Last June 15th, Daniel Ortega, the President of Nicaragua, held a ceremony in Managua to announce his newest and most audacious plan to help the country’s poor: a transoceanic canal, stretching from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific, a few hundred miles north of the Panama Canal. “This is a project,” he promised, “that will bring well-being, prosperity, and happiness to the Nicaraguan people.” The last time Ortega attracted the world’s attention, it was as Ronald Reagan’s great adversary in the Contra war of the eighties: a fighter “against the domination of the capitalists of our country, in collusion with the U.S. government—i.e., imperialism.” In those days, Salman Rushdie described him as looking like “a bookworm who has done a body-building course.” Now his face has thickened and roughened, and his hair is thinner. His politics have changed, too. A former Marxist, he presides over an economy in which nearly anything goes. But he keeps up his anti-imperialist credentials, with fiery rhetoric about “los yankis” and “la revolución” and “el pueblo.” Last summer, when the National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden was pondering his options during an extended stay at the Moscow airport, Nicaragua’s government offered him asylum.

For a dedicated practitioner of political influence, Ortega has little appetite for making speeches; his wife, Rosario Murillo, usually speaks on his behalf, in public and in a daily media address she gives. But the magnitude of the plan called for a grand gesture. Ortega’s canal would be the largest civil-engineering and construction project in the world. To lead it, and to bring in money and expertise, he had recruited an obscure Chinese tycoon named Wang Jing, and two days before the ceremony, the National Assembly had approved a concession that put a large swath of the country at Wang’s disposal as a building site. Yet for months, as rumors about the canal spread through Nicaragua, Wang had not appeared in public. And so Ortega was obligated to prove that the man anointed the country’s savior was not, as his critics put it, “a phantom.”

At the ceremony, Murillo—a former poet whose oratorical style combines the ecclesiastical and the stream-of-consciousness—opened the proceedings. “A very good afternoon, dear Nicaraguan families, who follow us on the television channels, on the radio, on all the means of communication, on this historic day for Nicaragua,” she said. “A day of prophecies coming true, a day in which dreams are being fulfilled, a day in which the doors to the future are opening with rights, with justice, with liberty, dignity, and fraternity.” She went on like this for some time. Finally, she handed the microphone to her husband, whom she called Comandante Daniel.

Ortega wore his usual suède jacket over a collarless white shirt. In the manner of a boxing referee declaring the winner of a fight, he held up the hand of a round-faced Chinese man in a black suit and a blue tie. “I want to welcome a brother born in that great nation the People’s Republic of China,” he said, in a flat, braying voice. “Here is our brother Wang Jing. Here is the phantom, in flesh and blood!” Ortega reminded the audience that the Americans had once planned a canal in Nicaragua, but had built it in Panama instead. Now it was Nicaragua’s chance to see its dreams fulfilled. The country was very poor, he said, and “with poverty and economic dependency there can be no sovereignty.” The canal would allow Nicaragua to finally achieve “total and definitive independence.” Behind the two men was a wall emblazoned with the logo of Wang Jing’s new firm, H.K.N.D.—the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company.

Nicaragua’s political opposition has loudly objected to the prospective canal. The novelist Sergio Ramírez, who served as Ortega’s Vice-President for six years before breaking with him, told me that he thought it was all a cuento chino—a “Chinese story,” local slang for a lie. But he was concerned enough to draft a manifesto, claiming that the canal violated the country’s sovereignty. Signed by dozens of prominent Nicaraguans, the manifesto pointed out that the concession, approved without consulting the public, granted Wang sweeping rights over any lands he chose, even those owned by private citizens. Ramírez suspected Ortega of using the canal to keep himself in office and also, possibly, to enrich himself. “Ortega wants to make it appear that his tenure in power is indispensable in order to consummate this long-term project,” he said. “But this is a white elephant. It is not known when its construction will begin, much less when it will end, or what kind of business deals or financial manipulations may be hiding behind the curtain.”

At the press conference, and in other appearances, Wang has emphasized his concern for Nicaragua’s sovereignty, its environment, and its people. “We move forward with complete confidence—throughout ancient and modern history, at the start of each new era, a new milestone, like a butterfly that breaks out of its cocoon,” he said. “The world will change through us; we shall bring more happiness, freedom, and joy to the planet.” Wang, who is forty-one, had no record of accomplishing anything on the scale of a canal; indeed, he seemed to have little public record of any kind. But he was confident that he would be able to raise money in China and elsewhere, and that he would “make every investor smile broadly.” The canal would be completed in five years, he promised, and for the Nicaraguan people it would change everything, bringing tens of thousands of jobs. Unable to restrain himself, he noted that the Nicaraguans had dreamed of a canal “for hundreds of years, and suddenly a Chinese guy shows up and has a plan.”

“Every guy out there is either married, gay, or a human suit zipped around a column of ants.” Facebook

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The lure of a canal began long before the modern state of Nicaragua was born. As the conquistadors plundered the New World, they ferried gold to the Atlantic Coast across the narrow Isthmus of Panama—an arduous crossing, by foot and by mule. Hernán Cortés wrote to Emperor Carlos V, “Whoever possesses the passage between the two oceans can consider himself the owner of the world.” In 1581, the Spaniards explored a possible route in Nicaragua, where the San Juan River flowed to the Atlantic from a huge inland lake, separated from the Pacific by just twelve miles of land. Half a century later, an engineer named Diego de Mercado made a survey. Noting a difference of a hundred and thirty-eight feet in the sea level of the Pacific and the Atlantic Coasts, he determined that the project was technically impractical.

But by the time Nicaragua gained independence from Spain, in 1821, the new technologies of the industrial revolution had made the engineering seem possible. Since then, Nicaragua’s leaders have granted at least seven “exclusive concessions” to foreign entrepreneurs. Simón Bolívar proposed a canal financed by Latin-American capital, seeing it as a step toward his dream of a United States of Latin America. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed, “Nicaragua can become, better than Constantinople, the necessary route of the great commerce of the world.”

In the California gold rush of 1849, tens of thousands of fortune-seekers from Europe and the East found that their only way to the Pacific Coast was a dangerous, months-long voyage around Cape Horn, and a number of hastily assembled transport syndicates began vying to shorten the trip. Two such groups, backed by a U.S. government subsidy, were given sole rights to the route across Panama, carrying passengers, by steamship and canoe, between New York Harbor and San Francisco in five weeks. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the American steamship and railroad tycoon, developed a route across the Nicaraguan isthmus. Within two years, he was boasting of transporting two thousand passengers a month from New York to San Francisco in twenty-five days, managing the water passages by steamer and the land crossing by stagecoach.