Years after the project was announced but still before any dirt was dug, Nicaragua has canceled its $50 billion deal with a Chinese businessman to build a canal through it connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The plan had generated widespread opposition over the past decade, sparking protests by thousands of farmers, the Guardian reports; three of the protest leaders were sentenced to long prison terms. President Daniel Ortega's government argued the 172-mile canal, envisioned as much larger rival to the Panama Canal, would be good for the economy, creating tens of thousands of jobs. Many Nicaraguans saw the project as destructive.
The canal would have forcibly displaced an estimated 120,000 people, including Rama and Creole communities from protected Indigenous territories. As one of the world's biggest civil engineering and construction projects, it would have would have bisected the largest lake in Central America—Lake Nicaragua—and destroy protected natural spaces where 22 endangered species live. The contract itself made no sense to many; the 50-year canal concession was awarded to a Hong Kong-based company owned by a Chinese businessman with no experience in civil engineering. Wang Jing then reportedly lost 85% of his wealth in the 2015 stock market crisis, per the Guardian.
A ground-breaking ceremony was held in 2014 that proved meaningless. The nation's congress now has officially scrapped the deal, per the South China Morning Post. "It's a shame that Ortega realizes his own failure a decade later, after making arrangements to confiscate land from peasant farmers," said Medardo Mairena, the leader of a canal opposition group who's living in exile in the US. (More Nicaragua canal stories.)
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