovereignty of Nicaragua, told The Tico Times.

(Tico Times)