The $50 billion interoceanic waterway is one of the biggest stories in Nicaragua since the revolution, but the project has been veiled in secrecy.
The following is part of a CPJ Blog post by John Otis, CPJ Andes Correspondent:
When Nicaragua began preliminary work on an interoceanic waterway designed to handle ships too big for the Panama Canal, some of the foreign correspondents who had flown in to cover the December groundbreaking were left high and dry.
Government officials told them to wait in a Managua hotel for a bus that would transport them to the ribbon-cutting ceremony, according to the Nicaragua Dispatch. But the bus never showed up. Tim Rogers, editor of the online news outlet, said that journalists who traveled to the Pacific coast site on their own were turned back by police. Wang Jing, a Chinese businessman who heads HKND Group, a consortium that has partnered with the Nicaraguan government to build the canal, apologized at a news conference the next day.
Read the full story on CPJ’s site.