Inter-American

Motorists have driven around the world but between North and South America no wheel has ever rolled. This fact largely explains the backwardness and poverty of Central America's seven sequestered little nations. It is therefore with genuine delight and excitement that all of them have looked forward for months to the dedication this week of a modern motor highway reaching nearly a quarter of the 3,200 miles from the U. S. to Panama and filling in one more great gap in the long-awaited Inter-American Highway* (see map).

By far the greatest highway project in the world, the Inter-American, if ever completed, will stretch some 12,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina. First proposed at the Fifth International Conference of American states in Santiago, Chile in 1923, the road immediately fired the imagination of the delegates, was undertaken after enthusiastic endorsement by subsequent conferences and by Presidents Coolidge and Hoover. When the U. S. Congress appropriated $50,000 in 1929 for a reconnaissance survey to start the work in Central America, the first Inter-American Highway Congress was held in Panama, created a commission which has driven the work ahead at a great rate in Central America.

In all the Central American countries except Mexico and El Salvador the road-building is largely due to U.S. paternalism and funds. Last November President Roosevelt gave $340,000 to Panama, Honduras and Guatemala for three bridges. U. S. donations to date: some $1,500,000. In Mexico and El Salvador, however, the roads have been almost entirely national work. This week's dedication is of the first section so completed in Mexico, the 770 miles from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico, D. F.

Already open to traffic for several months, this $20,000,000 road is paved all the way except for one 69-mile gap. To dedicate it, Mexico planned elaborate ceremonies at Nuevo Laredo, including a motorcade of 50 distinguished U. S., Mexican and Guatemalan citizens traveling over the road. Leaving the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week, Vice President Garner journeyed south to Texas to head the U. S. delegation part way.

Tourists taking the new road face a long, slow climb from the Rio Grande to the great plateau which fills the centre of Mexico. First real town is famed old Monterrey, scene in 1846 of one of the greatest battles of the U. S.-Mexican War, now the centre of Mexican industry. At Ciudad Victoria the tropics really begin.

Beyond the Mexican capital, the Inter-American Highway is paved for 165 miles to Tehuacan, after which it gradually degenerates from gravel to dirt to cow tracks. At Chiapas, 185 miles from Guatemala, it halts completely in a maze of mountains. From the Guatemala border to Guatemala City there are 310 miles of road, of which 192 are impassable in wet weather. From Guatemala City there is a fine gravel road for some 200 miles to San Salvador. Beyond lie 87 miles of dry-weather road, which trickles into nothing but a track with occasional good patches as it cuts across a corner of Honduras into Nicaragua. In that country the 214 miles of Inter-American Highway are universally bad. Costa Rica is next, with 356 miles, mostly impassable trail. Then the route slips into Panama, where it again becomes a first-class road for 300 miles to Panama City.

Here the Inter-American Highway meets its No. 1 obstacle: a difficulty so great that the U. S. Bureau of Public Roads has abandoned hope of ever surmounting it. South of the Canal for 400 miles to the Colombian border lie festering, impenetrable jungle and tumbled mountains inhabited by only a few Indians and marked by absolutely no roads or even trails. Aside from the ideal of linking the two Americas there is no need for a road.

In South America too, though the road is finished most of the way, the patches left blank are so rough and rugged that it will probably be long before they are filled in. In Colombia there is a decent stretch from the Gulf of Uraba on the Caribbean to Medellin. A 150-mile break to the neighborhood of Cali is followed by a 100-mile section of good road in the middle. In Peru, the Government has pushed through 2,000 miles of good road from near the northern border all the way down to Chile. Thence a newer road of 1,577 miles carries on to Santiago. From there a road, open only in summer, has been completed under incredible difficulties across the spine of the Andes to Mendoza in Argentina where it joins 850 miles of varied road, open all year, which carries the Inter-American Highway to its southern terminus at Buenos Aires.

* Also known as Pan-American Highway.

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