San Jorge, Nicaragua – Dusting off a dream that dates back five centuries, Nicaragua wants to build an $18 billion alternative to the increasingly overloaded Panama Canal.
Officials are drafting legislation, conducting feasibility studies and lobbying internationally for the project, first considered by Spanish explorers who scanned the Central American coast in the 1500s for a navigable waterway from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
“The prospect of having something like this is probably better now than at any time in the past,” said Marc J. Hershman, an international shipping expert at the University of Washington School of Marine Affairs. “There’s huge growth in cargo shipping around the globe, and it’s going to accelerate more and more.”
The idea is gathering pace as Panamanians hold a referendum Sunday that polls predict will approve widening their 92-year- old canal.
But Nicaraguan officials insist it isn’t a rivalry, arguing there’s enough traffic to sustain two waterways, and theirs would be able to handle bigger ships.
It would be 173 miles long. From the Caribbean, it would run along the San Juan river, which forms Nicaragua’s southern border with Costa Rica and lets out into Lake Nicaragua. From the western side of the lake, 12 miles of canal would be built across the Isthmus of Rivas to reach the Pacific.
Other river routes to Lake Nicaragua have also been proposed, as well as the possibility of a coast-to-coast railroad.
Many in the shipping industry have been looking “more closely at another canal with wider capabilities and a deeper channel” than Panama’s, Hershman said.
Mexico and Guatemala also would like to build inter-ocean cargo corridors, but Nicaragua has pursued the idea most aggressively.
Its outgoing president, Enrique Bolanos, said a canal could be built in 12 years and would open the way for giant tankers from Asia that cannot squeeze through Panama’s 50-mile waterway. The Nicaraguan option could cut a day off shipments between California and New York, while Chinese tankers could save as much as 36 days and $2 million on their round trips to the U.S. East Coast, Bolanos said.
