Nicaragua plans a big dig to rival Panama canal

He says it is a single person who is often behind the world's largest projects. "You usually need someone with burning ambition to achieve them. They don't get done by committee," he says.

In many ways, Alonso is an unlikely face of a canal. A lawyer by training, he doesn't like boats or water, and chooses the mountains over the sea on any vacation. But the canal has been an obsession over the past half century. On a trip to Green Bay, Wisconsin, as a law student in 1964, a local reporter asked him what Nicaragua needed. "Without a doubt," he replied, "we need the canal."

He pored over a 400-page study from Panama, putting sticky marks throughout it over the course of a day and a half. He says a canal in Nicaragua would employ 40,000 during construction and provide some 140,000, direct and indirect permanent jobs, but he envisions a much larger reach: schools adjusting their curriculum to offer maritime law and marine biology, for example.

He says a canal would double the expected GDP in 2025, and that it will create new markets. Trade that can't benefit by today's routes because the size of the ships needed to make such commerce profitable can't wedge through current channels. An example of what he envisions? Huge ships carrying coal from Colombia through Nicaragua en route to California.

Frank Davidson, coeditor of the reference book "Building the World," says he does not dismiss the project simply because it's been an unrealized dream for centuries. "Very large engineering projects sometimes have a history of thousands of years," says Davidson,

For residents in Ometepe, a canal seems a thousand more years away. "I can't imagine it," says Maria Elena Alvarado, giggling as she washes her clothes in the lake. A small farmer, she worries whether boats crossing the 50-mile-long stretch of the lake would pollute the water, where she often bathes. Yet she says her isolated community, San Ramon, needs something: the ride to the port, to catch a boat to the mainland, is a bumpy two-hour bus ride. "It's hard here," she says. "If it helps us I accept it."

She, like others in her community, says she'd rather see a small-scale project, like a transport ferry or a barge system. But that, says Wilmar Cuarezma, a researcher for the Institute for Nicaraguan Studies in Managua, is the problem with Nicaragua. "We don't have experience with big projects. It's not part of our culture," he says. "If we continue thinking small, we are never going to move forward."

Mr. Cuarezma worked for the United Nations when plans for a "dry canal," or rail system across the country, were floated in the mid-90s. He traveled through the region talking to poor rural communities that he says would benefit from both "dry" and "wet" canals. "This can change their lives, make them see they are part of something bigger," he says.

Environmentalists are skeptical about an interoceanic canal. They say it will ruin a part of the country whose natural beauty is stunning: tourists flock to misty sunsets over the twin volcanoes of Ometepe, and a lake said to be inhabited by fresh water sharks. "Environmentally it would be a disaster," says Victor Manuel Campos, co-founder of the Humboldt Center, an environmental group in Managua. "The country would have to decide between saving the lake or building the canal."

But beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. Luisa Amanda Tenorio has fished the lake's waters for decades. A canal would certainly change her life: when she's fishing for days at a time she ties up a hammock to go to bed, disturbed only by the occasional bawl of a howler monkey.

"It would be beautiful, all those big boats," she says, looking south across the lake, where nothing, except water and the sky and distant hills encompass the horizon.

• Ms. Llana is Latin America correspondent for the Monitor and USA Today.

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