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Nicaragua Canal:

Imperialist Competition, War, Environmental Destruction Demand Communist Response

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Sign reads “The lake is life. The canal is death.” Since December 2014, tens of thousands of Nicaraguans (mostly farmers) have protested the Ortega government’s massive land-grabs and evictions for the proposed canal. Some once supported the U.S.-backed fascist Contras against the first Sandinista government in the 1980s and might look to the US again for support against Ortega and his Chinese business partners. Others are former Sandinista fighters, once Ortega’s strongest base. “I don’t want a canal— that’s for capitalists,” one said. We must seize this opportunity to get Red Flag into the hands of the angry Nicaraguan masses.

Five months ago the building of the Nicaragua Canal began. It aims to unite the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean from Point Aguila on the Caribbean Sea to Brito on the Pacific Ocean, under the control of the HKND Group of China. It will be 278 kilometers (172 miles) long, with a budget of $50 billion and with a maximum capacity of ships double that of the Panama Canal.
This is a project through which Chinese capitalists plan to compete for the international market in the transportation of goods to the United States. The US bosses are planning to finish the expansion of the Panama Canal by 2016. It will nevertheless remain small compared to the Nicaragua Canal.
The HKND Group plans to build the route through Lake Cocibolca (also called Lake Nicaragua). The canal threatens to pollute this lake, the largest freshwater reserve in Central America and second-largest in Latin America. This shows that the capitalist-imperialists don’t care at all about the environment but only the growth of their businesses, accumulating more capital.

The truth of the situation is reflected in the lives of thousands of farmworkers affected by the beginning of the building of the Nicaragua Canal.
The Sandinista government will evict some seven thousand families who live on the future route of the canal.  This has sparked protests and blockades in the areas where construction of the canal has begun.
At the same time, it shows the inability of the environmental groups to carry out actions that prevent such abuses of the planet’s ecosystems since they align with the status quo and the rules of the bourgeois governments.
The workers of Nicaragua and the world need a communist revolution. Only in communism will decisions on whether projects like the Nicaragua Canal should be built take into account environmental and social aspects and their effect on the lives of workers and their families.

This project is part of the inter-imperialist rivalry for the control of international trade.

This project, according to the spokesman for the HKND Group, already has investors from Asia, Europe and even North America. The principal US capitalist-imperialists are not happy with this, according to a report presented by the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Michael Busch wrote in Warscapes, an internet magazine, “How should the U.S. respond? It could rethink its current focus on Asia and the Middle East, reorienting back to Latin America to counter China’s growing presence there.” The Warscapes article highlights that “given that the U.S. has military bases near China, there is strategic value for China in establishing its own military presence in Central America, above and beyond the economic considerations.”
China is eager to find a market for its surplus goods. These geopolitical movements will in turn provoke coup attempts and rebellions in the countries that are aligned with the China-Russia bloc.  Future regional wars will lead to a third world war, all orchestrated by the capitalist-imperialists of the world.

From Nicaragua to Greece, it is evident that it is no longer enough to protest. 

It is necessary to organize the masses around the revolutionary project of the International Communist Workers’ Party through Red Flag and the building of communist clubs throughout Central America and the world.  That makes it possible to fight in an organized way against these abuses to the planet’s ecosystems and to the lives of so many workers who, with the creation of free trade zones or maquilas in Nicaragua, will be forced to work in these modern concentration camps.
We must organize a permanent struggle for the political and dialectical development of the men and women workers so that those in the army and the factories form the Red Army that will wage the battle against the bourgeoisie for the building of a communist society that guarantees resolving the problems of the working class worldwide.

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