POSADAS.− Argentina and Brazil will have a new bridge connecting them from 2030. This is the viaduct that will connect the mission city of San Javier, 130 kilometers from Posadas, with the neighboring Porto Xavier.
It will be the first bridge between Mercosur’s two major partnerssince the Santo Tomé-San Borja crossing was inaugurated in 1997.
The other bridges between the two countries are Puerto Iguazú-Foz de Iguazú (inaugurated in 1985) and Paso de los Libres-Uruguaiana (1945).
This bridge is fully financed by Brazilwhich has already signed the contracts and published them in the Official Journal, with a consortium of five companies led by Rivola Constructores with Italian capital. The investment amounts to 214,000,000 reais (equivalent to $40,000,000 today).
According to the 2018 agreement of the binational commission that manages and studies the problems of the bridges already built or under development over the Uruguay River, Argentina will not give weight.
Brazil will even finance the Argentina team’s header. And they prefer it that way because working with binational financing would involve a number of bureaucratic and legal hurdles that would delay the completion of the project much longer.
The viaduct will be 940 meters longand will be much wider than other bridges: 17.4 meters. Because? For safety reasons, there will be two meter long shoulders on both sides, and there is also something completely new for a border crossing: a 1.7 meter wide cycle path and an area for the pedestrian crossing of 1.2 meters.
Work will begin in the middle of next year once environmental and management procedures on both banks are approved. Also some expropriations need to be carried outbecause in these towns the neighbors settle in the riverside area, he explained THE NATIONOvidio Kaiser, Minister of Tourism of Porto Xavier.
In a previous project, the bridgehead was intended to commemorate the Jesuit ruins. However, Brazil decided to delete these details to reduce costs, taking into account “that It is funded by taxpayers.said Kaiser.
The construction will be carried out in stages and it is estimated that once the first works begin, The work will take two years. It is estimated that the bridge will be operational shortly before 2030.
Until now, San Javier and Porto Xavier are connected by a raft servicewhich also transports huge trucks, especially Brazilian ones.
“In 2016, a technical and economic feasibility study of the works was completed and the San Javier and Porto Xavier bridge was chosen because it was the most profitable due to the economic volume,” Kaiser said.
The interest of the Brazilians, who are almost entirely financing the work, is basically to open one new route of the biooceanic corridor This allows it to reach the ports of the Pacific Ocean and transport goods through Argentine routes.
For Argentina, it is currently assumed that the main interest will be tourism, as this represents a new route to the beaches of southern Brazil.
“Commercially it serves Brazil to connect with Paraguay and Chile and of course Argentina. Until the construction of the Santo Tomé-Sao Borja Bridge, San Javier was the most popular location for the potato and onion trade route from the south of Buenos Aires to Brazil,” he said THE NATIONCristian Castro, accountant and provincial representative, native of San Javier.
“Another flow will occur in the summer, as a large part of the traffic is concentrated on the beaches of southern Brazil,” the lawmaker explained.
There is also a possible deal that Misiones is looking at with great interest: this Part of the exports from southern Brazil go through the port of Santa Ananot yet activated, but sufficiently deep for exporters from Rio Grande do Sul or Curitiba to use it.
“The Brazilians are keen to use the Paraná-Paraguay waterway to transport some of their cargo“, he explained THE NATIONDiego Zapaya, businessman from Oberá, a town very close to the border with Brazil.
Another very heavy use will be small border traffic, which is expected to increase exponentially with a bridge. In addition, in this part of the country there is a question of union and brotherhood of closely related peoples.
Missionaries and Brazilians from the cities along the Uruguay River coast maintain close bonds of friendship and familyand in the past they were used to canoeing to go shopping or play a football game. But in recent decades, tightening border, immigration and customs controls have begun to impede this free coming and going.
“Culturally speaking, we were much more culturally unified about 40 years ago and until about 20 years ago, something that has been lost in the last 20 years with these larger asymmetries. But what?” The bridge can restore this brotherhood between the banksCastro explained.
“I am part of this mix, the grandson of a Brazilian woman named Grasiolinda Fonseca Lara, known in Itacaruaré as Doña Olina, and she gave me this love for Brazil and Argentina,” explained the accountant and teacher.
The last international bridge that Argentina opened with Brazil took place in December 1997 in the presence of then presidents Carlos Menem and Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Since then, other projects in the pipeline have been crippled or put on hold, including the missing bridge in the tri-border area (Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina). It is the one that connects our country with Puerto Franco-Ciudad del Este.
This old project failed not only due to the political and economic circumstances in Argentina, but also in a short time Brazil and Paraguay will inaugurate their second bridge, which will be used primarily for transporting goods and will be a key element of the bio-oceanic corridor.
This bridge, financed by the Itaipú Dam, located a few kilometers upstream of the Paraná River, is ahead of the three-border milestone. It’s ready but not activated yet.
In general, the presence of binational bridges for Argentina has always created the same contrast due to the constant foreign exchange asymmetries and the different tax and bureaucratic burdens: strong development on the neighboring side, which has no counterpart in the Argentine “twin cities”..
This is what happens with Puerto Iguazú, with stark contrasts to Foz de Iguazú and Ciudad del Este; with Santo Tomé and San Borja and with Paso de los Libres, a city where time seems to have stood still, and Uruguiana.
Perhaps the only exception is Posadas-Encarnación, whose bridge was inaugurated in 1990. In this case, the city on the Argentine side is larger and more developed than its neighbor. Although no one questions the enormous growth of the Paraguayan city, which is largely due to the money that Argentines spend every day, both on consumption and on the growing real estate investments that they make on the other side of the border.
The mayor of San Javier, Matías Vilchez, assured after confirming the signing of the contract that guarantees the start of the work, which “a huge joyand stated: “None of us can imagine what this enormous trading power means”.
“San Javier has been preparing for a long time, together with the provincial government, on the energy issue and urban development to absorb these impacts,” said the mayor of “La Dulce,” as San Javier is popularly known.
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