When One Governor Builds It and the Next Tears It Down

One of the more telling footnotes in Yucatán’s political history involves not a palace or a prison, but a pair of columns that stood at the northern edge of Mérida for barely a decade — long enough to be photographed, not long enough to be remembered.

In 1928, Gov. Álvaro Torre Díaz marked the opening of the Mérida-Progreso highway with a ceremony at the Glorieta de San Fernando, the roundabout that sat at the city’s traditional northern boundary, known in earlier times as San Fernando de los Naranjos. The date was Feb. 1. Mexico’s president, Plutarco Elías Calles, was represented at the ceremony by Gen. Federico R. Berlanga, the military chief of operations in Yucatán.

To commemorate the occasion, Torre Díaz ordered two matching monumental columns erected at the glorieta, each bearing plaques marking the highway’s inauguration. It was, historians note, a practice as old as politics itself — leaving your name on something people would use every day.

The highway was no small thing. Connecting Mérida to the port of Progreso, a distance of about 36 kilometers (22 miles), the road had been decades in the making. Yucatán’s first governor to push seriously for it, Carlos Castro, laid the symbolic first stone in 1919. Sporadic construction followed. By the time Torre Díaz took office in 1926, the project had been stalled and restarted more than once. His administration finally pushed it through to completion.

Torre Díaz himself was a physician, journalist, and two-time governor whose tenure also saw the construction of the Casa del Pueblo and the extension of the Paseo de Montejo. He had run in circles close to the revolutionary left, serving under Gen. Salvador Alvarado before eventually winning a full term of his own. The highway and its columns were among the most visible marks he left on the capital.

They didn’t last.

When Humberto Canto Echeverría became governor in 1938, he ordered the columns demolished along with the commemorative plaques at the highway’s southern terminus in Progreso. No public explanation survives in the record. Historians have framed it simply as a new administration erasing the legacy of an old one — not an unusual occurrence in Mexican politics, then or now.

The glorieta itself has changed hands many times since. What was once the starting point for the only paved road to the coast has been absorbed into a city that now spreads well beyond it. The highway that Torre Díaz inaugurated, meanwhile, evolved into the modern MEX-261, still the primary route linking Mérida to its port.

The columns are long gone, leaving behind only photographs and a footnote in Yucatán’s history of infrastructure — and the administrators who shaped it.

With information from Yucatan Pasado Glorioso, meridaenlahistoria.com.mx; yucatanancestral.com

Quick facts

• Mérida-Progreso highway inaugurated: Feb. 1, 1928
• Governor at inauguration: Álvaro Torre Díaz (1926–1930)
• Columns erected at: Glorieta de San Fernando, formerly San Fernando de los Naranjos
• Columns demolished: Between 1938 and 1940, under Gov. Humberto Canto Echeverría
• Highway distance: Approximately 36 km (22 miles)
• First stone laid: July 5, 1919, under Gov. Carlos Castro