Yogana, Oax., The wait is over. Finally, the road that will connect the capital of Oaxaca with Puerto Escondido, on the Pacific coast of this state, was inaugurated yesterday.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador led the ceremony where the ribbon was cut, with which the Barranca Larga-Ventanilla highway was opened, which will reduce the travel time from more than six and a half hours to only two and a half hours.
From that space, the president said he was sure that projects like this will continue, as he trusted that the movement he has led will continue in the next six-year term:
Here you could make a branch, the project is already there, but we are not going to have enough time; but don’t worry, because the transformation will continue and it will be even better. Because when we arrived it was to lift the rheumatic and tricky elephant that they left us, and we already lifted the crippled, corrupt elephant, and now it is walking, so it will be relatively easier for whoever replaces me in less than eight months. The transformation will continue.
With an investment of more than 13 billion pesos, this new 104.3-kilometer-long highway will start operating after almost 15 years, when its construction began.
Although, some workers pointed out, there are details missing, such as 20 kilometers that are still in dirt, before which federal officials acknowledged that in fact the work is unfinished, but it is only 4 kilometers that present landslides caused by natural phenomena. It is estimated that the road will be fully operational in the second half of this year.
The head of the Executive promised that at least until the end of his term he will not charge a toll. And we are going to leave you a decree, a proposal that from September, late September, only visitors and cargo transport will be charged, but not the Oaxacans.
He also announced that the federal government bought from businessman Carlos Slim the concession he had for the road under construction Mitla-Tehuantepec (which would link the state capital with the isthmus), and advanced that he will inaugurate it on August 31.
In front of the toll booth of this municipality, where the act was carried out, it was reported that as part of the structure of the highway, 15 junctions and accesses, three tunnels, 10 bridges and three viaducts were also built.
The Secretariat of Infrastructure, Communications and Transport (SICT) estimates that the highway will receive 4 thousand vehicles daily and that it will bring benefits to more than 100 thousand inhabitants of 11 communities.
It was planned that the road would start operations on Monday; however, the president himself instructed that it be yesterday: Today we open the road. It was planned that until tomorrow, at 12 or one in the morning. No, right away, since we remove it, we remove this scaffolding and the vehicles start to circulate.
The president was accompanied in this act by the head of the SICT, Jorge Nuño Lara; the governor of Oaxaca, Salomón Jara, and the former state governor Alejandro Murat, who received the support of President López Obrador with a strong hug, after some attendees expressed themselves against his presence.
Source: La Jornada
