La Uniòn is a 2,000-person farming community in Nicaragua. It is slated, along with other communities, to be sacrificed to industrial progress at the hands of the Hong Kong-funded Grand Canal, the largest construction project in the history of the world.
Some of the farmers living there fought against President Daniel Ortega in the war that tore through Nicaragua in the 1980s. During that war, Ortega called himself a fighter “against the domination [by] the capitalists of our country”.
I went to La Uniòn to hear the stories of these farmers, and to photograph a community on the edge of disappearance. People were willing to unite with Sandinista farmers, their former enemies, in the struggle against the Canal. This struggle pits Ortega’s government, the canal’s profiteers, and most of the urban population against the farmers.
