Guadalajara - Ports are not the only facilities Mexico is seeking to improve under its national infrastructure programme. The government has also drawn up a grandiose plan for its roads and railways.
The plan is to build 17,598 km of highways and rural roads, including 5,472 km of national corridors, 6,788 km other roads, 1,338 km complementary works and 4,000 km rural and feeder roads. Of the total 12,260 km of highways will be part of 100 projects to be completed by 2012. The government also wants to upgrade the current highway network to international standards.
The focus will be on road access to cities, ports and the border with the US. There will be more attention given to building east-west roads as there are quite a few north-south roads.
By 2012, Mexico would have given itself a much more comprehensive trans-isthmus connection. For example, the Pacific port of Mazatlan will be connected to the Gulf of Mexico US border town of Matamoros via one road instead of the several disconnected ones currently. Further South, Manzanillo, on the Pacific but serving the industrial centre of Guadalajara, will connect to the Gulf of Mexico's Tampico with a branch to the port of Lazaro Cardenas. This is significant as it effectively creates a new corridor.
But the question, as in the case of the port of Punta Colonet, is money. "We have to use private resources because we don't have enough public resources," Oscar de Buen Richkarday, Undersecretary of Infrastructure, told a recent Guadalajara conference. "We are facing a window of opportunity that is not always going to be open."
The cash crunch is similar in the rail sector, with a goal of building 1,418 km of track, increasing the train speed from 24 to 40 km per hour and developing 10 multimodal corridors, including the construction of 12 intermodal cargo terminals. The main rail project is the 300 km double-track connection to the US border.
"In the past decade we have not spent a peso on the railways," admitted Luis Alberto Ibarra Pardo, director of the infrastructure unit of the Office of the President of Mexico. "However, I don't think Mexico is going against the tide but in the same direction as other countries are going in,'' he added.
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