Great transocean game

Nicaragua, starting to build the "Great Channel" between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans with the help of China and Russia, risks getting involved in the "scam of the century"

The Nicaragua authorities said that on December 22, the long-promised construction of the “Great Transokean Canal” will officially begin, which should connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and become a more perfect, deep and wide competitor of the Panama Canal , the 100th anniversary of the opening of which the world celebrated this year . The implementation of a colossal scope and cost, but a very "opaque" project, implying the reconstruction of the entire region and the creation of a giant infrastructure, is engaged in a little -known company from Hong Kong, as well as, possibly, several Russian state -owned enterprises. Critics of construction are sure that it will turn into a huge humanitarian and environmental disaster for the whole Nicaragua - one of the poorest states in the Western Hemisphere.

The length of the "great transocean canal" Nicaragua will be, according to design data, 278 kilometers (it will be almost three and a half times longer than the Panama Canal), the width in separate sections is up to 500 meters, and the average depth is 27 meters. The cost of construction may exceed 50 billion dollars, although a year earlier it was said "only 40 billion." One of the natural sections of the channel, for 105 kilometers, will be the Lake Nicaragua , the largest freshwater lake in all of Latin America, which serves as a source of irrigation and drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people. Nicaraguans themselves call him "sweet sea." In addition, the Nicaragua lake and the tropical forests and swamps surrounding it are a unique, still almost untouched natural ecosystem, a complex of reserves with a huge variety of species. For example, this is the only freshwater lake on the planet in which sharks live .

Options of the Nicaraguan channel. The final route is the second from above, starting east south of the city of Blufields

However, the Nicaraguan authorities, led by President Daniel Ortega, are sure that the laying through these areas of the "Great Channel" will tear out the country out of poverty, give it economic independence and create up to a million jobs, including in neighboring states - and therefore it will begin in any case, as soon as the last estimates are approved. The ecology of the region, according to the government, will not suffer at all, since the route, most remote from all reserves and territories where Indian tribes , sometimes leading an almost archaic lifestyle, was chosen from the three proposed construction options, and explosive substances will not be used for dredging work. Only in the first year, for example, workers, the number of which will be up to 200 thousand, will have to dig up more than 1 million cubic meters of soil, said the representative of the State Construction Committee of the channel Talemaco Talaver :

- Huge preparatory work has been carried out, many thousands of specialists worked on the project, from Nicaragua and other countries of the world, mainly from China. In total, 28 groups of engineers and scientists worked on different sectors of this plan. The main thing is that we want to declare: the laying of the channel will be carried out in such a way as to minimally affect the lives of people and the natural wealth of our country. We calculated what materials and methods will be used in one case or another what exactly is located on every kilometer of the future construction - where houses are located, processed fields where this or that family lives, and so on.

Street fresco in the capital of Managua, with Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro

Nicaragua occupies 168th place in the world in terms of per capita GDP and is included in the three most dysfunctional countries of Latin America, along with Haiti and Honduras. This is a country that has experienced dozens of coups for two centuries, foreign interventions, right-wing dictatorships and the actual civil war in the 80-90s of the last century, with a completely agricultural economy-extensive agriculture, focused on the production of coffee, bananas and sugarcane, and a small industry, in the main form of a transforming agricultural production. Nicaragua's annual imports exceed export by almost a billion dollars. 50 percent of the Nicaraguans do not really know how to read and write and live below the officially established poverty level. Therefore, the “saving” idea of laying a giant channel, which has been mentioned for centuries and with the help of which, perhaps, “the whole country will step to a new level of prosperity” (this is a quote from one of the speeches of President Daniel Ortega) captured very many here. The representative of one of the self -governing peasant communities in the south of the country Monica Lopez says that she is impressive and at the same time scares such a tremendous scope:

President Nicaragua Daniel Ortega

- Nobody consulted with us. According to the plan, the channel will be laid for 5 years, starting from the Pacific Ocean, with the expectation that the first vessels will pass through it in 2020, but in just a year it should skip more than 5 thousand ships, including supermaners transporting up to 400 thousand tons of oil. Yes, we want the development of the country, but perhaps you should not develop it in this way, in every sense of the word.

The creation of the “great transocean canal” of Nicaragua also provides for the construction of two sea ports on each side (in the Atlantic in the south of the mosquito shore , and on the Pacific near the border with the Costa Rica), a modern highway with a 600-meter bridge on one site, two free trade zones, a large airport, oil pipeline and tourist resorts.

One of the syncretic ritual holidays on Lake Nicaragua

Numerous critics of this Latin American construction of the century (and the local political opposition and the self -governing peasant communities in the zone of the future channel, organizing several marches of protest, the Catholic Church, many world -famous scientists and government of neighboring states) fear not only the inevitable destruction of nature. Surprise and complaints causes the choice of the main contractor and actual future owner of the channel, namely the unknown Chinese company HKND Group, formed only in August 2012, for participation in the project and belonging to the Hong Kong businessman Van Jin.

Already in 2013, President Daniel Ortega gave the HKND Group the planned channel for as much as 50 years to the concession, despite the doubts of skeptics in the reliability of the Chinese company as a partner and in its ability to finance and implement such a tremendous idea in complete lack of experience. The failure of the project for one reason or another, as well as, according to its opponents, the obvious “opaque” and indiscriminateness in the means and methods of both Nicaraguan officials and Chinese businessmen, which are obvious, can lead not only to environmental, but also to a monstrous social catastrophe. The leader of another Nicaraguan Indian community, Camilo Lara , who entered the State Channel Construction Committee, notes that the selected route can be called the most "humane", of all the proposed options:

- The others were even worse. This area of construction is the most costly and complex, but the least dangerous to the environment. Of course, we are concerned about the possibility of an environmental disaster, especially in a number of areas, of great interest from a biological point of view. Unfortunately, on the selected route there are very valuable areas that are somehow exposed to builders.

View of the Nicaragua lake and volcano conserapion

The idea of laying the Transocoisk Canal in Central America precisely through the territory of the current Nicaragua really first arose in the 16th century, at the beginning of the colonial era - the King of Spain and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Charles V thought over it. Then, many Spanish monarchs returned to the idea of building such a canal, and after gaining independence, Nicaraguan, as well as European and North American monarchs and presidents. The latter eventually bent to the idea of tearing him through the territory of the Panama Isthmus . During several bankruptcy, financial frauds and scandals of attempts to pave the Panama Canal in 1903, the state of the same name was born (before that Panama was one of the departments of Colombia), and the European languages included a sustainable expression of Panama, which means a grandiose scam.

Daniel Ortega, along with his "combat comrade", former President of Iran Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Managua, 2007

However, the 69-year-old Nicaraguan citizen President Daniel Ortega, a former left partisan, who first took care of the revolutionary activity as a schoolboy, who had been the votes of foreign skeptics and opposition that reproaches him more and more authoritarianism, telling the illiterate people today, returning in 2006. propaganda fairy tales, conducting inconsistent and unreasonable foreign policy and obvious economic failures, the apotheosis of which can be the laying of the Transokean Canal. Speaking recently at one of the conferences of the leaders of the political parties of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Daniel Ortega said the following:

Nicaragua Lake is already very contaminated

- This lake has long been polluted! Yes, there were once rare freshwater sharks there, but they have been gone there for a long time. I say this, because I myself personally did not see a single shark there. Around it is still full of agricultural fields with fertilizers, enterprises, and we have no money to preserve the nature of Lake Nicaragua!

“Resistance is nonpatriotic,” Daniel Ortega loves to repeat on this occasion. Under his presidency, the main friends of the country again became Cuba and Russia, as well as Venezuela (together with Moscow and Karakas in 2008, the Nicaragua government instantly recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia ), Belarusian and Iran, whose leaders are more likely to talk about great construction sites and giant intentions, about patriotism, independence, independence, prosperity and resistance to prosperity and prosperity. "Western imperialism." As far as these slogans are combined with readily, perhaps, the whole state in the hands of Chinese entrepreneurs, known for their hard -style business, Daniel Ortega either does not think, or does not tell his supporters about it.

Abkhaz leader Sergei Bagapsh visiting Daniel Ortega in Managua. July 19, 2010

Not so long ago, the Nicaragua government expressed readiness, also "for the development of the country's infrastructure", to build a large air base for Russian strategic bombers . These conversations were still quiet, although Russian defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently stated again that the Russian Air Force soon, “due to circumstances”, will begin the combat patrol of the region of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. In July this year, Nicaragua was an official visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin. One of the topics of his negotiations with Daniel Ortega, as announced later, was a discussion of the future participation of Russian state companies in the construction and operation of the "Great Transokean Canal."