“This mainline interruption has impacted service to and from the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas and has the potential to impact traffic throughout the KCSM network,” KCS officials say. Served exclusively by KCSM, Lázaro Cárdenas is a major Mexican Pacific Coast port.
Threatening violence in protest of appointments of education school administrators, students in Michoacán are disrupting rail and highway traffic, according to Mexico News Daily.
The state of Michoacán has been a hotbed of civil unrest which has disrupted KCSM service this year, including citizen pushbacks against drug cartels [See “Protesters block KCS de Mexico mainline in Mexico,” Trains News Wire Sept. 12, 2019], and a teachers’ strike [See “Mexican teachers end strike blocking train traffic to port,” Trains News Wire Feb. 15, 2019].
In September, KCSM service in the state of Hildago north of Mexico City was disrupted when train looters blocked tracks and stopped a train, resulting in a fiery crash when it was rear-ended by another train. [See “KCS line to Mexico City still out of service after sabotage, fire, and theft,” Trains News Wire Sept. 26, 2019].
There are people on the forums who use this as one of the reasons why it’s not possible to directly link North, Central, and South America together by rail, but while there are other reasons (incompatibility of equipment and gauges in general, the Darien Gap between the northern and southern portions of the Central American and Caribbean plate, and a lot of the network in Central America outside the Panama Canal being too run down), the ongoing violence in Latin America in general that has fostered the rise of radicalized dictators left and right who might just want to nationalize whatever rail cars and locomotives are within their borders is the primary problem. Come on, Kanas City Southern. Just pull out of Mexico already and hand over your Mexican subsidiary to Ferromex because that company is pretty much already becoming Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Mexico Reborn ever since it purchased Ferrosur, the only other big private rail company in that part of the world, years ago and it’s probably only a matter of time before they come after your operations south of the border anyway.
Doing business in and with a corrupt 3rd world country has its challenges, to say the least.
Smh….