ESPINAZO DEL DIABLO, Mexico - Lavender-blue peaks of the western Sierra Madre jut as far as the eye can see, and the only hints of civilization are a tendril of smoke from burning corn residue and a squiggle of dirt road.
Then, out of nowhere, a flat ribbon of concrete runs like a roller coaster over giant pylons, burrowing in and out of the mountainside until it seems to leap over a 1,200-foot river gorge via the world’s highest cable-stayed bridge, called the Baluarte.
The Durango-Mazatlan Highway is one of Mexico’s greatest engineering feats, 115 bridges and 61 tunnels designed to take people, cargo and legitimate commerce safely through a mountain range known until now for marijuana, opium poppies and an accident-prone road called the Devil’s Backbone.
Even those protesting the project say the 140-mile highway, expected to be completed in August, will change northern Mexico for the good. It will link port cities on the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific by a 12-hour drive, and Mazatlan with San Antonio in about the same time. The highway will eventually be used by 5 million vehicles a year, more than four times the number on the old road.
Sinaloa state tourism officials predict an “explosion” for the resort city of Mazatlan, hard-hit by drug violence in recent years, as the new road gives 40 million Mexicans in interior states an easy drive to the beach.
“It will change the landscape of this part of the country,” Tourism Secretary Francisco Cordova said. “It’s an opportunity to develop these areas and diversify the local economy.”
But it remains to be seen whether the $2.2 billion highway will pull the towns of wood and corrugated-metal shacks in rural Sinaloa and Durango away from their historical ties to drug trafficking. In Concordia, the municipality that abuts the Baluarte Bridge in Sinaloa state, nine people were ambushed and killed last December as they ate their Christmas Eve dinner. The prosecutor blamed the attack on a war for control of drug trafficking.
The public security chief in Pueblo Nuevo, on the Durango side of the bridge, was gunned down a year ago by armed commandos as he walked down a street in daylight.
Government officials say the new road will bring legitimate economic activity to a troubled area. Residents say it might improve access or take what little honest business they had as trucks and buses bypass towns altogether.
“It could leave some of the communities even more isolated,” said Jose Luis Coria Quinones, spokesman for 1,800 communal tree farmers, who have an injunction suspending construction on the Durango side near the bridge while a court considers their case. They say the federal government hasn’t paid them sufficiently for access to their property during the construction and hasn’t repaired the damage caused to pine forests, water supplies and endangered species’ habitats.
From a distance, the Baluarte Bridge and its triangular web of steel cables appear both spectacular and wildly out of place, a Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of a moonscape.While shorter than the Golden Gate Bridge, the Baluarte crosses a canyon deep enough to fit the Chrysler Building.
Engineers pump their fists when asked who designed it: “Puros Mexicanos.” All Mexicans.
A team of 60 to 80 experts started about 15 years ago in the secretary of communications and transportation offices in Mexico City, said supervising architect Alberto Ortiz Martinez, going by horseback, mule and helicopter to explore possible routes. Building the entire road took 130,000 tons of steel and more than 20 times the concrete of an Olympic stadium.
About 1,200 workers lived for four years in a nearby encampment.
“The most complicated problem was getting there, to locations totally inaccessible, and bringing huge quantities of materials,” said engineer Jose Refugio Avila Muro, a federal subdirector of highway projects for Sinaloa state. He compared the topography to an electrocardiogram: “Lots of peaks, and you have to find a way to get to each peak from below. You just keep going, one by one, to each new point of construction.”
The new highway will cut the drive between Durango and Mazatlan to 2½ hours from the current six hours of hairpin turns, few guardrails and the Devil’s Backbone, a stretch of road along the spine of a mountain with drops of hundreds of feet on either side.
Information for this article was contributed by Martin Duran and Karla Tinoco of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 06/30/2013