During the Enrique Bolaños Administration, many miles of good highway were finished, but it was like pulling teeth in some cases to get the international contractors to do their job. Two fiascos with international firms contracted to build highways made headlines repeatedly. One had to do with a Spanish company hired to widen the highway from Managua to Granada, a project plagued with delays, and the oher was a Mexican firm that left some unfinished business on the final stretch to the Honduran border going north out of Chinandega. Having borne witness to all this, the government of Daniel Ortega has announced that it will form a national construction firm.

Rather than being purely Nicaraguan State-owned, the new company would be made up by this country, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and any other countries that join in with the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, or ALBA as it is known. Details of exactly how this would work have yet to be forthcoming.

Criticisms of the announcement, however, were quick to come, some merely because it was Sandinista leader Ortega who announced it. A dyed-in-the-wool anti-Sandi Liberal, Eliseo Núñez (formerly pro-Arnoldo Alemán, now with the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance or ALN, likely to jump ships when political winds shift) had a particularly visceral reaction. He said you only have to look at the poor record of State construction firms during the 1980s under the FSLN government, which he argues, received an inventory of 5000 miles of constructed roadways in 1979, yet by 1990, there were less than 1000 miles of good road left. With this “proven record” of failure, a Nicaraguan State firm under the Sandinistas would not be up to the task, he alleges.

Eliseo conveniently failed to mention that a civil war wracked the country over that time period. Contra forces routinely attacked construction equipment camps and the aftermath of the landmines they planted along country roads to disrupt any and all interurban traffic made the potholes of today look like no more than a dimple on a baby’s bum.

A more thoughtful consideration was raised by this politician. It has to do with the fact that the majority of roads built in the country since Sandinista rule ended have been financed with external funding, grants or soft-term loans, in order to build up the country’s war-ravaged infrastructure in hopes of promoting some economic development. Donors put conditions on money they pour into the country, conditions like open bidding processes that allow for involvement of firms from the country where the money comes from in the first place. All of which means a quasi-multinational State firm, as proposed by Ortega, would have to show that it can compete competitively in this open market.

For his part, President Ortega stated, “We have to free ourselves from that dependence on outside resources. When it comes to some inconvenience, they take you to international arbitration, which means millions spent on lawyers and lost fights.” He was referring to lawsuits filed by the past administration against contractors to have them comply with what they signed on for.

At the same press conference, the Minister of Transport and Infrastructure took the opportunity to announce that there will be repairs to “approximately” 731 kilometers of already existing roadways and the construction of another 100 or so new kilometers. Many new highways proposed over the years, including the long-awaited Coastal Highway, are still on the drawing board.