A network of public routes over which the modern trains of Chile’s State Railways could pass has become more than a cause for legitimate complaint and understandable nostalgia, and is now an urgent problem.

By Oscar Galindo V and Jorge Ivan Vergara (El Mostrador)

HAVANA TIMES – “Like the train station, my life is populated by farewells,” wrote Pablo de Rokha in his Canto del Macho Anciano [“Song of the old man”], one of the most extraordinary poems about old age in the Spanish language. Today, Chile’s train stations don’t remind us of those farewells anymore, because they simply are no longer there.

Their poetic commotion has been replaced by the noise of the buses and trucks that populate our geography. Above all, trucks that with no small degree of aggressiveness, have the power to move the country along or leave it paralyzed for weeks. Just a few trucks parked sideways on the highway can force an entire country to submit, and turn it into a long, narrow, and crammed strip of asphalt.

Different hypotheses have existed regarding the dismantling of the State Railway System under the Pinochet dictatorship, and the lack of reconstruction under democracy. The few attempts to revive it ended in frustration, despite an important injection of resources. Even worse, the clarifications made so far have been completely insufficient, such as those of former president Lagos, a master in the area. It seems the oft-mentioned “political will” has…