Highway will leapfrog drug lands
Roads, bridges and tunnels will link port cities on Gulf and Pacific by 12- hour drive
ESPINAZO DEL DIABLO, Mexico — Lavender- blue peaks of the western Sierra Madre jut as far as the eye can see, the only hints of civilization: a tendril of smoke from burning corn residue, a squiggle of dirt road.
Then out of nowhere, a flat ribbon of concrete runs like a roller- coaster over giant pylons, burrowing in and out of the mountainside until it seems to leap mid- air over a 400- metre river gorge via the world’s highest cable- stayed bridge, called the Baluarte.
The Durango- Mazatlan Highway is one of Mexico’s greatest engineering feats, 115 bridges and 61 tunnels designed to bring people, cargo and legitimate commerce safely through a mountain range known until now for marijuana, opium poppies and an accident- prone road called the Devil’s Backbone.
Even those protesting the project say the 230- km highway, expected to be completed in August, will change northern Mexico dramatically for the good. It will link port cities on the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific by a mere 12- hour drive, and Mazatlan with San Antonio, Texas, in about the same time. The highway will eventually move five million vehicles a year, more than four times the number on the old road, plus more produce and goods from Asia to the Mexican interior and southern U. S.
Sinaloa state tourism officials predict an “explosion” for the resort city of Mazatlan, hard hit by drug violence in recent years, as the new road gives 40 million Mexicans in interior states an easy drive to the beach.
“It will change the landscape of this part of the country,” said Tourism Secretary Francisco Cordova. “It’s an opportunity to develop these areas and diversify the local economy.”
But it remains to be seen if the $ 2.2- billion highway will pull the towns of wood and corrugatedmetal shacks in rural Sinaloa and Durango away from their historic ties to drug trafficking. In Concordia, the municipality that abuts the Baluarte Bridge in Sinaloa state, nine people were ambushed and killed last December as they ate their Christmas Eve dinner. The prosecutor blamed the attack on a war for control of drug trafficking.
The public security chief in Pueblo Nuevo, on the Durango side of the bridge, was gunned down a year ago by armed commandos as he walked down a street in daylight. From a distance, the Baluarte Bridge and its triangular web of steel cables are both spectacular and wildly out of place, a Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of a moonscape.
The new highway will cut the drive between Durango and Mazatlan to 2.5 hours from the current six hours of hairpin turns, few guard rails and the Devil’s Backbone, a stretch of road along the spine of a mountain with drops of hundreds of metres on either side.
From December 2006 until September 2011, when the federal government stopped providing numbers, Sinaloa and Durango on either side of the Baluarte Bridge were among the deadliest states in terms of drug- related killings.