First, you have to dream it...
The two-decades-long process of creating a privately-owned, two-Ocean-front, unified piece of real estate in one of the poorest regions of Guatemala, has produced a wealth of information, conducive to having a concrete expression of the original “dream”. A “trial and error” approach, combining expensive consultancies, aerial reconnaissance, satellite geo-positioning, topography, cadastral verification, technical analysis and on the ground physical checking, resulted in a zigzagging convergence to a specifically designed “optimal” and viable path, conforming to a conventional technological solution (two deep water ports connected by a double track railroad, a set of independent polyducts and complementary infrastructure parallel roads, logistical centers and ecological compensation areas). All done while concurrently conducting a subregionally divided local public relations campaign, to explain to an originally very skeptic local population the vision behind the fuss. As was to be expected, these efforts had also to face local and external misinformation counter campaigns, some of which resulted in physically violent incidents. Several rounds of this process (one that implies the hiring of local and foreign technical experts, the recruiting and training of cadres of subregional on site personnel for topographic, legal and piecemeal negotiating tasks) took place, time and time again. I took twenty years, but by 2019, the deed, a fully integrated, privately- owned Interoceanic Land Strip (ILS), was done:
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The original puzzle of independent land parcels got assembled into a coherent set of 3,748 specific properties forming a viable corridor 372 Kms. long and 140 mts. wide, with occasional parallel auxiliary paths,
ecological compensation areas and six (in addition to the two ports) complementary-service zones. Each land lot individually identified in terms of geographic location, topography, other relevant conditions and legal ownership.
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A complete mapping of the ILS (at a 1:20,000 scale), intersecting satellite images, topographical and cadastral information, with separate two-plane cross sections (with a 5:1 vertical/horizontal relative scale),
provided the foundation for the preliminary design of corridor infrastructures and their corresponding preliminary budget estimates.
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A comprehensive review and pertinent updating of all previous studies led to a coherent summation of the available market intelligence in 2019 and provided a technical audit of the preliminary engineering and project-management done.
On that basis, a final Corporate and Financial Plan was developed.
