The investments needed to get Mexico’s trains back on track
Mexican rail infrastructure is deeply flawed—its also patently fixable.
This is the second and final part of a series on Mexico’s trains. To read part one, click here.
The main fault line in the rail sector has not always fallen between the public versus the private sector. This fight is actually relatively new. Its origins stem from the mid-90s, when the Mexican State privatised rail services whilst keeping ownership of the rail itself. This hybrid model was very much in the spirit of its time, as Mexico struggled to transition from a closed nationalist to a market economy.
Before that the Mexican government ran and operated the country’s trains. The fight between the 1940s to the 90s was between the State and the unions. That impasse was broken through government co-option of union leaders but also by shifting investment to the roads. Motorways were not only far cheaper to maintain but the freight ecosystem on them was more decentralised, segmenting haulers’ unions.
Cars and lorries felt like the future. Pouring more tarmac was a quick and easy way for governments to show they were modernising. In the 1940s, there was the same amount of rail and road infrastructure—about 20,000 km—“but from then on the road network exploded,” Alejandro Álvarez, former head of Mexico’s Rail Regulatory Agency (ARTF) between 2018-2021, told The Mexico Political Economist, “and while rail stayed in the 20,000’s there are now over 400,000 km of road.”
Before the road boom, before the massification of the motorcar, before the Mexican Revolution of 1910, trains ruled and it was the private sector that dominated Mexico’s railway system. The 1890’s until 1910 were the peak decades of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, whose pro-business, pro-foreign investment agenda unleashed private capital, resulting in a massive expansion of Mexico’s rail.
But the free market was always an illusion. The decision to let rail expand through private investment was contingent on repression and union busting by the Porfirian authorities. Its growth also required an ideological switch. Before opening the taps of private investment, Díaz first had to repeal previous Mexican policy that instituted by former president Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. Díaz’s predecessor saw the expansion of rail to the north of Mexico, through its connection of the country to the US, as a risk to national security. “Between strength and weakness, the desert,” is the phrase attributed to Lerdo to justify this position.
Díaz opened the door to the foreign capital that developed and populated the vast and previously remote northern borderlands of the country through rail. It was on those very same trains and those very people that the Mexican Revolution swept down from the north to boot Díaz out of power in 1910.
Rail cannot help but be political. The present day is no different, both in the sense that politics continuously incursions into the way Mexican trains run and in the way policy around trains is always shaped by the zeitgeist of the time.
Today, for the first time since the Mexican Revolution, the Mexican government is trying its hand at both passenger and cargo rail. Especially under president Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration, trains are seen as a core vehicle for redistributing economic development geographically and for driving growth across Mexico as a whole.
