Model City Built to Help Mexico's Indigenous Poor Now a Ghost Town Andrea Martinez - Cronkite Borderlands Initiative
go to original May 13, 2014

Houses and sidewalks are beginning to be overtaken by weeds in the Sustainable Rural City of Santiago el Pinar in Chiapas, Mexico. (Andrea Martinez)

SANTIAGO EL PINAR, Chiapas, Mexico – Children from the school can be heard in the daytime but when class ends the voices in this nearby city die down.

More than 100 houses were built here as part of the “sustainable rural city” project but the people who came to live here did not stay.

Santiago el Pinar was planned as one of four model cities to help the state of Chiapas’ rural poor find better lives. They would have modern conveniences, better schools, access to health care. They would work in a local assembly factory, leaving behind the scattered villages, mud huts and subsistence farming that had sustained their families for generations.

The project was so important that Mexico’s president at the time, Felipe Calderon, personally dedicated it when it was inaugurated on March 29, 2011.

But just three years later, the model city is a virtual ghost town.

The factory has closed. Store gates are shut in the abandoned market. Sidewalks are overtaken by weeds. Houses are empty shells. They have been looted and are missing doors, windows and anything else that could be carried away. And at dusk, the main sound that can be heard in the town is the flapping of the torn plastic of the greenhouse at the top of the mountain that frames the colorful houses built on stilts in the abandoned city.

What went wrong?

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