Nicaragua Canal, smoke and mirrors, or genie in a bottle?

CHINESE officials visited visited Brito City on Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast last month where construction of a port for the Grand Canal is scheduled to begin in December, about a year late.

It is three years since President Daniel Ortega granted the480 kilometers    Canal project to the  HKND Group, based in Hong Kong, but the recent turmoil on the Chinese stock exchange, with billions wipedf  off the shares of the group have raised doubts about the  Canal’s future

The project’s  Canal, has been questioned by transport experts and engineers since Ortega first announced the plan  and the contract was granted without accepting competing offers.

Proponents of the project say that the waterway will attract larger ships that  cannot pass through the new set of locks on the Panama Canal-a project with a cost  of$5.3 billion dollars and almost two years late.

The Nicaragua project is projected to give a $12 billion boost to the county’s economy.

In 2015, Nicaragua officials said the financing of its channel would be achieved through a sale of shares in Hong Kong.

Canal project official Manuel Kautz said that the skepticism about the $50 billion channel will disappear when things start to happen and surveying and archaeological work is  coming to an end.

“We see everything with a macro approach as the stock market does not worry me. It changes every day,”said Kautz

Kautzs said  that most of the funding would come now from private capital. The project could be divided into several phases to raise smaller sums for each part.

Protests against the channel continued in January with calls for the  cancelation pf the 50-year concession granted to HKND.

A survey by Cid Gallup published in the newspaper Confidencial showed that 34% of respondents considered that the channel was “pure propaganda”.

Skeptics say the channel is an Ortega plan  intended to rally support ahead of presidential elections in November.

A separate study released by the government showed that 81% of Nicaraguans support the channel.

“I think that the channel exists only in the mind of Ortega,” said Sequeira Yader  a 24 year-old college student living in the city of El Tule, near the canal route. “Absolutely nothing happening.”

Kautz does not think so. “They are arranging things to begin later this year, starting with the port on the Pacific coast,” he said. “There is progress”