100 years after its commissioning, the Mexico-Oaxaca railway line of the old southern Mexican railway continues to give man an enormous service and astonishes us by what was then a real feat: crossing the rugged and imposing Mixteca mountain range.
In the Vértiz Narvarte and Del Valle neighborhoods in Mexico City, a street is named after Matías Romero. More or less halfway through the railroad between Salina and Cruz and Coatzacoalcos there is an Oaxacan town that is also called that.
In Ciudad Satélite the municipal nomenclature honors him in the same way. And an institute for international studies and research of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs proudly holds the same name. Who was the character deserving of such recognitions? What relationship did he have with the Puebla-Oaxaca railway that began to be built a century ago?
A MULTIFACE AND TIRELESS TRAVELER
Many remember Matías Romero as the almost eternal diplomatic representative of Mexico in Washington, where he lived for about 20 years. There he defended the interests of the country during the governments of three presidents: Benito Juárez, Manuel González and Porfirio Díaz. He was a friend of the first and third, as well as General Ulises S. Grant, a fighter in the Civil War and later President of the United States. Romero was also Secretary of the Treasury on several occasions, a promoter of agricultural activities in southeastern Mexico and a determined promoter of the construction of railways through foreign investment. For more than 40 years he was in public service. He died in New York in 1898, at the age of 61, leaving an important work written on diplomatic, economic and commercial issues.
Perhaps fewer people know that Matías Romero was a tireless traveler. In times when traveling 818729 had overtones of heroism, since there were almost no roads, inns or comfortable vehicles in much of the country, this multifaceted character left Mexico City and reached Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala. For about 6 months he was on the move. On foot, by train, on horseback, by mule and by boat, he traveled more than 6,300 km. He went from Mexico to Puebla by rail. He followed Veracruz by train and on horseback. There he was in San Cristóbal, Palenque, Tuxtla, Tonalá and Tapachula. Then he went to Gyatenakam where he made deals with the leader of that country. Rufino Barrios. He returned to Mexico City after taking care of his farms and businesses: the cultivation of coffee and the exploitation of wood and rubber. In March 1873, he was in Guatemala again, this time in the capital, where he frequently met with President García Granados during the six months he stayed in that city.
As his biographer wrote, Romero climbed mountains, crossed swamps and marshes and passed through "the hot and humid lands of Veracruz, Campeche, and Yucatán during the terrible summer months ... He reached where only the first conquerors had reached centuries before."
It was not his first trip. At the age of 18, in October 1855, he took the old road from Oaxaca to Tehuacan, along which for centuries the packets that carried the main Oaxacan export product had moved: the grana or cochineal, a valuable dye highly coveted by the Europeans. Still in that year in which the young Matías left his hometown forever, 647 125 pounds of scarlet were exported, worth more than 556 thousand pesos.
He arrived in Mexico City, after a stay in Tehuacan, aboard one of the stagecoaches of Don Anselmo Zurutuza, the transportation entrepreneur who put the capital of the Republic in communication with Puebla and Veracruz and with numerous cities in the interior. .
At that time, stagecoach was a sign of modernity. This vehicle had advantageously replaced pump cars, "heavy and slow as probate litigation," according to Ignacio Manuel Altamirano.
Technical innovations held a special fascination for Matías Romero. He was soon caught by another symbol of progress: the railroad. Thus, shortly after arriving in Mexico City, he went to know the progress of the works of the railway station that was being built in Villa de Guadalupe.
And in August 1857 he set his eyes for the first time on a locomotive: the Guadalupe (type 4-4-0), built by Baldwin in Philadelphia in 1855, and which had been driven in parts from Veracruz to the 2,240 meters of the central Altiplano. in carts drawn by mules. Shortly after, he made his first trip by train from the Jardín de Santiago in Tlatelolco to the Villa along 4.5 kilometers. A good part of the route corresponded to the road installed in the Calzada de los Misterios, which was also used for the circulation of carriages, horsemen and pedestrians.
The turbulent times the country was going through soon forced Matías Romero to undertake other trips. The War of the Reform began, it followed the legitimate government on its hazardous pilgrimage. Thus, he was in Guanajuato in February 1858. The following month, already in Guadalajara, he was reduced to prison by the mutinous soldiers who were about to shoot at President Juárez. Freed, but not before suffering the threat of execution, he rode towards the Pacific on a beast and a chair that he acquired from his own pocket. In his saddlebags he carried the meager funds of the Federation Treasury, placed under his care. He arrived in Colima, after exhausting night parades, in illustrious company: Benito Juárez, Melchor Ocampo, Secretary of Relations, and General Santos Degollado, head of the diminished army of the Republic.
From that city he went to Manzanillo, braving the dangers of the Cuyutlán lagoon with its hungry lizards that looked like “brown floating tree trunks” of so many that there were. The saurians waited patiently for a mistake by the rider or a misstep of the mule to swallow them both. Presumably they did not always satisfy his ravenous appetite.
Instead, mosquitoes, which also infested stagnant waters, were dispatched mercilessly. For this reason, another illustrious traveler, Alfredo Chavero, said that in the lagoon there was "an enemy that cannot be seen, cannot be felt and cannot be killed: fever." And he added: "The ten leagues of the lagoon are ten leagues of putrefaction and miasmas to inoculate evil in passing."
Matías Romero survived such harsh trances and in Manzanillo he embarked for Acapulco and Panama He crossed the isthmus by train (it was his second trip by rail) and in Colon he boarded another ship to go to Havana and New Orleans, after sailing through the Mississippi delta . Finally, after a three-day sea voyage, he arrived in Veracruz on May 4, 1858. In that port the transhumant government of the Liberals was installed and there was Romero at his service, as an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Relations. On December 10, 1858, aboard the same ship in which he had arrived (the Tennessee), he left for the United States to assume his position as Secretary of the Mexican Legation in Washington. Back in that country, he sailed up the Mississippi to Memphis, where he took the local train, which "stopped everywhere and was full of smokers, along with some very dirty slaves and some boys." At Grand Junction he passed another train, sleeping car, and resumed the journey: Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lynchburg, Richmond, and Washington, where he arrived on Christmas Eve. During the rest of his life, Matías Romero traveled a lot and got to know the railroads of the United States and several European countries very well.
THE PUEBLA, TEHUACAN AND OAXACA RAILWAY
What would the Oaxacan territory look like from a spaceship? It would be seen for the most part as enclosed in itself, as within a hedge of mountains, foothills, and ravines. The cold lands would face the warm valleys located at 1 4000 - 1 600 m altitude. In the Pacific, after the steep Sierra Madre, a narrow coastal strip some 500 km long would turn its back on the central valleys and the mountain ranges and canyons. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, shielded by another orographic fence, would constitute a different region in its own right.
From the heights of that privileged observatory, two special cases would also be contemplated. One, that of the Mixteca Baja, somewhat isolated from the central part and more geographically integrated to the Pacific slope. Another, that of the Cañada de Quiotepec, or Oriental Mixteca, a low and closed area that separates the Zapotec lands from the center and the east of the country, and that for that reason has been a forced passage of one of the traditional routes that have tried to remedy the relative Oaxacan isolation. This route is the Oaxaca-Teotitlán del Camino-Tehuacán-Puebla route.
The other goes through Huajuapan de León and through Izucar de Matamoros.
Despite his great familiarity with different means of transportation, Matías Romero was never able to see Oaxaca from the air. But he didn't need it either. He soon understood the need to fight the isolation and communications shortage of his land. Thus, he took on the task of taking the railroad to his hometown and became a determined promoter of this "herald of progress" in Mexico. A friend of presidents and of great figures in politics and finance in his country and in the United States, he used his relationships to promote railroad companies and other economic improvement activities.
From 1875 to 1880, the government of Oaxaca had entered into some concession contracts to build a railroad that would connect a port in the Gulf, with the Oaxacan capital and with Puerto Ángel or Huatulco on the Pacific. Resources were lacking and the works were not being undertaken. Matías Romero, representing his native state, actively promoted the project. He helped his friend Ulises S. Grant, former president of the United States, come to Mexico in 1880. Then in 1881, he led the constitution of the Mexican Southern Railroad Co., in New York. The president of the Oaxaca railroad concession company was none other than General Grant. Other American railroad magnates also participated.
Matías Romero placed great hopes in this railway. He thought that he would give “life, progress and prosperity to all the states of the southeast of our country. That… they are the richest in our nation and that they are now in a truly sorry state. " Grant's company ran into severe financial difficulties and soon went bankrupt. As a former warrior of the American civil war, he was ruined. To such an extent that Matías Romero loaned him a thousand dollars. (Many years before, he had also provided financial assistance to Benito Juárez, then president of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. Although he only lent him one hundred pesos.)
In May 1885 the concession was declared expired, without the Mexican Southern Railroad Co. having laid a single kilometer of track. Matías Romero's dream seemed to disappear.
Fortunately for his desire for progress, things did not stop there. Without his intervention, as he once again represented Mexico in Washington, a new franchise for the railroad was authorized in 1886. After various administrative and financial incidents, an English company began to build it in September 1889. Work progressed rapidly. In just three years and two months the narrow road was laid between Puebla, Tehuacan and Oaxaca. The locomotive triumphantly crossed the Eastern Mixteca and passed through the Tomellín canyon. He overcame the obstacles of a wild environment, as well as the reluctance of the disbelievers and the doubts of the fearful. From 1893 the Southern Mexican Railroad was fully operational. Its 327 kilometers of rails were there. Also its 28 stations, 17 steam engines, 24 passenger vans and 298 cargo vans. Thus the dreams of Matías Romero, the tireless promoter and traveler, were realized.
THE FORGOTTEN MATÍAS ROMERO
“Passengers who have been transported comfortably by sea, coming from New Orleans and other places on the Gulf Coast, disembark in Coatzacoalcos to resume their aquatic journey now aboard the luxurious paddle ship Allegheny Belle (brought ex-professor from Mississippi) that goes up a wide Coatzacoalcos river to the place called Súchil, (near the current town of Mátías Romero;) and from here, in rattling carriages, to the Pacific where they have to embark towards San Francisco. " Fanciful? no way. The aforementioned was offered by the Tehuantepec Railway Company of New Orleans, in the middle of the last century.
The company made one crossing per month and the service was taken advantage of by hundreds of prawns who thus moved to California.
In 1907, Matías Romero saw the Coatzacoalcos Salina Cruz railroad pass, in whose heyday there were 20 daily runs -and net income of 5 million pesos a year-, but 7 years later it fell into disuse due to the competition from the Canal from Panama. However, in Matías Romero (formerly Rincón Antonio) the railway activity did not decline, it had workshops and related mechanical industry of considerable importance promoted by the new Pan-American railway (1909) that ran from San Jerónimo -Today Ciudad Ixtepec- to Tapachula, as it continues to do today.
The town of Matías Romero, of approximately 25,000 inhabitants, with a hot climate and surrounded by the Isthmus landscape, offers two small hotels; Castillejos and Juan Luis: there are excellent gold and silver filigree crafts from neighboring Ciudad Ixtepec (next to Juchitán), which was a military air base during World War II.
