San Miguel de Allende, Dolores Hidalgo, San Luis de la Paz a future in common

Published December 19th, 2021

At a time when regionalization is what helps to alleviate economic lags, the municipalities in the north of the state of Guanajuato have no choice but to look for ways to direct their efforts to consolidate alliances that allow their societies to progress and preserve their environment and the resources they each have to survive, in a fierce war for both natural and human resources.

This is what is happening with the regional alliances between municipalities such as Leon, Silao, and Guanajuato capital, which will soon form a metropolitan area that will diversify its economic movement and is allowing rapid development of that area.

Here in the north of the state of Guanajuato, the movement will start from the foothills of the Santa Rosa mountain range, until reaching the Sierra Gorda, but the main engines will have to be the municipalities with a medium development, such as Dolores Hidalgo, San Luis de la Paz and San Miguel de Allende (this one already has a medium-high level of development) and they have to hurry if they really want to win in this.

We have common issues such as the rapid growth of the area in tourism, although the pandemic slowed us down, now that the activity is awakening quickly Mineral de Pozos and San Miguel de Allende are emerging, Dolores Hidalgo is even more behind, but also in recovery, which is making more services are required and this can be the engine of emerging economies.

The construction of the Independence Boulevard between San Miguel de Allende and Dolores Hidalgo will bring with it the need for Dolores Hidalgo to reinvent itself in tourist services, it will need real hotels and not just inns disguised as hotels, good restaurants, and attractions to help relieve some of the saturation that San Miguel de Allende already has in peak seasons so that tourists do not go to other regions.

San Luis de la Paz has understood it a little better and is already preparing to attract all the tourism that does not find in Dolores Hidalgo the quality they deserve, and Pozos is a great example, although also the municipal capital looks better and has better attractions, what fails them are their roads that with so many potholes become unsafe, their traffic lights are poorly synchronized and some are not even seen, lack of signage which makes it difficult to move in the municipality which in Dolores Hidalgo if they have very well defined.

But a point in favor of the integration of this region is that Adrián Hernández, Mauricio Trejo Pureco, and Gerardo Sánchez come from the same political background, even though they may have other political views, and without a doubt, they can understand each other in order to carry out joint projects that benefit and strengthen the 3 municipalities.

They would have to sit down to talk about security because the area is still very hot, they will have to get to know their common issues, one of the main ones is the inequality in each of the municipalities (San Miguel takes them by storm), they have to talk about common economic issues, such as agriculture and livestock that they share, the water problems they have, the possibilities of creating an aeronautical park in the region that has been raised so many times, in short, we have more in common to be able to move forward.

And although this would be the first stage of regionalization, in the same way, it will have to be proposed, to have San Diego de la Union within the same, because it shares a lot with 2 of these municipalities and the same will have to happen with Comonfort and San Jose Iturbide to make this great area of the north of the state of Guanajuato, often neglected by the state government, which faces poverty and various vices of societies that have not managed to leave the cacicazgo, but that is growing rapidly and at any moment will become another of the most thriving regions in the state.

And what can we citizens do to move forward, is a good question, it is up to us to build the foundations of something that seems inevitable and that will bring us benefits, we need to demand a better quality of services, that the regulations are respected and respected, that we can have a decent quality of life and above all increase our level of education to build a better society.

Let’s hope that all of this does not end up like the great failure that is Leon and its metropolitan area, which is home to the largest number of people in poverty in the country, because in that place strategies were implemented that benefited only the businessmen.

But in the end, the coming year will have to be the one in which the foundations are laid to rescue this historically poor area and to build a future that will be very different from what we could be thinking now.