The Nicaragua Canal is expected to take five years to complete and cost fifty billion dollars; when finished (if it is ever finished), the hundred-and-seventy-two-mile canal will bisect Nicaragua from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.

At the ceremony, the canal’s impresario—a Chinese billionaire named Wang Jing —spoke fulsomely about the canal, describing the project as “the most important in the history of humanity.” His audience mostly consisted of local officials and about two hundred Chinese and Nicaraguan employees in yellow and white hard hats and orange and blue jumpsuits. Later that day, Wang, a pudgy man in his early forties, appeared at an event in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, with Daniel Ortega, the former Marxist guerrilla turned born-again Christian who has become the country’s eternal President. Ortega pushed through the bill that last year granted a fifty-year, renewable canal concession to Wang. (I wrote about it for the magazine last winter.) The deal was, in a sense, the fulfillment of a longtime national dream. In 1902, Nicaragua came in second to Panama as the site for an American-built canal. The Panama Canal had its centennial in 2014.

At the event in Managua, Ortega promised that the canal would help to reduce poverty in Nicaragua, the poorest country, after Haiti, in the Western Hemisphere. Wang has promised as many as fifty thousand jobs for Nicaraguans during its construction, and said that the project ultimately will employ two hundred thousand people. But the canal has plenty of skeptics, including several hundred protestors who blocked roads and clashed with police during the groundbreaking. Many shouted “Fuera chinos” (“Out with the Chinese”) and “Vendepatria,” an epithet for someone who sells his own homeland, in reference to Ortega’s support for Wang.

The term “vendepatria” was coined by Augusto César Sandino, the national hero and a guerrilla leader of the twenties and thirties. In a curious twist of history, the insult was connected to the original sale of the rights to a Nicaraguan canal. Sandino’s defiance of “the Colossus of the North,” as he referred to the U.S., was rooted in a nationalist outrage that dated back to the signing of the ignominious Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, on August 5, 1914. With that treaty, the country’s President, General Emiliano Chamorro, granted the U.S. government, represented by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, the exclusive right to build a Nicaraguan canal, in a pact renewable every ninety-nine years.  The deal effectively prevented Nicaragua from competing with the Panama Canal, which opened for business ten days later. In return, the U.S. paid Nicaragua three million dollars. One of Sandino’s demands, never fulfilled, for laying down his arms was the abrogation of the treaty. (The treaty was abolished, in 1970, in a bilateral agreement, after hampering the Nicaraguan economy and damaging its national dignity for decades. For much of the twentieth century, Americans derisively referred to Nicaragua and its poor neighbor Honduras as “banana republics.”)

Today, some former Sandinistas believe that Ortega has betrayed his revolutionary principles over the canal. Among the most prominent is the writer Sergio Ramírez, Ortega’s former Vice-President. On the occasion of the groundbreaking ceremony, Ramirez tweeted, “Today is a tragic day for Nicaragua. With the Chinese canal, its sovereignty is once again surrendered to a foreign power.”

Ortega’s government has granted Wang, among many other sweeping powers, the ability to expropriate land along the canal route, which may affect as many as thirty thousand Nicaraguan property owners. It appears likely that Wang will also be able to seize the autonomous territories of the black Creoles and indigenous Sumo and Rama Indians, which were granted to them by the Nicaraguan Constitution of 1987. Environmental experts have also expressed concerns about the canal’s destruction of natural habitats. The proposed route cuts through wetlands and stretches of virgin rainforest rich in wildlife, and involves dredging an aquatic pathway through Lake Nicaragua, Central America’s largest freshwater lake, which many fear will allow in silt and seawater. Ortega did not ameliorate those concerns when he declared, a few months ago, that the lake was “already contaminated.” Afterward, Confidencial, one of the country’s few independent media outlets, reminded its readers that, in 2007, Ortega publicly stated that he would not put the great lake’s fresh water at risk with a canal project “for all the gold in the world.”

Wang’s development plans, approved last summer by the Nicaraguan Congress, which is dominated by Sandinista Party loyalists, call not only for the canal but also for new seaports on both coasts, new satellite cities along the canal route, and tourist resorts. They also include a new railroad, highways, an oil pipeline, and steel and cement mills. There has been much speculation about Wang’s relationship with the Chinese government. He insists that he is a “private businessman,” but Nicaraguans and others who have met him and visited his corporate offices in China have come away convinced that he is is well-connected in Communist Party circles. The Ortega government, never known for its transparency, has been particularly opaque about its dealings with Wang, increasing concern about corruption in the canal concession. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Wang said that Nicaraguans whose land is expropriated would be compensated based on “market principles,” with “no tricks or lies.” He added, “We will respect all the rights of the Nicaraguans.” The U.S. government, too, has been unusually inscrutable about the canal. Far from warning China to back off its traditional turf, the Obama Administration has limited its public observations to calls for greater opennness in Wang’s bidding process.

On a trip to Brito about this time last year, I found a group of Chinese workers unpacking crates of equipment in a field. The locals, many of them illiterate peasants, were mystified by these newcomers. At the mouth of the Brito River, however, near some fishermen’s shacks, with mangy dogs and a lot of trash strewn about, I found a group of men, Nicaraguans and other Latin Americans, who identified themselves as scientists. I asked if they were on contract to make an environmental-impact study for one of Wang’s companies. They nodded. One of the scientists said that they had been studying the comings and goings of sea turtles. He offered that there weren’t many at all—far fewer than were previously believed, he said. “You would say that, then, wouldn’t you?” I quipped. “After the canal goes through here, there won’t be any at all, will there?”

He became wary, and asked if I was a journalist. When I confirmed that I was, he said, “We are not authorized to speak to the media.” He and his colleagues turned away and went into a huddle.

I looked beyond the gaggle of men. At that moment, the coastline was wild and beautiful as far as I could see.