President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) presented a 2bn-peso (US$105mn) plan to build highways connecting cities in Mexico’s Durango, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua states.
The highways would be built in the golden triangle, a strategic drug-trafficking area under the control of the Sinaloa cartel.
“It is a road that crosses the Sierra Madre Occidental de Tamazula to Santiago Papasquiaro, which passes through Canelas, passes through very marginalized, abandoned, incommunicado municipalities of Durango,” the president said, adding that the region has been stigmatized and forgotten for years.
No details have been published, as over 200km are between the cities of Badiraguato, Guadalupe, and Calvo, which the highway would connect crossing mountainous terrain.
Funds will be allocated over the next two years, according to AMLO.
Works are “part of the strategy to calm the country,” he said, referring to the high levels of violence in the area.
“We are serving these regions with thousands of isolated communities, small communities in Sinaloa, Durango, Chihuahua that have always been abandoned,” AMLO said.
DURANGO
An early work in that infrastructure program was inaugurated on February 22. The 12km, 31.2mn-peso Sahuaripa bridge in Tamazula municipality, Durango state, is an extension of the Los Herrera-Tamazula highway, which is also part of the interstate Durango-Culiacan highway that connects Sinaloa and Durango.
At the opening ceremony, transportation and communications minister Javier Jiménez Espriú said the government would allocate 240mn pesos in 2020 to new highway stretches in the state and 308mn pesos to modernize other roads.
This year, the inter-state Durango-Culiacan highway will receive 930mn pesos, around 700mn pesos of which will go to a new 13km stretch and 230mn pesos are for building nine bridges.
Source: BN AMericas
The Mazatlan Post
