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Without outside help, Costa Rica doesn’t have a chance.

The entire region is pro-communist, pro-Ortega, pro-Chavez, pro-Morales.

Brazil just elected a communist terrorist, Dilma Rousseau. The only remaining anti-communist country with the military might to push the Nicaraguan army back up the river is Columbia.

Given that the US sides with the communists these days, Columbia will go it alone, and probably have to contend with opposition from the US and Brazil.

If the Nicaraguan communists wanted it, they could take all of Costa Rica. I doubt anybody would do anything about it.

According to this article,

The recent border dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua is a sign of an ambitious plan by Venezuela, Iran and Nicaragua to create a "Nicaragua Canal" linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that would rival the existing Panama Canal.

Costa Rica says that last week Nicaraguan troops entered its territory along the San Juan River – the border between the two nations. Nicaragua had been conducting channel deepening work on the river when the incident occurred.

Sources in Latin America have told Haaretz that the border incident and the military pressure on Costa Rica, a country without an army, are the first step in a plan formulated by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, with funding and assistance from Iran, to create a substitute for the strategically and economically important Panama Canal.

Often considered in the past and even more recently, such a canal would be technologically and economically difficult to build; due to the late season storms and hurricanes on the Caribbean side it would be difficult to use during much of the year. The Panama Canal is well below the latitude where such storms occur and the southern shipping routes in the Caribbean and the Atlantic from and to the Panama Canal make it relatively easy to avoid hurricanes. Still, if it were to be built it could give some rather unpleasant people a bigger role in the world's economy.

Just looked at the map. There is about 15 miles of land between the Pacific Ocean and the western shore of Lake Nicaragua. From the southeast corner of the lake, Rio San Juan runs for about 120 miles to reach the Caribbean Sea.

All of the south shore of Lake Nicaragua plus a 45 mile long x 4 mile or so wide sliver of land south of Rio San Juan is Nicaragua territory from the eastern end of the lake shore, after which the river itself forms the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I'm not sure of the incentive to build a rival canal when a ChiCom Consortium, Hutchinson-Wampoa, controls operations at the Panama Canal.