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| Sapucai (take your pick on the spelling) - the Scream |
The road to Potrero Pucu from Paraguari cuts between two
long lines of hills. Ten kilometers before my pueblo of Caballero is the town
of Sapucai, which has flourished in the last two years ever since the road that
passes it by was asphalted over. The road runs east-west, and in summer the
droning whine of cicadas mix with the bone-rattling clatter of 18-wheelers roaring
by.
It could be any other Paraguayan campo town but for the
workshop and the pint-sized train locomotives scattered about, rusting into
decrepitude, a story forgotten and a legacy ignored. But things were not always
this way. As with Paraguay’s interaction with the Jesuits, there was a moment of optimism, of a different possibility than the corruption and misguidance which crippled this country for so many years.
A little history though: Paraguay’s first (and maybe most
bizarre) dictator, Dr. Francia, took office in 1811. He banned higher education
and instituted mandatory interracial marriage. Most importantly, he sealed the
country, banning immigration and emigration. These moves forced the mestizo-ization
of Paraguay’s population, insuring Francia’s supremacy, but paradoxically
forced the country to develop its domestic economy. By the end of Francia’s
reign, Paraguay was one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America.
It was at this point that the hombres Lopez
(Carlos, and then his son Francisco,) took over and set to modernizing the
country. In 1856, they enlisted the help of William Whytehead, an English
engineer. Whytehead built the San Roque station in Asuncion, and together they
formed South America’s first railway company, “The Paraguay Central Railway.”
The story goes that Paraguay had the first train, and for a time was the most modern country in South America. Since I started writing this story, I learned that was an exaggeration.
(The
hombres Lopez also brought the country a modern navy, and South America’s first
foundry.) Within six years, Paraguay’s train system had laid 45 miles of track
in the steamy, subtropical jungle. The first train ran in 1861, a teacup sized
screecher named Sapucai, or in Guarani, “The Scream,” for its piercing whistle.
It still sits in Asuncion’s central station today.
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| One of the trains sitting outside the workshop |
As the decades passed, the rail-lines snaked south. In 1864,
it reached Ypacarai, Cerro Leon, and Paraguari, thirty years later it
terminated in Yegros, to the south. Sapucai, completed in 1894, sat a hundred kilometers
to the south east.
Today, the hustle and bustle of the yards is gone. Old
locomotives sit forlorn amid overgrown weeds, while cows meander about and cars
zip by on the newly paved highway.
The first day that I visit, it is hot and clear, and the
grass glows bright green.
One of my first views of the yards is the old turning table.
Like the locomotives, it is decomposing away. The wooden ties between the rails
on top are weathered and cracked with age. In the basin below, water puddles
with mud and a few stubborn tufts of grass.
Decrepit as it looks, the machinery still works. A friend
who has come along grasps a smooth lever arching off one end of the massive
contraption, and throws his weight behind it. There is a pause, and then the wheels
catch and the massive structure rotates, with nary a sound.
A sign in the middle of the turning tracks comes
into view: Ransomes and Rapier, Makers, Ipswich, England.” Most of Paraguay’s
rail machinery (and at first, a lot of its human talent) came from England.
Sapucai housed them in a gated community of flats called “Villa Inglesa,” a few
hundred yards from the work sheds.
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| Silent inside, but perfectly preserved |
The townspeople of this small Paraguayan pueblo have chopped
up tracks to serve as fence posts. The chassis of one train sits on long since
grass-covered tracks, rusted almost beyond recognition.
A few yards past, an old railroad crane also rusts into
scrap. A sign on one side of the machine says, “Clutches to be out of gear
before running crane in Train.” Its boiler has also turned rust brown, and the
crane’s main shaft emerges from the thing like a stork’s beak.
Behind the train yards I find my first train, Encarnacion
151. It is an attractive little piece of equipment, painted black, with the
Paraguayan flag, a wood hopper attached, looking for all the world like it
rolled out of 1875. But in Paraguay, wood-powered engines were used until the lines
shut down in 2000.
This is just the exterior of the work sheds.
After paying the equivalent of a dollar US, I walk into the old repair sheds,
which have been converted into a museum. The site has been cleaned and
reroofed, allowing welcome sunlight to stream into the workshops, but other
than that, the place has sat virtually unchanged for the last 150 years.
David Martinez Zayas leads me around the sheds.
When he isn’t teaching math at the Sapucai’s high school, he sometimes leads
tours at the museum.
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| Some old tools |
The train station has been renovated for about a year, David
told me. “Everything was black and dark,” David said. “We had no support from
the local township, even less from the department capital.”
Now, after receiving funding from a local metallurgical company,
it looks less like a museum than a perfectly preserved workstation.
“It’s amazing you can just go see all this rusty machinery
that looks like you could just go and use it,” said one of my friends who came
along to check the place out.
The rails came to Sapucai for its natural resources, David
said.
“The technicians chose Sapucai for its wood and water, which
wouldn’t dry up,” David told me. (The workshops draw water from a natural
spring that sits on top of some of the nearby hills that ring the town. The
gravity fed well was Paraguay’s first running water system.)
At first, Paraguay relied on outside help to run its trains.
Then, it decided to run the show in house.
“If
something was broke, they [the engineers] would have to send it to England.
Finally, they said, ‘No. we can’t depend on England, we have to be able to
repair things here.’”
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| The extent of the railway, from Asuncion south, and east towards Iguazu Falls |
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| An old list of fares |
Many of the people who used to work at the junction still
live nearby. While I was in Sapucai, I visited a few. The first former worker
of the ferrocarril that I talk to is Antonio Bacilides Belarga Lopez Gimenez, a
former carpenter. I arrive at his house on an early Sunday morning. He comes to
meet me from his chacra, where he was working. He is wearing macintosh rain
boots, and billowing brown pants that would better fit him if he gained 40
pounds. But he has an easy smile. His shirt is plaid, and a straw hat crawls
down over his ears.
Lopez, 73, started working for the railroad in 1974, and
continued there for 23 years.
He is slow to talk about the train, and we are at cross
purposes, talking in Guarani and Spanish while I try to convert it all to
English. But there are small snatches of pride in the conversation that point
to what it must have been like, an institution of regularity and semi-modernity
in a country that, at the time, was anything but.
“The workshop was the biggest in Paraguay. It was the lung
of the railway,” he said. “Here, we made
everything and sent it to the other
stations [in Asuncion and San Roque.]”
“There wasn’t other [reliable] work,” he said. “And there,
they paid monthly.”
Now, the asphalt road links the town to the capital. But
until just two years ago, the only ways to reach the town were through the
train, or a 25km dirt track from the town of Paraguarí.
“When it rained, buses wouldn’t come,” he said. “But the
train never failed.”
There was the everyday rhythm of the place. A huge clock
hung at the train yards. Every morning, it let out a blast an hour before work
started. The workers shifting in their beds, drinking down maté and cocido. A
second blast, half an hour before work began, and then they are hustling out of
their houses to get to the yards, the clock whistling twice more as the
beginning of the work day approached.
Those were the things that mattered, the memories that
remain, he said. I asked him what he liked best, and he without even thinking,
he said, “My favorite thing was eating breakfast with my brother and my friends
in the mornings.”
At 11:25, the clock would whistle again, and they would have
five minutes to lay down their tools and wash their hands before lunch. Then,
an hour break, followed by four more hours of work.
The trains pulled out of Sapucai at 6 every morning for Asuncion
and at 3pm for Encarnacion. When he talks about it, Lopez gets downright
wistful.
“It was like a big party. People went to sell things, they
went for curiosity.”
And then the party ended. At the end of the 90’s, the rail
service began getting cut back. Mario Gonzalez also worked at the junction. The
trains hadn’t had any substantive modernization in the 140 years it ran – it
still was using wood powered trains and steam powered workshops. The rail
infrastructure was pretty much the same as had been used in the past, and began
to wear out. When a gas powered train carrying 60 wagons came through from
Argentina, it went straight off the rails, he said.
“They couldn’t handle the weight or the velocity of the
train,” Gonzalez said.
There was talk of restoring and rejuvenating the line, he
said. The king of Spain visited, and pledged millions for the project, but it
never materialized. Japan was also interested, allegedly. “But they didn’t want
to give money because of the corruption [here],” he said.
“Political interest is what damned it,” he said.
As in the states now, the train
transported freight at significantly cheaper prices than the truckers. “It was
only half as expensive as trucks!” Gonzalez said. The massive (relatively)
effort put in to create a transnational train system went to waste, and now rails,
stations, and locomotives around the country lie derelict, disappear under the
weeds. And so a national treasure sank into oblivion.
It's not a bad metaphor for the country as a whole, this beautiful place which has until recently suffered through so many mishaps.
