Mexico’s president is aiming to launch a railway by year’s end that he touts as an alternative to the Panama Canal.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec will be inaugurated on 22 December.
He said rail lines now connect the port of Coatzacoalcos in Veracruz state on the Gulf of Mexico with Salina Cruz, in the state of Oaxaca on the Atlantic in six hours and 20 minutes.
“We still have to put in more effort and refine some parts of the railway,” the president said.
Proposals to connect the two sides of the narrow isthmus have been around for hundreds of years, with some even proposing a canal.
In a video posted on X and recorded as he rode in a passenger car, Lopez Obrador said he was on a line that was first constructed about 130 years ago.
A railway connected Coatzacoalcos and Salina Cruz in the late 1800s and began interoceanic traffic in 1907, with the American-Hawaiian Steamship Co providing shipping services to each side of the line.
But it would only be a few years before the Panama Canal was inaugurated, spelling the ultimate demise of the rail service.
Lopez Obrador first proposed rebuilding the rail corridor early in his presidency in 2018.
As he rode through the countryside of southern Mexico in his X video, Lopez Obrador pointed to the problems at the Panama Canal today, where a historic water shortage has led authorities to limit traffic in the canal.
“Imagine what this project means now that our brothers in Panama have some difficulties because of a lack of water in the canal,” he said.
“They will move forward. They will overcome that obstacle, but there is a lot of saturation in the Panama Canal.”
As he completes the final year of his six-year term, the president, known to Mexicans by his initials AMLO, beamed with pride in the project.
“Look at the train,” he said. “It’s pretty comfortable.”
