A long period of inactivity, as well as a conspicuous lack of rhetoric from the administration of longtime President Daniel Ortega, is prompting speculation about whether the quixotic Grand Canal of Nicaragua is an actual civil engineering project or just a smokescreen for some sort of iniquity.

As has been reported by The Costa Rica Star over the last couple of years, the Grand Canal of Nicaragua is one of the most significant infrastructure projects ever proposed in the Americas. Its estimated cost has been tagged around $50 billion, and the main contract was awarded by President Ortega to Wang Jing, a Chinese businessman whose experience lies in the field of telecom financing.

The Grand Canal project has been a source of concern for Costa Rica due to the grave environmental impact that the international scientific community has warned about. At one point, this trans-oceanic project was going to start right on the northeastern tip of the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, not far from the contentious region of Isla Calero, which was the flashpoint of the infamous Google Maps Invasion . The administration of former President Laura Chinchilla sent a strong warning to Nicaragua about its initial intentions of building the canal so close to Costa Rica, and the Ortega administration moved the project north a few hundred kilometers.

Closer to the Pacific side, the canal would ostensibly require the virtual elimination of El Tule, a small rural community on the shores of the Great Lake of Nicaragua. El Tule has been the site of violent protests by farmers who have organized across the nation to stop groundbreaking ceremonies and initial construction. This is where journalist Michael McDonald, Haixing Jin and Susana Gonzalez of the Bloomberg news media empire recently visited:

[A] four-day tour through El Tule and surrounding areas slated for crucial initial development only seemed to corroborate the belief, harbored by many analysts inside and outside Nicaragua, that this project isn’t going to get done.

The townspeople haven’t seen any signs of canal workers in months. And the work that was done was marginal. [A] local entrepreneur, is so convinced that the project won’t proceed that he’s constructing a two-story house with three guest rooms and an attached convenience store […]

The rest of the fine Bloomberg article quotes various skeptics, including the Vice President of the Council of the Americas, who believes that the recent expansion of the Panama Canal will erase the need for a similar project in Nicaragua. New, major engineering challenges are mentioned on an almost daily basis by analysts, who ponder whether the project engineers have considered what would happen if the volcanoes along the proposed canal were to become very active.

If anything, the current discussion surrounding the Nicaragua canal project has mostly turned to conspiracy theory, and the Bloomberg piece mentions some topics in this regard:

Many people doubt that Ortega […] and his Chinese partners ever truly intended to build a canal. [Among the conspiracy theories we find:] the project is a land grab by Ortega; or a tool to whip up support ahead of next year’s elections; or a Chinese plan to threaten U.S. hegemony in the region by mapping out infrastructure designs so close to its shores.