Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamerica, 1837-1995 (review)

Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamérica, 1837-1995. Edited by Jesus Sanz Fernandez. Madrid: Centro de Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas (CEDEX), 1998. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliographies. 456 pp. Paper.

A work fashioned to commemorate a century and a half of rail transport in Spain, the Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamérica, 1837-1995 offers readers a comprehensive survey of Latin America's even older railroad experience. Coordinator Jesús Sanz Fernández and his five collaborators, all scholars with ties to Spanish railway, research, or university institutions, focus their essays on the factual details of Latin American railroad construction, operation, and economic impact, deliberately avoiding rail-related aesthetic, cultural, political, and social matters. While "entire libraries" deal with the latter, "at times exhaustively" in their view, the authors are determined to "fill the void" that has made finding basic quantitative information about Latin American railroads so "exasperating" (p. 11).

Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamérica contains a general essay on Latin American railroads in historical perspective and a conclusion that sums up the findings of the volume. In between lie eight chapters, each with a useful bibliography of key literature. One surveys the history of pre-rail transport in Latin American while the rest cover railroad history regionally. While one wishes that some parts, particularly the conclusion, were more forceful in their engagement with the controversial issues concerning railroads and Latin American national development, the volume as a whole offers consistency of approach and coverage. The six authors of Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamérica elucidate essential issues that create a coherent historical picture valuable to any audience interested in Latin America, not just those concerned with railways or with economic history.

Latin America's railways derived from the patterns of national consolidation and raw material export growth that predominated in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early ones of the twentieth. Over three-quarters of the region's rail routes were built between 1880 and 1915. Despite the presence of railways in Brazil and all the Spanish-speaking societies of Latin America, railroad operations remained highly concentrated in four countries alone. At the advent of the Great Depression, for example, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico contained about 88 percent of all Latin American railway mileage and produced over 90 percent of all rail activity (as measured in ton-
kilometers of freight traffic). Mirroring this historical pattern, the organization of Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamérica devotes entire chapters to Mexico and to Brazil, while Argentina and Chile form the heart of the essays on the La Plata and Andean areas.

Railroad transport constituted a decisive factor in the generation of raw material export economies in Latin America, vastly expanding import-export commerce and attracting large-scale foreign capital investment while at the same time, however unevenly, knitting together national markets. Railroads decisively involved the state in matters of international finance as well as in questions of transport subsidy and domestic regulation. Economic nationalism ultimately placed Latin American railroads under public ownership. While foreign capital operated three-quarters of Latin America's rail mileage in 1900, state control expanded from 15 percent in that year to nearly 50 percent in 1945 and over 80 percent in 1950.

Having energized Latin American economies in the era of raw material exports, railroads failed to adjust successfully to the new forms and locations of economic activity that characterized the period of import-substitution industrialization. The Great Depression initiated a time of railroad decline that accelerated under the influence of increasing roadway competition, decaying capital equipment, escalating costs, and poor quality administration. By 1979, for example, Argentine and Chilean railroads carried only 40 percent of the tonnage they had transported in 1929. While freight shipped by Brazilian and Mexican rails more than quintupled over that same period, such growth depended on heavy...