United Fruit’s Truxillo Railroad 100th Anneversary and Spurs into the Rio Plátano Biosphere area

United Fruit’s Truxillo Railroad and  Spurs into the Rio Plátano Biosphere area

By Wendy Griffin (2014)

This year 2014 is the 100^th Anniversary of the approval of the Truxillo Railroad’s concession in Northeastern Honduras.  They took over early concessions given to people to build railroads connecting Trujillo, Iriona, Juticalpa, and Tegucigalpa.  The Truxillo Railroad, was a United Fruit wholey owned subsidiary. Derek Parent, retired Geography professor at Concordia University in Montreal,Canada, Taylor Mack, Geography professor of Louisiana Technological University,  personal communication) have identified tracks in the Mosquitia as belonging to United Fruit's Truxillo Railroad. Geographers Derek Parent (from Canada) and Peter Herlihy, Geography professor of the University of Kansas, (from the US)  have seen the tracks of Truxillo Railroad in the Mosquitia, The official Honduran government refusaed to permit United Fruit to cross the Sico River, a refusal widely covered by the newspapers at the time reports Dr. John Solouri, historian at Carnegie Mellon University,  in his 2009 book Banana Cultures.    Another short distance railline in Mosqutia belonged to the Decker Lumber Company (Derek Parent, personal communication). See map below.

Derek Parent has investigated and uncovered the early 20^th Century locomotive narrow-gauge steam engine abandoned on the old railway bed about two hours trek south of  Ibans Lagoon.  The cut mahoghany was then transported by barge to the Decker Lumber Company sawmill in Brus Laguna. Parent had also observed an easterly direction rail bed leading towards the Black River (Rio Negro or Rio Tinto) perpendicular to the north-south Ibans Lagoon rail bed.

A senior Miskito inhabitant of the area (Henry Decans senior)  related to  him that the rail line was used to haul mahoghany, and that the barge to haul the wood to Brus Laguna was sunk somewhere in Ibans Lagoon, which is near the current county seat of Palacios, in the Honduras Mosquitia. Following rail line tracks still on the ground,  Derek Parent was able to identify that both United Fruit and Cuyamel Fruit seem to have started rail lines in what is now the Rio Plátano Biosphere, partly to access mahoghany and partly to access fresh lands for bananas as other plantations were affected by Mal de Panama and Sigatoka. Banana plantations in the Honduran Mosquitia did not prosper and still to this day Miskitos need to plant Saban bananas, known as Pilipitas, rather than commercial type bananas for the problems of funguses that affect commercially popular types of  bananas.

Miskitos of Brus Laguna (including Scott Wood, personal communications) and resident Ladinos (including Osvaldo Munguia, director of MOPAWI, personal communications) have confirmed the presence of an American owned and run sawmill in Brus Laguna, which was abandoned when a local worker accidently fell under the saw and was killed and so the American manager got in an airplane and flew away never to return, reported Scott Wood. In the 1950’s the old sawmill was still standing, and the local Miskitos still called it “sawmil”, reported Osvaldo Munguia, a native of Brus Laguna.

 Osvaldo Munguia, Derek Parent, Pech,  and Garifunas have all confirmed that the huge pilings for the bridge for the train trestle crossing the Sico River at the town of Sico, are still more or less in place and much of the Truxillo Railroad track or rail bed, from Ibans to Sico and Sico to Limon, were more or less in place during the 1990’s observations, reported Derek Parent. So much for the Honduran government’s disapproval of crossing the Sico River.

 Another confirmation of a line near the Ibans Lagoon is that Miskito teacher Profesor Miguel Kelly reported his American father met his Miskito mother while working in Bataya, the Garifuna town on the east side of the  Ibans Lagoon, for the Truxillo Railroad Company. His father stayed in the Honduran Mosquitia the rest of his life, helping the Moravian Missionaries at the Renacimiento School in Brus Laguna (Miguel Kelly, Scott Wood, personal communications).

US Geographer Taylor Mack remembers seeing the rail line from Ibans to Sico, as well as the line from Trujillo to Sico of the Truxillo Railroad, among the papers of the United Fruit Company (Taylor Mack, personal communications.) If the Rio Platano Biosphere contains an intact relatively undisturbed rainforest today (mentioned as one of the top 50 adventures in the world by Outdoors magazine), try to envisage what it was like before the Truxillo Railroad began to log it. The Truxillo Railroad Consession permitted logging of all the wood it desired along a 50 mile border on both sides of its tracks and they could keep the wood without any additional payment (Griffin, 1992, La Historia de los Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras Tomo II 1800 - 1992). It was used for supports under the tracks, barracks and offices, the actually cars of the train and its seats, and for export.  There was also a sawmill at the other end of the line in Puerto Castilla report Garifunas like Victor Garcia whose father worked there.

The Rio Platano Biosphere did not exist at the time of the Truxillo Railroad Company which had mostly stopped operating trains by 1942. The Rio Platano Biosphere began as a Protected Area as the Ciudad Blanca Archaeological Reserve founded in 1961 at the petition of Dr. Jesus Aquilar Paz, the maker of Honduras’s national maps.  The Honduran Mosquitia only fully became part of Honduras after a short war between Honduras and Nicaragua in 1958-1959 known as the War of Mocorón, and the 1960 World Court in The Hague, Netherlands decision recognizing the Rio Coco as the border between Honduras and Nicaragua.   

In the late 1980’s the area between the Rio Paulaya and the Patuca River was declared as the Rio Platano Biosphere.  The purpose still seemed to be to protect the Ciudad Blanca ruin, as explorer Theodore Morde had said the Ciudad Blanca was between the Paulaya River and the Patuca River in the Honduran Mosquitia in his 1939 report to the Honduran Ministry of Tourism. According to  Derek Parent many of the protected areas being founded in Central America around the time of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Summit on the Environment were founded to protect archaeological ruins and only secondarily to protect specific types of eco-systems.

The fact that it took until 1960 to decide the Nicaraguan Honduran border was partially related to another company whose major stockholder was Samuel Zemurray who owned Cuyamel Fruit and who later went on to become president of United Fruit.  Samuel Zemurray was the major stockholder of the Louisana Nicaragua Lumber Company which logged woods on the west side of the Coco River (Rio Coco), an area now part of Honduras,  under a concession given by the Nicaraguan government. He thought he could get a cheaper price for the wood under the Nicaraguan government, so exerted an influence so that Nicaragua did not come to an agreement with Honduras over the Honduran Mosquitia lands.   

The reason the Honduran Guatemalan border is currently marked “Decided by the Decision of Washington, DC” in the 1930’s was also related to a border dispute in which Samuel Zemurray’s Cuyamel Fruit Company wanted to extend west with a concession from Honduras and United Fruit wanted to extend east with a concession from Guatemala. The Washington, DC brokered deal included not only settling where the Honduran Guatemala border was, but had United Fruit buy out Samuel Zemurray and combine Cuyamel Fruit into their Honduran operations, which gave them an additional impetus to close the Sigatoka ridden Truxillo Railroad. A number of Maya Chorti villages switched from being located in Honduras to being located in Guatemala as a result of the deal.  Not only did Nicaraguan Miskitos and Sumus cross over the new border during the Contra War, but Maya Chorti also crossed over the new border on the Honduran side to reclaim the nationality of their grandparents during Guatemala's civil war.   

Other Protected Areas and the Truxillo Railroad

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The Truxillo Railroad Company had not logged the mountain range behind the Garifuna community of Trujillo traversed by the Truxjillo Railway east of Truxillo, perhaps because the Garifunas had not permited it.  The mountains now in the Capiro and Calentura parks above Trujillo were logged of mahogany by a ship laden with Belizean mahoghany loggers in the 1950’s, with a permit from the Honduran government. The Belizians logged the mountains, reported Profesor Fausto Miguel Alvarez (personal communication) who grew up in Trujillo. The current forest cover of cohune palm (corozo) found near the Pech villages of Silin and Moradel outside of Trujillo is a crisis plant that grows in full sun after the forest canopy of shade trees is clear-cut, reports UNAH ethnobiologist Paul House (Paul House, personal communications).

The Pech of the nearby community of Silin confirmed that the area that is now in the buffer zone of the Capiro and Calentura National Park and is covered in cohune palm, was previously cornfields which they had planted after the area was logged in the 1950’s (Don Euterio, personal communications). 

However the Pech of Olancho reported that the Truxillo Railroad did log in the Olancho and Colon areas through which the Railroad passed, and when they left Olancho in the 1930’s after the depression reduced the demand for bananas (and apparently hard woods),  they  just abandoned tons of cut mahoghany in the forest.  The start of the still conflictive Ladino community of Sico, Colon in the buffer zone of the Rio Plátano Biosphere dates to the period of the Truxillo Railroad.

In addition to stories on this blog www.healthandhonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com  in English about the Truxillo Railroad period, some Truxillo Railroad related stories collected as part of an oral history Project for the 100th Anneversary of the Truxillo Railroad, are also on my Spanish language blog www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com