Just north of Punta Gorda, the view of Nicaragua’s Miskito coast is much as Christopher Columbus would have seen it when he first sailed these waters more than five centuries ago. On the land, there is little sign of habitation among the forested cliff tops and pellucid bays. At sea, the only traffic is a small boat and a pod of half a dozen dolphins.
Our launch, however, is a 21st-century beast that leaps and crashes through the swells with bone-jarring, teeth-rattling thuds as we speed past this nature reserve and indigenous territory that is set to become the stage for a great many more noisy, polluting intrusions by the modern world.
If the dreams of Nicaraguan officials and Chinese businessmen are realised, this remote idyll will be transformed over the next five years into a hub of global trade – the easternmost point of a new canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific for supertankers and bulk carriers that are too big for the Panama canal.
In an era of breathtaking, earth-changing engineering projects, this has been billed as the biggest of them all. Three times as long and almost twice as deep as its rival in Panama, Nicaragua’s channel will require the removal of more than 4.5bn cubic metres of earth – enough to bury the entire island of Manhattan up to the 21st floor of the Empire State Building. It will also swamp the economy, society and environment of one of Latin America’s poorest and most sparsely populated countries. Senior officials compare the scale of change to that brought by the arrival of the first colonisers.
“It’s like when the Spanish came here, they brought a new culture. The same is coming with the canal,” said Manuel Coronel Kautz, the garrulous head of the canal authority. “It is very difficult to see what will happen later – just as it was difficult for the indigenous people to imagine what would happen when they saw the first [European] boats.”
For the native Americans, of course, that first glimpse of Spanish caravels was the beginning of an apocalypse. Columbus’s ships were soon followed by waves of conquistadores whose feuding, disease and hunger for gold and slaves led to the annihilation of many indigenous populations.
The Nicaraguan government, by contrast, hopes the canal can finally achieve the Sandinista dream of eradicating poverty. In return for a concession to the Chinese company HKND, it hopes for billions of dollars of investment, tens of thousands of jobs and, eventually, a stable source of national income.
First, however, the project has to be built. Since the days of the first Spanish colonisers, there have been more than 70 proposals to construct a route across this stretch of the Central American isthmus. Blueprints have been sketched out by British, US and French engineers. Almost all have remained on the drawing board.
But this time work is already under way. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on 22 December. Over the next five years, engineers will build a 30-metre-deep, 178-mile, fenced waterway which, if finished (and there must always be doubts for a project of this size and cost), will change the lives of millions and the wildlife of a continent.
Despite protests, Chinese surveyors have measured up the land and in the next few months, HKND is expected to announce compensation packages for those whose lives will be turned upside down.
On the ground, there is widespread unease about what this mega-project will mean for people and their homes, wildlife and ecosystems. Will it bring wealth and growth or confusion and destruction? To get a sense of the mood as this latest tidal wave of global development approaches, the Guardian travelled across the country, as closely as possible to the proposed route, to ask ordinary Nicaraguans what the canal would mean for them.
Brito – the journey begins
The journey starts where the canal will begin: at Brito, on a stretch of Pacific coastline where the only visible inhabitants are half a dozen children who spring out from their forest home to dash across the flats, hurdle the breakers and splash amid the surf.
Until recently, this three-mile beach was little known. There is no mention of Brito in my guidebook. Preparing for the trip, I was told it was marshland, that there were no roads, that it was uninhabited.
But that is about to change in spectacular fashion. In the coming months, dredgers will deepen the bay, construction firms will lay concrete roads through the forest and a wharf will be constructed on the beach to land the giant excavators and trucks that will be shipped in from the US, Australia and China.
Once this bridgehead is completed, Brito will become the operations hub, expanding into a deep sea port, a free-trade zone and ultimately, officials say, the second biggest city in Nicaragua.
Such a future is hard to imagine as our 4x4 bumps along a rutted track towards the beach. We have to splash through the Brito river and rev up a muddy bank to reach our destination. Over the final stretch, the only people we pass are a campesino on a horse and a couple of foragers.
But this path is increasingly well-travelled. Members of a local family at a makeshift camp by the beach tell us Chinese and Nicaraguan surveyors were here a couple of months earlier with armed escorts from the army. They used lasers and GPS devices to measure buildings, paths, gardens and farmland and warned residents they would soon have to move.
“We have to leave. That’s what the Chinese say. We can’t be here in 2015 because they’re going to be here with their machines,” says Juan Félipe Cárdenas, who sits bare-chested on the sand as his words contend with the crashing waves. “It’s a serious problem. Where are we going to go?”
It’s a common refrain. The loudest criticism of the canal is that it is being rushed through without proper consultation or transparency. Although it is the biggest project in Nicaragua’s history, parliament has had only two days to debate the law granting the concession. The social and environmental impact assessments – still being carried out by London-based Environmental Resource Management on behalf of HKND – are also being pushed through with undue haste, say critics.
Similar concerns can be heard across Rivas, the stretch of land between the Pacific and Lake Nicaragua that will soon be re-engineered.
A few miles outside the village of Tola, oxen pull a water cart along a road that will be close to the westernmost of the canal’s two giant locks. At La Chocolata, a solitary child wanders across an empty junction that will be replaced by a six-lane highway. On the other side of the isthmus, a cluster of one-storey farmhouses on the marshy shore at Obrajuelo are likely to be knocked down to build an entry and exit point for the vessels that will ply the lake.
Elizabeth del Carmen is reluctant to move. Her family, who have a little farmland, a horse, some chickens and a very fat pig, have lived in Obrajuelo for about 50 years. The local community recently bought building materials for a new chapel, but officials told them to abandon construction because of the canal.
“I’ve been worrying about this because I don’t want to move to another place,” Del Carmen says. “We don’t agree with this bad treatment. They are making poor people feel uncomfortable. This place is safe. We all know each other here. Who knows where they are going to move us … We don’t want to leave.”
Rivas – a history of interference
The unease is partly explained by the grim history of interference by foreign powers – a history depicted by two large murals in Rivas town square. One shows the first meeting between Spanish colonisers and an indigenous chieftain called Nicarao in 1522. During that encounter, the tribe is said to have exchanged a substantial sum of gold for a shirt, silk jacket and red hat – the first of many bad deals with foreigners.
The other shows residents fighting a mercenary force led by US adventurer William Walker, who in 1854 was invited to help the Liberals of León against the conservatives of Grenada, but then declared himself president two years later. He was eventually defeated at Rivas and fled overseas only to be executed in 1860 after the Royal Navy handed him over to his enemies to prevent him from interfering with British plans – later abandoned – for an interoceanic canal.
Today, the foreigner who wants to change the history of the country is Wang Jing, the Chinese head of HKND, which has secured a 50-year concession – with the right to extend to 100 years – to build and operate a canal. He is something of a mystery, having made a dramatic switch of focus from telecoms in his home country to canal building on the other side of the Pacific.
The source of his funding is as yet unclear and although he has stressed this is a private project, there has been constant speculation that he is backed by the government in Beijing.
Nicaraguan newspaper Confidencial claims Wang has links to the People’s Liberation Army; Nicaraguan officials and HKND employees tell the Guardian that “to the best of their knowledge” Wang is a private businessman. The Chinese government has explicitly denied that it is linked to the canal project but given the Communist party’s influence over leading companies in China, however, Wang will have at least needed approval of senior cadres before pushing ahead with such a diplomatically sensitive project. If not, the canal will have a short life.
A Chinese-run canal through Nicaragua would have significant geostrategic implications both as a rival to Panama and as a base for Beijing to extend its influence in the Americas. The competition should push down shipping prices and boost trade, and the investment ought to bring substantial benefits to Central America.
However, the canal is also likely to extend Beijing’s influence in the Americas and could become a flashpoint if there were ever a conflict with the world’s other superpower, the US, which has historically viewed Central America as its own backyard.
Last week, the US embassy expressed concern over the “lack of information and transparency” surrounding the canal project, and called for the relevant documents to be made public.
Canal opponents, including many former Sandinistas, fear history will repeat itself. “Wang Jing is the modern equivalent of William Walker,” says the opening speaker at an outdoor meeting attended by about 30 protesters. To criticise in such a way is bold. One of their leaders – Octavio Ortega of the Rivas-based Fundemur non-governmental organisation – says he was recently beaten and arrested by police, who interrogated him about possible linked to the CIA because he lodged a supreme court challenge against the canal and organised protests.
The opponents unfurl a banner in Spanish reading Ortega Vende Patria, accusing the president of selling the nation’s heritage. The insult dates back to the 1920s, when it was used by the national hero Augusto César Sandino to chastise the government for selling the US rights to develop a canal across the country. This time, though, the hostility has a different target.
Another sign in rough red Chinese characters, confusingly proclaims “outside China!” alongside its intended meaning in Spanish, “Fuera Chinos” (Chinese out!). There is a bellicose tone to many of the statements. “Personally, I’m willing to die for this. If the Chinese want to take me, they can come and get me!” proclaims a landowner, Augustín Ruiz.
Such talk raises the prospect of Nicaraguan security forces facing off against Nicaraguan campesinos to support a Chinese project – a potential nightmare for the Sandinista government, but the authorities insist the opposition will die down when the 7,000 affected families see how generous the compensation packages will be.
Ometepe island – tranquility threatened
One concern that cannot be easily fixed with cash is the environmental impact of a project that cuts through four nature reserves, a globally important wetland, Central America’s largest body of freshwater and scenes of stunning beauty.
The most famous are the twin volcanoes of Ometepe island, which were vividly described by Mark Twain in Travels with Mr Brown: “Out of the midst of the beautiful Lake Nicaragua spring two magnificent pyramids, clad in the softest and richest green, all flecked with shadow and sunshine, whose summits pierce the billowy clouds. They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil.”
The biggest of the two – Concepcíon – has erupted several times with deadly consequences since Twain’s visit, but on the day we take the Che Guevara ferry across to the island port of Moyagalpa, it is once again a picture of tranquillity with scarred slopes cutting a perfect cone against a clear blue sky.
But the world and its turmoil are already disrupting the slumber of Ometepe, a biosphere reserve home to five ecosystems, including the most biodiverse tropical dry forest in the country. Three villages on the north-west shore have been measured by Chinese engineers for a upmarket resort linked to the canal. Residents are unhappy at the prospect of losing their land, the canal’s likely impact on fishing and a possible threat to the biosphere status of the island.
“The tourists aren’t going to have any reason to come and enjoy Ometepe any more as its nature is going to be destroyed by these people to build a canal through our lake,” Norvin Somarriba, a tourist guide, tells me. “Our aim is to stop the canal from being built so the rest of the world can come to enjoy the wonders of Ometepe: its nature, its peacefulness, its safe environment.”
The risks to wildlife are manifold and not just on Ometepe. Along the Pacific and Caribbean coastlines, whales, dolphins and sea turtles will be affected by dredging and the noise and pollution of increased traffic. Inland, construction will pass through ecologically sensitive dry forests, wetlands and jungle. The Humboldt centre, an environmental NGO in Nicaragua, says the canal threatens more than a dozen endangered animals, including sea turtles, tapirs, green macaw, spider monkeys and several species of frog.
Coast-to-coast fences on either side of the concrete waterway will also cut through the Mesoamerican biological corridor – a protected route for threatened species to migrate up and down Central America that has been supported by Mexico, seven Central American countries and the World Bank. Engineers say they will build two eco-bridges over the canal, but environmentalists say this will not be enough to save the wildlife passageway.
“If the canal is built, then the Mesoamerican biological corridor is finished,” says Victor Campos, director of the Humboldt Centre.
Lake Nicaragua – concern over impact
A greater ecological worry is what will happen to Lake Nicaragua, the largest body of freshwater in Central America and a precious resource in a region increasingly plagued by drought.
Until a few decades ago, the lake was teeming with aquatic life, but economic pressures are already taking their toll – and look likely to increase dramatically as a result of the mega project.
Conservationists say the canal will disrupt the lake ecosystem with pollution, traffic, noise, salinity, higher levels of torpidity and oxygen depletion.
Under the construction plans, a 65-mile channel will be carved through the lake bed just south of Ometepe. This will require extensive dredging – and possibly blasting – because the lake’s average depth of 14 metres is barely half of what is needed for bulk carriers.
That is essential to HKND’s business plan. Size is Nicaragua’s main advantage over the Panama canal, which cannot handle the world’s biggest and most carbon-efficient vessels. But to accommodate them, 700m cubic metres of earth will have to be excavated from the lake bed.
The primary problem is the four-metre-deep layer of sediment. Disperse that and the water will become more turbid and less capable of supporting life. Then comes earth, which is relatively easy to dredge and finally a few metres of harder rock.
Bill Wild, chief project adviser to HKND, insists the sediment can be managed by cut-and-suck technology, while the later stages can be completed with the world’s biggest dredgers, which have powerful cutting heads.
“We are absolutely determined not to blast Lake Nicaragua,” Wild says. “We don’t believe we will impact the environment of Lake Nicaragua.”
The lake has already experienced the decimation of one of its highest profile species as a result of a short-sighted government deal with foreigners. The lake was once home to thousands of freshwater bull sharks. They were largely wiped out after former president Anastasio Somoza granted a shark fin processing plant concession to a Japanese company.
In his youth, Coronel, now the chairman of the canal authority, used to catch sharks on the San Juan river and sell their livers for oil. “We didn’t really know what we were doing,” he admits.
Today, he is similarly candid about the canal project. “It is impossible not to have an impact on the environment around the route,” he tells me. “When you have thousands of people coming into places, they start destroying the environment. That will be impossible to avoid initially.”
But, he predicts, after five years of construction, the worst will be over and efforts will get under way to restore the environment. The end result, he says, will be something like the Panama canal – a well-managed business with a low environmental impact.
But the scale of the two projects is completely different. According to the Humboldt Centre, the canal basin in Nicaragua will cover 500 sq miles – 30 times the area in Panama – so far more damage will be done, making it unlikely that ecosystems will ever be returned to anything like their original state.
San Miguelito – business boost?
The size of the lake is apparent on the night ferry from Ometepe to the eastern shore – a voyage of more than six hours. Trying without success to sleep in deck-chairs (the smart travellers brought hammocks), I don’t see a single other vessel until we eventually reach our destination, the sleepy port of San Miguelito, at 2am. I have to knock loudly on the door of the hotel in the town square before the receptionist wakes and shows me to a room.
The next morning the owner, Nereida Balladares, tells me she supports the canal because the economy needs a boost.
“This is a very poor town. There isn’t much employment … There are a lot of young people who aren’t studying and don’t have any work,” she says, sitting on the porch with a grandson on her lap. “Us old folk won’t be here much longer, though with God’s grace, I’ll be around to see the first ship.”
The canal will badly affect the San Miguelito wetlands, which have been recognised as being of global importance by the Ramsar convention, an international treaty on the conservation of wetlands, but business is more of a priority for Balladares. “The hotel association is very optimistic about the canal. I might expand. Let’s wait and see.”
For the government of Daniel Ortega, the promise of rapid development is the primary justification for pushing ahead with the project. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere with a per capita income of less than $150 (£99) a month, but with the canal it expects to bring in investment of more than $40bn – more than three times the current size of the economy. This is a high-stakes gamble. Nicaragua is sacrificing vast swaths of land and many of its sovereign rights. In the early stages of the project, it will have no ownership and almost no say, but a hefty liability if the canal is cancelled. Every 10 years, however, it will be given a 10% stake, becoming a majority shareholder after half a century.
Paul Oquist, private secretary for national policy and a key presidential adviser, predicts the project will double GDP by 2020, make Nicaragua more resilient to global financial shocks and provide the funds needed to help the country adapt to climate change, raise incomes and create 250,000 jobs.
“This is the opportunity for Nicaragua – the second poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean – to overcome extreme poverty and to be able to offer a more prosperous and just life and society to our children and grandchildren,” he says. “There is nothing else in Nicaragua that could achieve that within our lifetimes.”
Bluefields – reawakening the past
The closer a traveller gets to the Caribbean, the lower the level of development. From San Miguelito, transport is unreliable and there are few roads so I divert from the eastern route of the canal. This is disappointing because it means I miss the Indio Maiz biosphere reserve, which has a reputation as the most unspoiled of Nicaragua’s protected areas, as well as the site of the dam and artificial lake that HKND has planned at Atlanta to maintain the water level between the two locks.
Instead, I take a crowded bus north to El Rama. Then the roads run out so I take a speedboat down the Escondido river, through the Cerro Silva nature reserve to the tatty coastal city of Bluefields. On the wharf there, English is the first language for a large black – rather than Hispanic – population. This is a legacy of the British empire.
For centuries, English settlers, pirates and the Royal Navy dominated this stretch of the Miskito Coast, which was in effect a separate territory from the Spanish-run Pacific seaboard. They left a local population of former slaves along with the indigenous tribes including the Miskito, Mayangna and Rama indigenous people, whose descendants still describe the Managua government as “the Spaniards”.
Integration of the autonomous region into an independent Nicaragua was imposed by force of arms in 1894, but divisions and mutual distrust remained. As recently as the 1980s, many indigenous and Kriol groups fought against the Sandinista government.
They only laid down their arms when the Sandinista government promised autonomy for the whole Caribbean Coast region. Legislation in 2003 recognised the right of the indigenous and Afro-descendant communities to communal property in their traditional lands and started a process to legalise indigenous areas, including the Rama-Kriol territory south of Bluefields which covers 484,256 hectares of land and 441,308 hectares of sea. This will be cut in two by the canal.
Unsurprisingly, many in this area were upset to be informed that part of that “inalienable” territory will be handed over to HKND for the canal and that, contrary to the autonomy law, they were not even consulted.
“This is an indigenous area. By law, the government is supposed to ensure prior, free and informed consultation, but we haven’t been asked anything,” Alan Claire, one of the leaders of the Kriol community, tells me at small building which serves as the office for the Rama-Kriol territory government in Bluefields.
In fact, there have been talks and the community have granted HKND permission for preliminary studies, but they are dissatisfied and have lodged an appeal at the inter-American court of human rights .
So far, the dispute is only legal, but historians warn it could escalate because it touches upon the issue of land redistribution that prompted guerrilla war in the 1980s. “If you start forcibly taking property again, you will reawaken forces from the recent past,” cautions sociologist Manuel Ortega, who was a member of the national commission in the 1980s that designed the autonomy laws.
Full-scale conflict is hard to imagine, however. The Rama-Kriol population is only 3,000 or so people and most of them live some distance from the canal. Much will depend on how much they are offered. But not everyone is for sale.
Punta Gorda – the final day
On the final day of the journey, Claire takes me by speedboat down the coast to the Caribbean end of the proposed canal. The two-hour ride passes the most spectacular and unspoilt scenery of the trip. We enter the broad Punta Gorda river estuary in the late afternoon and have to stop at a military checkpoint to show our documents. Further upstream, we spot several farms and a riverside shop – signs of illegal, but widespread intrusion into the nature reserve and indigenous territory by Hispanic settlers. Soon after, under almond and chestnut trees we come across a deserted camp for ERM, the environmental and social impact assessment team hired by the canal company.
HKND claim it has the resources to restore and better protect the environment, and to ensure the wellbeing of indigenous communities. The company promises to offset damage by expanding wetlands and other ecosystems elsewhere. To reduce the impact on wildlife, it has decided not to take the canal through the estuary, which is an important habitat for herons, egrets, pelicans and other wildlife, but instead to cut inland a few miles north. It will pay an annual rent to the Rama-Kriol community.
Even so, a heavy impact is unavoidable. Another large port is likely to be built here, along with a rail terminal, roads and petroleum storage tanks for the oil pipeline that will run alongside the canal. Dredgers will tear up the seabed. Excavators will rip a channel through the coastline.
The small Rama community is divided about how to handle the risks and opportunities. The young are more inclined to embrace change and economic possibility, while the old are wary of what this latest in centuries of foreign intrusions will mean to the traditional way of life and sense of wellbeing. The reality, however, is that – as when the first Spanish ships arrived in the 16th century, and as was the case with the pirates and the Royal Navy – they will probably have little say in deciding their fate.
By the time we leave the river, dusk is closing in. On the way back, we pay a last visit to the Rama village at Bangkukuk Taik (Eagle Point), near where the canal will enter the Caribbean. The scene is like something from a castaway film. Our boat bobs alone in a secluded cove of azure water between forested slopes. Above them is a community of thatched huts on stilts where residents wear traditional attire. This is home to some of the last dozen or so people who can speak Rama. Yet it is in Kriol English that the residents here proclaim their opposition. For them, the canal is not just a one-off mega-project introduced by a foreign company and backed by the Nicaraguan government. It also looks likely to be the latest and greatest encroachment by outsiders who, they believe, will flatten their forests and kill their waters in the name of economic progress.
“I’m 100% against the canal,” says the president of the community, Carlos Billis. “It will destroy the nature that we are as much a part of as the trees that grow here and spread their seeds. The government wants to move us for a project that has nothing to do with us. There’s been no consultation, but they are going ahead regardless. This is discrimination against Indians, the same discrimination that’s been seen all over the world for so long.”
Of all the speeches for and against the canal I hear on my journey, this is the most impassioned and compelling. It is also one of the briefest. I would like to talk more, but it is getting dark and Bluefields is still an hour across the sea. So Claire revs up the engine and we speed towards the port city.
Additional reporting by Gareth Richards
Who is building the canal?
For the company behind one of history’s biggest engineering projects – a 178-mile inter-ocean canal through Nicaragua – the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co (HKND) is difficult to track down.
While HKND’s website includes a contact form, it lacks an address or phone number. Its home page is bare bones, cycling through images of a shipping port, Hong Kong’s skyline, a tropical beach, and the words “the century-old dream will come true” written in dark blue letters against a clear blue sky.
When the company did not immediately reply to an interview request, the Guardian attempted to track down its Hong Kong office. Searches for HKND on Google Maps led to a central Hong Kong office tower, where the company was not listed as an occupant. Hong Kong direct inquiries could not find a listing.
Little is known about Wang Jing, HKND’s billionaire chairman. Four years ago, the 41-year-old took control of Beijing Xinwei, a major telecommunications company; the HKND website says he “serves as board chairman of more than 20 enterprises which operate businesses in 35 countries around the world”. One, registered in the British Virgin Islands, manages private jets; another manages mines in Cambodia.
While a HKND public relations manager did eventually reply to the interview request, subsequent emails were ignored.
The Nicaraguan newspaper Confidencial has reported that HKND is in fact a web of 15 separate holding companies, based in Beijing, Hong Kong, the Caiman Islands, the Netherlands and Nicaragua. Wang says he has spent more than $100m of his own money on the project; while he claims to have attracted numerous outside investors, their identities remain unknown.
Overseas newspapers have accused Wang of acting as an agent of China’s government or military, which he fervently rejects.
The Chinese government has denied any involvement in the canal project “I know you don’t believe me,” Wang told Reuters in May. “You believe there are people from the Chinese government in the background providing support. Why, in the end, is only Wang Jing out front?”
Wang said that his father was an office worker who died of illness in 2010; his 70-year-old mother is retired. He studied at the Jiangxi University of Traditional Chinese Medicine but did not graduate. He has one daughter.
“I was born in December 1972 in Beijing,” Wang told the newswire. “All these years I’ve lived a very ordinary life.”
Jonathan Kaiman in Hong Kong