Nicaragua

The largest Central American country, wanted by everyone for a canal that was never dug, and governed twice by the same revolution. The San Juan river and the enormous Lake Nicaragua offered the best transit route between the oceans before Panama, which is why the American adventurer William Walker was able to make himself president in 1856 with a private army before being driven out and shot. American marines occupied the country from 1912 to 1933, and the guerrilla campaign Augusto Sandino fought against them ended with his assassination by the National Guard commander Anastasio Somoza, whose family then ruled for forty-three years. The Sandinistas overthrew them in 1979, ran a literacy campaign that cut illiteracy sharply, and were opposed by the American-funded Contras through a war that killed around thirty thousand people and produced the Iran-Contra scandal and a World Court judgment against the United States. Daniel Ortega lost the 1990 election and accepted it, returned in 2007, and has since jailed or exiled essentially all opposition candidates. The Caribbean coast is culturally distinct, Miskito and creole English speaking. Managua was destroyed by an earthquake in 1972. Nicaragua is the poorest country in Central America. The country has about seven million people. Lake Nicaragua holds the only freshwater sharks known to move between sea and lake. Granada and Leon were rival colonial cities and Managua was made capital as a compromise. Ruben Dario, who founded the modernismo movement in Spanish poetry, was Nicaraguan. A Chinese-backed canal project announced in 2013 came to nothing.

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