No more choo-choos

Guatemala is already producing ethanol in such quantities that could cover 10% of its fuel requirements and thereby reduce its dependence on fossil fuel imports by up to $70m per annum. Legislation that would make this a practical reality has been stuck in congress for two years now, but may well get passed before the year is out.

Meanwhile, there has been a fair bit of coverage surrounding the decision by a Pittsburg company to wind up Guatemala's only functioning railway service, Ferrovias, which has been transporting cargo between Guatemala City and Puerto Barrios since it was restored in 1998 by American millionaire railway-buff Henry Posner III and his partners.

Enough is enough," Posner has griped. "It's clear that at every level of Guatemalan society there is, at best, a lack of respect and, at worst, an outright hostility to everything that we have been trying to accomplish."

The gringos had a 50-year concession, but ended up trying to sue the government for $65m in 2005 for not doing things they had apparently promised to do, such as improving the track and removing 'squatters'. This may not be such a bad thing, as the railroad had been out of service for decades in a part of the country where much of the available agricultural land had been kept uncultivated by the United Fruit Company. One can imagine that fairly large communities must have rushed in to exploit this terrain before the turn of the millennium.

"The implications for foreign investors are not good," claims Carlisle Johnson, host of a radio program called Good Morning Guatemala. "Who is going to come in after this fiasco?"

Answer: The Taiwanese. Ever since Costa Rica broke off diplomatic relations and cosied up to the People's Republic, Guatemala's govermenment has been lamiendo culo fairly energetically in Taipei and last Thursday it was announced that Taiwan's petrochemical conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group have expressed an interest in helping build an oil refinery in a new, purpose-built industrial zone the country.