Colombia's problem? It closed its railways

Independent (London)
Commentary
By Stephen Smith
19 August 1999
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THE FIRST lady of Colombia, Mrs Pastrana, told me this summer that she slept at most five hours a night. "Before the election, it was eight," she said wistfully.

What disturbs her slumbers is the threat to her nation - not to mention the threat to her husband, President Andres Pastrana. Like other VIPs in Colombia, he is quoted against assassination by his insurers, and risks voiding his policy if he overlooks the bullet-proof- vest clause. What has brought his country to the point where a hundred people are murdered every day? The obvious answer is the drugs trade. The less obvious answer is the lack of railways. At the risk of sounding like a ghoulish train-spotter, I've worked out that Colombia has descended into bloody chaos during the very period that its rail system has been allowed to run down.

Not convinced? Well, there's hard evidence that the arrival of the train was the making of Colombia. Even excluding what might be called the white economy of its powdered exports, the country has been one of the wealthiest in South America. The locomotive was the engine of this prosperity, taking Colombia's exquisite mild arabica coffee to a world with a caffeine craving. The train was also the only practical means of moving coal: Colombia had the largest reserves in Latin America.

The railway was a dream of the liberator, Simon Bolvar. It was realised by engineers from Europe like my grandfather, Leslie Frost, who surveyed and built and operated railroads over more than 2,000 miles. The line had had to be blasted through foggy mountains and malarial jungles.

This topography also threw up problems of political volatility and civil violence: Colombians were cut off from each other, living in virtual city-states, and this had bred suspicion and resentment. A perhaps unintended consequence of the railways was to break down this isolation in the early part of this century. At the same time, the country enjoyed comparative peace and stability. The Colombians nationalised the railways in the mid-Fifties but failed to put any money into them, and the rains washed them away. Barely half a dozen routes survive of the ones my grandfather surveyed. I travelled on them to learn more about him, and to trace his secret family, the one he had raised with a beautiful Colombian teenager. For reasons which remain murky, but have to do with the priorities of foreign investors, the government preferred to develop roads instead of my grandfather's remarkable railways. But lorries clogged the principal routes, and the effect for most Colombians was a diminution of travel opportunities. They became divided from one another again and the city-states reasserted their power. It's no coincidence that the two biggest municipalities outside the capital, Medellin and Cali, became the fortresses of narco-gangsters.

Overlaying the struggle between drug traffickers and the authorities has been an even more deadly civil war in which the combatants have strong regional identities. Left-wing guerrillas now control a remarkable 40 per cent of Colombia. Since taking office a year ago, President Pastrana has ceded territory the size of Switzerland to them, in hopes of making peace. In the blue corner, so to speak, are right-wing death squads, who fund their killing by extorting protection from landowners - or seizing their estates and selling them.

Colombia's civil war has been going on almost uninterruptedly for over 40 years, since the railways were marked with the black spot. The limitations of geography and history, transcended briefly by the train, have stonily reimposed themselves. In their decline, the contribution that the railways made has been forgotten, but it's no exaggeration to say that they did more to unite and modernise the country than anything else.