Bubba
Apr 27, 2007, 8:59 AM
Post #1 of 10
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When we bought this 30 years old house in Ajijic in 2001, we inherited the complete Encyclopia Brittanica from one of the (unknown) previous owners and we also found and bought an old Humble Oil road map of Mexico from 1953. For those of you interested in what has changed in Chiapas and in road conditions throughout Southeastern Mexico in fifty years, here are some interesting statistics.
In 1950 there were an estimated 907,000 people living in Chiapas of which a quarter were of pure Mayan blood. In 2000, that population has reached 4,300,000 people - an amazing growth rate and indigenous Maya still account for about a quarter of the population. This is astonishing to me as I have never thought of Chiapas, with its poverty and isolation, as a place where there would be any significant in-migration so most of this population growth must be internally generated.
About 40% of the population of Chiapas is considered malnourished and there are countless rural settlements throughout the state accessible solely by dirt path. Many live in small villages in almost unimaginable poverty so far from public roads that they must walk for hours, perhaps longer than a day, simply to get to the nearest passsable public thoroughfare. These communities must be self-sufficient and many exist on barter alone.
Much of the population growth in Chiapas has been in its cities. The largest, the state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez, has a population today of in excess of 500,000 people, up from 15,000 people in 1950. Other comparisons between 1950 and today include Tapachula which grew from an estimated 15,000 to 282,000 people and San Cristóbal which grew from 12,000 to 200,000.
The state´s second largest city, largely ignored in the rest of Mexico, is an interesting place with a mix of Indigenous, Mestizo, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Chinese peoples. The Europeans were attracted to the Soconusco in the 19th Century by the opportunity to grow coffee for export and the Asians originally arrived in Chiapas to build the vital railroad from the border with Guatemala to Ixtepec, Oaxaca which joined the old Isthmus railway from Tehuantepec, Oaxaca to Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz.
The Tapachula to Ixtepec railroad is no longer functional below Arriaga, Chiapas due to the hurricane damage of a couple of years ago. The rail line hooking up Tapachula to the isthmus railroad started as a magnificent dream to compete with the Panama Canal; a dream that largely faded and in the years before Hurricane Stan the railroad had become infamous as a link to the United States for desperately poor Central Americans who were immigrating illegally through Mexico.
Tapachula is a surprising place with one of the highest GDP levels per capita in Mexico according to Wikipedia which touts it as the cosmopolitan capital of the Soconusco coffee growing and coastal lowland region.
A look at my old U.S. published road map is interesting. In the 1950s, the railroad was a vital link through the Soconusco, a region that had only a single 17 km paved road from Tapachula to Puerto Madera. Most of the state, in fact, had virtually no paved highways. Only Highway 190 from Oaxaca City to San Cristobal de Las Casas was paved all the way through. Most other roads were unpaved fair weather roads and a vast area including the Lacandon Forest all the way up to Campache had virtually no roads at all worthy of appearing on the map as even seasonal dirt roads. The only link between Campeche, Merida and the rest of Mexico was the rail line from Tabasco State. Most of the state of Yucatan and almost all of the state of Quintana Roo were without improved roads. Interestingly, in all of Quintana Roo, roadways in 1953 consisted of a dirt road from Chetumal to Bacalar, A dirt road from Valladolid, Yucatan to Puerto Morelos and a dirt road from Peto, Yucatan to the ruins at Xyatil on the way to what is now Filipe Carrillo Puerto.
Sorry to bore you folks with this but I am amazed at the infrastructural improvements in this region in the past fifty years. In the 1950s Encyclopedia Brittanca, the vast central plateau of Chiapas was cited as among the most fertile and finest land masses in all of Mexico hindered by the almost complete lack of transportation and its remoteness from the rest of the country. Today the roads are there but the poverty persists in an economy largely favoring the status quo for oligarchical elites. So what´s new?
(This post was edited by Bubba on Apr 27, 2007, 9:19 AM)
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