WLC-4 THE AMERICAS Wendy Call is a donor-supported “Healthy Societies” ICWA Fellow living and writing in southern . Can’t Get There from Here: LETTERS Transit Infrastructure and Since 1925 the Institute of The Isthmus Megaproject Current World Affairs (the Crane- Rogers Foundation) has provided long-term fellowships to enable By Wendy Call outstanding young professionals JANUARY 15, 2001 to live outside the United States MATIAS ROMERO, – Two security guards blocked the doorway to the and write about international train station. One, middle-aged, squatted on an overturned milk crate. The other, areas and issues. An exempt much younger, sat on a torn cushion balanced atop a piece of plywood. Their operating foundation endowed by rifles lay across their laps. Mirna and I greeted them politely, then looked past the late Charles R. Crane, the them into the station’s cavernous waiting room. Our shift in gaze put them on Institute is also supported by alert. What were we doing there, they wanted to know. contributions from like-minded individuals and foundations. We planned to take the train to Matías Romero, we explained, the one that leaves this station at 4:40 in the afternoon. Would it be here on time? (We had arrived nearly four hours early.) They didn’t know exactly when the passenger TRUSTEES train would arrive at the station. Around 7:30 or 8:30 in the evening was their best Carole Beaulieu guess. Mirna and I surprised them by saying that we would wait. Reluctantly, Mary Lynne Bird they shuffled their makeshift chairs apart enough for us to squeeze by. Wasps’ Steven Butler nests pockmarked the once-white ceiling of the station. Fluorescent tubes threw William F. Foote down weak light. Birds’ nests spilled from the narrow spaces between the light Pramila Jayapal fixtures and ceiling. Bird droppings mottled the long, tiled benches — the room’s Peter Bird Martin only furnishings. Ann Mische Dorothy S. Patterson A train passed at 1:05 pm. Another at 2:00 pm, and a third at 2:50 pm. None of Paul A. Rahe them stopped; they were cargo-only. After the third train chugged by, we asked Carol Rose the guards again: There would be a passenger train today, right? When might it Chandler Rosenberger John Spencer Edmund Sutton Dirk J. Vandewalle Sally Wriggins

HONORARY TRUSTEES David Elliot David Hapgood Pat M. Holt Edwin S. Munger Richard H. Nolte Albert Ravenholt Phillips Talbot

Institute of Current World Affairs The Crane-Rogers Foundation Four West Wheelock Street Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 U.S.A. The retired steam engine on display at the Matías Romero train station is probably the last one in the state. come? This time, both answered that they had no idea. We pressed them on this point: how can you offer pas- senger service if the timetables are meaningless and you Railroads don’t know when the trains will arrive? Their answer Highways seemed plausible: the dispatcher radios to the previous station to let them know whether there are passengers waiting here to board. He also finds out when the train is • expected. Encouraged by this explanation, we walked • TABASCO around to the other side of the station to talk to the dispatcher. The door to his office was clearly labeled, and locked tight. Isthmus The guards seemed to be the only employees in the en- CA XA tire station. We returned to the waiting room. We waited. OA

Early that morning, I had boarded a bus with Mirna of Godinez Rasgado, my neighbor and a life-long resident OAXACA of the central isthmus region. We traveled southeast from • Matías Romero to Arriaga, , in search of the pas- A • C A senger train. Arriaga is a small city in the western corner X A IAPAS of Chiapas, which pokes into the Isthmus of . Tehuantepec O CH We took the bus out of Matías Romero so that we could take • the train back. This might sound odd, but finding a passenger • train in Mexico these days requires creative planning. • • • * * * • Gulf of Tehuantepec Mirna grew up with the trans-isthmus train. When passenger service in the isthmus was temporarily sus- pended during the summer of 1999 — after years of grow- vegetables, beef, and refried beans — to passengers along ing less frequent, less efficient and less used — a piece of the tracks. Mirna’s life passed into memory. Her father, Teodoro Godinez Toledo, started working for Ferrocarriles The railroad tracks define Matías Romero. Before the Nacionales de México (Mexico’s national rail company) town existed, Señor Matías Romero was a late-nineteenth- when he was 15. He retired 43 years later. A couple of her century treasury secretary, ambassador to the United brothers still work on the rails. Once, when her family States, and promoter of a nationwide rail system in moved, they loaded all their belongings into a rail car, Mexico. His namesake town was founded at the turn of rather than a truck. For years, Mirna, her sisters, and her the century by the British engineers who built the trans- mother sold tlayudas — huge grilled tacos stuffed with isthmus railroad “with characteristic thoroughness,” as

The brick buildings constructed by British railroad engineers at the turn of the century still provide housing for a few Matías Romero families. 2 WLC-4 In the indigenous Mixe town of San Juan Guichicovi, women dance at a fiesta. the New England Magazine reported when the line was mid-1980s, part of Matías Romero’s slow decline, it be- inaugurated in 1907. The Brits established their shops and came a victim of its own (relative) opulence. “The loot- yards a mile or so from a hamlet called Rincon Antonio. ing was incredible,” remembers a longtime resident. The nearest true town was San Juan Guichicovi, an in- People in town still talk about the theft of everything from digenous Mixe community of about 10,000, some12 miles the beds to the bathroom fixtures. Today, the clinic is a northwest of the British rail yards. Over time, Spanish- crumbling carcass, its rooms inhabited by sleeping dogs speaking Matías Romero replaced Mixe-speaking and tarantulas crawling among the piles of dead leaves. Guichicovi as the primary market center for the central isthmus. Only about 15 percent of the 50,000 people who Elsewhere in Mexico they call the town where I live live in the Matías Romero municipality speak an indig- “Matías Muy Feo,” or “Very Ugly Matías.” It looks as if it enous language — much less than the state average of 36 were built in a hurry, with no plan, vision or attention to percent. An artist who lives in Matías told me that the detail. As a person raised on military bases, ugly but func- main street was originally lined with wooden, Swiss-cha- tional is a familiar architectural esthetic to me. For this, I let-style buildings. Slowly, perhaps because of aggressive consider myself lucky. Having lived in plenty of unat- termites, perhaps because of changing tastes, they were tractive places, I see past Matías Romero’s grim façade. replaced by one plain cement-block structure after an- It is a kind, friendly town that remembers a better time: other. The city’s origins are British. Its culture is mestizo. when railroad workers filled the union hall, when their Spanish and indigenous influences are harder to find. families got excellent medical care when train whistles pierced the air at all hours. Everyone I know who grew up in Matías Romero is from a family of railroad workers or market vendors. The Now, the lonely whistle cuts the humid air only six railroad workers’ union hall is one of downtown’s most or seven times a day. Trains passing through hardly ever commanding buildings. It isn’t used much these days. stop. Passenger service was suspended in the summer of Weeds and trash have taken over the medical clinic that 1999, as it was in most of the country when Ferrocarriles was built after well-organized railroad workers de- Nacionales de México was parceled up and sold to private manded it. The medical center’s tiled walls and stone corporations. Cargo means profit. Passengers must be stairway look as if they were meant for a facility in an- subsidized. As with Amtrak in the United States, pas- other city — a larger, wealthier one. Massive mango trees senger service in Mexico could not survive without gov- crowd the brick buildings, which sprawl over an entire ernment support. In 1998, posters about privatization city block. Palms tower over it, dropping coconuts into hung in the Matías Romero train station, claiming “the the empty rooms. When the clinic was shut down in the new railroad offers better service [and] higher efficiency INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 3 The medical center built for the Matías Romero railroad workers lies in abandoned ruin today. in the transfer of high-volume merchandise.” later, one of its lead organizers noted, “The only concrete accomplishment was stopping the privatization of the The Zapotecs, the isthmus’ largest indigenous group, trans-isthmus line.” Nonetheless, the quasi-public com- have traditionally been traders, not farmers or fishermen. pany set up to manage the trans-isthmus line does little Their businesses are low-volume, not high. Mirna’s sis- more than rent space to private train operators. ter Sylvia laughs when she remembers “the Zapotec women from Juchitán, squeezing on the train with their Mirna’s father believes the railroad should be obli- huge baskets of things to sell.” gated to offer passenger service, subsidized by cargo. “My proposal would be to have a train with three passenger The railroad is closely bound to regional identity and cars that would also carry non-dangerous cargo. This way, pride. “The isthmus without the train isn’t the isthmus,” I think that the [rail] company wouldn’t lose so much wrote Noticias, Oaxaca state’s primary newspaper, a few [income], while the cost to the passengers would be in- months after passenger service was suspended in 1999. expensive,” Teodoro Godinez explains. The editorial endorsed passenger-oriented, local service, so “people can get off and on to buy and sell, as they No one really expects the trains’ new owners to agree have always done in the isthmus.” with retired workers like Godinez, but many were hope- ful when renewed passenger service was announced in Like rail systems in nearly every country of the con- August 2000. Mirna and I were curious to see if the old tinent — with the notable exceptions of Canada, the tradition of buying and selling along the rail route would United States and Cuba — Mexico’s railroads have passed be revived. Securing the two-page timetable required a from government to private hands in the last several special meeting with railroad administrators. Even after years. In 1995, the Mexican Senate changed the Mexican an official explanation, it took Mirna and me nearly half constitution to allow private investment in the country’s an hour to figure out when the trains left, where they railways. During the last three years of former president stopped, and where they ended up. We could not do the Ernesto Zedillo’s term, nearly every mile of Mexican rail traditional trans-isthmus trip: board a train in was privatized — except for the 190 miles of track be- and ride south all the way to . tween the Pacific port of Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, and the According to the chart, the passenger trains from Gulf of Mexico port of Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz. The gov- Coatzacoalcos ran as far south as Ixtepec, Oaxaca, stop- ernment claims that the trans-isthmus line was kept pub- ping 25 miles shy of Salina Cruz. They then turned south- lic because of its “strategic value.” A few years ago, east into Chiapas, running to the border. A though, the government had pushed hard to privatize it. round-trip between Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz and Arriaga, In August 1997, more than 800 people — including many Chiapas (a 16-hour trip by car) would take four days by railroad workers — gathered in Matías Romero for a train. three-day meeting. They came to plan a community re- sponse to the then-recently announced plans for the We settled for a one-way trip, from Arriaga back to Megaproject. Looking back on that meeting two years Matías. As Mirna and I sat under the wasps’ and birds’ 4 WLC-4 nests in the Arriaga train station, even that seemed too much to ask. We passed the hours chatting with Agustín, the younger guard. Mirna asked him about the passen- gers who took the train. He explained that market women carried their dried shrimp and fish from the nearby port to market. This was how people had used the train in years gone by, when the service was slow, but regular and cheap. “Yes, before, but what about now?” she pressed. He looked confused and did not answer. I imag- ined his mental question: What passengers?

Half an hour before the passenger train’s scheduled arrival at 4:40 p.m., Agustín told us that the (still invis- ible) dispatcher had announced our train would not arrive until 11:30 pm. Did Agustín believe it would actu- ally arrive? “Maybe, or maybe not,” he said. “Sometimes it stays in Tonalá [a city south of Arriaga] for five or six days.”

I imagined market women eating all the dried shrimp they had brought to sell, in order to avoid starving. “The next one comes Tuesday,” Agustín said, his tone reassur- ing and hopeful. “So, there will be one Tuesday.”

Photo credit: courtesy of the Museum of the . Mirna’s patience had run out. Her two young daugh- ters were waiting for her at home. We headed back to the Mexico’s trains were an important source of income th bus station. At 4 pm, we boarded a bus that would have for Mexican women for most of the 20 century. us back in Matías Romero before 9 pm. If the train had Trans-Isthmus Megaproject — a 1996 proposal to build a indeed shown up, it would have arrived in Matías modern industrial corridor across the Isthmus of Romero a little before nine the next morning, on its way Tehuantepec. Expansion of the Atlantic and Pacific ports north to Coatzacoalcos. and construction of a new superhighway form the other two-thirds of the plan. Two primary visions for the * * * Megaproject have competed for the support of govern- ment and corporate leaders for the past four years. In Railroads are one-third of the transit triangle of the both, the trans-isthmus train is central. One sees exploi-

Arriaga, Chiapas. INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 5 post-NAFTA period, it became apparent that Planned new highways there should be another entry/exit system de- Current highways veloped for…direct access to Mexico.”

• Miranda points out that while Panama moves 300 million metric tons across its isth- mus each year, about 10 million tons pass across the . This pal- try figure isn’t surprising, given the current state of the two paths connecting the Atlantic • and Pacific ports: an antiquated, single-track • railroad and a two-lane, shoulderless highway filled with speed bumps and potholes.

The two highways that run southwest Gulf of from the state capital of Oaxaca, one to the isth- Tehuantepec mus and one to the Pacific Coast (an impor- tant tourist destination) are no better. The two- lane highway that connects to the tation and export of the region’s considerable natural re- isthmus is a stomach-turning four and one-half hours of sources as the primary reason to develop a transit corri- hairpin curves past thousands of blue agave plants blan- dor across Mexico’s isthmus. Adherents of the other be- keting mountainsides, trees clinging to eroding cliffs, and lieve that Mexico has a shot at developing a transit tiny villages between mountain peaks. The one to the corridor that will complement — if not rival — the coast crosses even more rugged terrain. For several years, Panama canal. Senator Fidel Herrera Beltrán, a promi- there has been talk of building a faster, wider, safer su- nent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) member perhighway between these two highways. from Veracruz, is perhaps the primary booster of the lat- ter vision. His goal is to build a new high-speed contain- Germán Martínez is a municipal authority of San erized train from Coatzacoalcos to Salina Cruz, one that Pedro Leapi, a Zapotec community that lies between the could traverse the distance in under an hour. He believes state capital and the coast. According to Martínez, engi- this transit system would “secure Mexico’s place as a sig- neers showed up in Leapi in 1997 to do some surveying. nificant player in global commerce.” Enrique Murga, the Without speaking to the local government first, they be- director of the Salina Cruz port, subscribes to the former gan working in a forest that is part of the village’s com- vision: improving transit to move more goods out of the munal lands. Martínez described the area where the en- isthmus — not across it. For Murga, the top goals are to gineers worked by giving a long list of the animals that “generate employment and products and consumer de- live there. His community is concerned that a road would mand and taxes.” Exports and increased industry — affect the aquifers that they depend on for their crops. which require a trans-isthmus train with intermediate Local authorities wrote to the Secretary of Communica- stops — would do that, he says. tions and Transport (SCT), asking what was happening. They received no response. They asked other government “Mexico is a cornucopia of abundance, but upside agencies, and received the same response: silence. The down — everything goes north, to the United States,” silence bothered them almost as much as the thought of says Carlos Miranda, director of the Coatzacoalcos port. a four-lane toll road (that they could not afford to use) “The Americas for the Americans, not for the people from the United States,” he likes to say. Miranda’s industry is passing into private hands, too, and he is not entirely com- fortable with that. His port — like the one in Salina Cruz — is still public, though not subsidized. “The govern- ment doesn’t give me a single cent,” he says. He asserts that the most powerful, successful ports in the world are publicly owned. Private companies are more interested in short-term profit than long-term strength, he tells me.

He proudly describes a new transit service planned between his port and the United States gulf coast: a ship that would transport railroad cars directly from his port to Mobile, Alabama. The International Shipholding Cor- poration, the US partner for the project, announced in November 2000 that “After considerable study of cargo movements between Mexico and the United States in the Coatzacoalcos port director Carlos Miranda in his office. 6 WLC-4 cutting through their land. Finally, in March 1999 they sent a formal letter to the state governor, with copies to the SCT and four other government agencies, asking whether Elba Flores, director of a new highway would be constructed on or near their land. the Tepeyac Human This time, the SCT responded. No one else did. Martínez sum- Rights Center of the marized the agency’s response: “No, we don’t have any Catholic diocese of such program…, it only goes as far as .” Tehuantepec, speaks about the social I heard this story from Germán Martínez at a confer- impacts of the planned ence for communities concerned about the Megaproject. superhighway at a A few days after this meeting, the state association of ho- November 2000 forum tel owners held a press conference to demand that the on the Megaproject. highway project move faster. The president of the asso- ciation, Rafael Gómez Ruiz, was quoted as saying, “All the municipalities that the highway will cross agree with Mexican constitution. In the case of the Megaproject — the project, except for six people [from one town].” (The as is often the case with large-scale development plans town mentioned was not San Pedro Leapi.) Five days af- in poor areas — that constitutional protection has not ter this press conference, a Noticias editorial declared, meant much. The conference where Germán Martínez “With the superhighway, we all win.” told his town’s story was coordinated by the human rights organization of the Catholic Diocese of Tehuantepec. Di- I spoke with Oaxaca’s SCT director, Reynaldo rector Elba Flores says, “The fact that indigenous com- Guajardo, about this highway project. His characteriza- munities are not consulted or [given] full and adequate tion of it was quite different from the one his office had information infringes on their rights. That is to say, these given to the residents of San Pedro Leapi. Yes, the SCT communities are not recognized, in practice, as subjects had begun construction on only the short stretch of new of the law.” highway from Oaxaca City to Mitla, about 30 miles east of the city. He described the entire route in detail, saying it After four years of scattered, contradictory and in- extends from Oaxaca City southeast to the Pacific-Coast tour- complete information, people hope for some kind of ist development Bays of Huatulco, then east to Salina Cruz. It change with the new president. Vicente Fox has repeated will cut travel time in half, at a cost of 400 million dol- several times that infrastructure development in south- lars. He also described the proposed cross-isthmus high- eastern Mexico is a high priority for his administration. way from Salina Cruz to Coatzacoalcos, explaining that Fox’s very first presidential visit was to Oaxaca, the day funding had not yet been secured for this portion. The after his inauguration. In September 2000, he had an- route that he traced on a map showed the new highway nounced an ambitious development plan for the entire passing just a couple of miles from Germán Martínez’s region south of , along with : town. In one brief interview set up on short notice, the The Puebla to Panama Plan (called “Three P”). With this SCT director gave me information that had been refused announcement, the assumption among isthmus residents the people of San Pedro Leapi for nearly three years. was that the Megaproject would be a central part of Three P. On January 5 this assumption was at least partially con- The “right to be well informed” is guaranteed by the firmed, when the national newspaper La Jornada an- nounced that Megaproject plans would in- deed be incorporated into Three P. The article also noted that Alfonso Romo, presi- dent of the powerful Grupo Pulsar had signed on to help lead Three P. One of Mexico’s most important transnational cor- porations, Grupo Pulsar has been involved in eucalyptus plantations in the isthmus region, and is expected to draw interna- tional investment to the project. La Jornada reported that Romo “highlights the re- launching of an old plan to modernize the trans-isthmus railroad that crosses the isthmus….”

Since the Megaproject was first an- nounced in 1996, much of the talk has been about financing. Many have believed that In the Arriaga, Chiapas train station, the entire the proposals would become real possibili- passenger train schedule has been blanked out. ties only when the World Bank — or another INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 7 deep-pocketed finance agency — stepped forward. In Oc- tober 2000, the World Bank announced that Oaxaca was a high-priority region for them, but there was no specific mention of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Around the same time, though, another big spender stepped forward. The InterAmerican Development Bank (IADB) announced that it would put up 1.5 billion dol- lars annually to support Fox’s Three P. Fox has appointed Florencio Salazar Adame, a former PRI leader from Guerrero, coordinator of the Puebla to Panama Plan, giv- ing him a sub-cabinet post within the Department of Pub- lic Policy. Salazar announced recently that the Three P is a 20-year plan, with an anticipated total budget of more than eight billion dollars.

* * *

The morning after Mirna and I returned from Arriaga, I packed for a three-day visit to Coatzacoalcos and walked to the Matías Romero train station. The two guards there looked a little less bored than the pair in the Arriaga station, but no more busy. A sign hung over the exit to the train platform: “Buy your ticket in the sta- tion to avoid a 25 percent surcharge on board.” That seemed more encouraging than the sign in the Arriaga station, on which all the arrival and departure times for the passenger trains had been blanked out.

I explained to the guards I was there for the passen- The smell of creosote fills the air near the Matías Romero ger train to Coatzacoalcos. That startled them a bit. Be- train station, where new railroad ties await installation. fore replying, one of them made a phone call. After put- ting down the receiver, he explained that there was no had come as far north as Ixtepec — and then turned back train that day. But, I replied, I had been at the station in south. Arriaga the previous afternoon. The workers there had said the train would pass around 11:30 pm, which would Why? Well, he explained, during the rainy season they put it in Matías Romero around 8:30 am. My explana- don’t run the trains between Ixtepec and Coatzacoalcos. tion prompted more confused looks and another phone The rails are in poor condition and it’s dangerous. I won- call. “There’s a passenger here,” the guard said to the dered, but did not ask, why he could not have told me authority on the other end of the line. “She says that the this five minutes earlier. Instead I asked, “So, in March, train is coming from Arriaga, that’s what they told her when the dry season starts, I can come back and take the there.” He listened. “OK, very good.” He hung up the passenger train to Coatzacoalcos?” They assured me that phone. He told me that the train had arrived in Arriaga, I could. ❏

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Phone: (603) 643-5548 E-Mail: [email protected] Author: Call, Wendy Fax: (603) 643-9599 Web Site: www.icwa.org Title: ICWA Letters - The Americas ISSN: 1083-4303 Executive Director: Peter Bird Martin Imprint: Institute of Current World Program Assistant: Brent Jacobson Affairs, Hanover, NH Publications Manager: Ellen Kozak Material Type: Serial Language: English ©2001 Institute of Current World Affairs, The Crane-Rog- Frequency: Monthly ers Foundation. The information contained in this publica- Other Regions: East Asia; South Asia; Europe/Russia; tion may not be reproduced without the writer’s permission. Mideast/North Africa;Sub-Saharan Africa