highway of gold

Last week i found an interesting article in the newspaper. The headline reads: "The highway of gold is in Western Honduras."

Ha! I almost laughed out loud. If you have ever been to Santa Rosa by way of San Pedro (or from any direction for that matter) you know that the road is terrible. I put it in the top 5 worst highways in Honduras for most potholes and lowest average speed (due to terrible holes and curves).  It is part of the Pan-American highway that connects El Salvador to Honduras and thousands of trucks use it each day to transport goods.

According to this article, a social audit revealed that in the last 6 years, the state has invested around 490.2 million Lempiras in "maintaining" (and I use that word loosely) this destroyed artery of Honduras. That is a staggering 24.5 million dollars from a government that is "broke"-- and for a highway that is STILL horrendous. The audit states that 57.1% was for routine maintenance, 28.5% for emergency maintenance, 12.3% in emergency attention (whatever that is?), 0.6% in signage (usually to say “warning: failures in the road”) and 0.5% in studies and designs.

What I find interesting is that this article quotes someone talking about how all these repairs to the highway are like painting a wall without first patching the holes. They are not addressing the root problems of all the potholes and so it’s a continual “surface treatment” to deeper problems in the underlying road structure.

As far as I'm concerned, that’s an analogy for an overall problem that the article won’t even touch—the underlying corruption that probably diverted a huge amount of these funds to the pockets of politicians and left very little for actual repairs. And this article was just like that money: not addressing the root causes of such a problem and glossing over the issue of corruption that weakens the structure of the whole house.

It is frustrating to see such numbers and see so few results in the actual highway itself. Unfortunately, this is not the only issue that is affected by corruption. It's part of every project, in every government ministry, and in every local municipality too. How sad when even the journalists are too afraid to speak out against it. Articles like this should be voicing the frustration and outrage of such a terrible highway that should be "lined with gold." Instead, it offers little more than another layer of paint to cover the crumbling house.