| | |  Travel & Outdoors 
Mexico Paving New Future for Devil's Backbone
 Chris Hawley - USA Today
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April 26, 2010
| | The world's second-highest bridge being built at the Baluarte Gorge. | |
Palmito, Mexico — Mexican legend says when the Archangel Michael threw Satan out of Heaven, his broken spine formed a jagged ridge that winds across Mexico's Sierra Madre: the Devil's Backbone.
The mountainous terrain that surrounds this serpentine road has another story: one of bloodshed and poverty.
Farms in the thickly forested area here are a major source of marijuana and opium cultivation and the cartels that control the drug trade use gruesome violence to settle scores. The people who live here have few choices for work given that no highways and the commerce they bring have penetrated the Sierra Madre.
But the Devil's Backbone is undergoing surgery. The Mexican government has launched a massive road construction project to straighten and modernize the road, an engineering feat that will require 63 tunnels and 32 bridges, including the world's second-highest road bridge.
The new highway will provide easy access to and from the Pacific Coast, its ports and tourist destinations, cutting the drive time from 8 hours to 2˝ hours. Mexican authorities say the faster ride will open up industrial cities to the region, maybe even persuade carmakers and other companies that pay good wages to supplant the drug trade.
"The more jobs we can bring to these areas, the more we'll reduce crime — I'm a true believer in that," said Nicolás Velíz, a tunneling supervisor.
Velíz and others hope the new road will also make it easier for police to access the lawless mountains and establish order, rebutting claims that the road will become a drug superhighway.
"I think it's going to bring more security," says Ernesto Gómez Chacón, the town administrator in nearby Pueblo Nuevo.
Completion set for 2012
The old Devil's Backbone road is the only crossing through the Western Sierra Madre mountains for 500 miles and it runs through some of the most remote parts of Sinaloa and Durango states.
When the three-year project is done in 2012 it will create a 45-mile stretch of modern road between the Pacific Coast city of Mazatlan and the interior city of Durango. About 11 miles will be underground and its total 95 bridges and tunnels dwarfs the seven tunnels stretching 4˝ miles of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, known as America's "Tunnel Highway."
"This is going to be a marvel, something really world class," said construction manager Miguel Angel Ramírez, as he stood at the edge of the 1,280-foot-high Baluarte Gorge, which lies along the route.
Later this year crews will start on a span across the gorge, creating a bridge so high that the Empire State Building could fit under it.
The first road along the Devil's Backbone opened in the 1940s. The terrain was so rugged that construction crews had to bring in supplies by mule train.
"Now we're trying to do in three years what it took them 15 years to do," said Ernesto González, a construction supervisor on the new road.
Construction of the Mazatlan-Durango highway began in 2005, but work on the toughest stretch through the Sierra Madre began only last year. Most of the tunnels are already being dug, including the 1.6-mile Sinaloense Tunnel, the longest on the route. Workers are also excavating a tunnel parallel to the Sinaloense to be used as an escape route in case of emergencies.
The most challenging part of the highway is the Baluarte Bridge on the border of Sinaloa and Durango states, González said. With its roadway 1,280 feet above the Baluarte River, it will be the world's second-highest highway bridge after the 1,550-foot-high Sidhue River Bridge in China, according to HighestBridges.com, which ranks such structures.
Drug gangs occasionally set up roadblocks in the area to protect shipments or drug crops, check for rivals or shake down residents. And in other parts of Mexico cartels have begun blocking main highways to keep police from sending reinforcements during gunfights.
So far there have been no run-ins between construction crews and drug traffickers, Ramírez said.
"I'm sure they're out there, but we don't bother with them and they don't bother with us," Ramírez said.
That has not been the case with the people in the region, where the thickly forested mountains are full of clandestine farms growing marijuana and opium, the raw ingredient in heroin, as well as airstrips used to move cocaine shipments northward.
In Pueblo Nuevo, a province encompassing many villages on the east side of the Baluarte Gorge, suspected traffickers killed three teenagers in February and sprayed a town hall building with assault rifles. In March they gunned down 10 people, ages 8 to 21, for failing to stop at a checkpoint they had set up on a road near Los Naranjos, population 600.
In a village on the other side of the gorge, traffickers kidnapped and killed a man in September and another in January.
Drug-related murders doubled in Sinaloa from 2006 to 2009, and in Durango state they shot up by 900%, according to a tally by the Reforma newspaper. (Sinaloa had 350 in 2006, 767 in 2009. Durango had 64 in 2006, 637 in 2009). The U.S. State Department has urged Americans not to travel to Durango state because of the danger.
Currently the closest federal police stations and military bases are hours away so drug traffickers operate with impunity, using murder and torture to silence villagers and keep weak local police forces at bay. They also dabble in highway robbery, ambushing vehicles as they crawl along the Devil's Backbone road, said Gómez.
The new road will be high-speed, well-lit and patrolled by federal police cruisers, the Mexican Transportation Department says. Military reinforcements will be able to move more easily through the mountains to deter drug smugglers, it says.
"We won't be so isolated from the authorities any more," Gómez said.
And that may help turn people away from the drug trade, officials hope.
"With development of this type, people will have less reason to turn to illicit activities," said Alma Larrańaga, a spokeswoman for Mexico's Transportation Department.
Eager for development
A real highway to the Pacific means the hundreds of thousands of people living in the central part of the country north of Mexico City will be able to drive to Pacific Coast vacation spots like Mazatlán. Along the way they will need to stop for a variety of goods, people hope.
In Palmito, population 788, residents are eagerly anticipating motorists who might stop in their town to buy gas, eat or visit nearby attractions like the Pope's Peak, a rock formation that looks like a man with his hands folded in prayer.
"It's already brought a lot of work. You see people going down to Mazatlán to shop and coming back with all these new things they've bought," said Sandra Quinteros, a nurse at the town's clinic.
And many townsfolk are getting good construction jobs on the project.
"It's going to be good. The people here need this."
And even greater hope is industrial jobs. During an event in Palmito this month, Durango Gov. Ismael González Deras said he's hoping the new highway will encourage Asian manufacturers to open factories in his state because of the easier connection to the Pacific Ocean.
His government has purchased 4,300 acres near the highway for a new industrial park. Sinaloa Gov. Jesús Aguilar predicted a boom in traffic at Mazatlán's seaport.
Experts cautioned against too much optimism.
Traffickers are deeply entrenched in the Sierra Madre, and the region is vast. It could take years before new development puts a dent in the drug trade, said Gerardo López Cervantes, director of the economics department at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa.
"It's not going to change overnight," López Cervantes said.
Says Velíz, "If we don't give these mountain people any options than to be criminals, then that's what they'll be." |
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