250 UTAH INTERNATIONAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF A BUSINESS Already well-established south of the border from the halcyon days of Mexican railroad building, Utah completed several projects in the State of Chihuahua, Mexico, beginning in the 1950s. In 1956 the company finished the Chihuahua Dam Tunnel at a cost of $400,000. Then, between 1958-61, Cia. Utah, S. A., a wholly owned Mexican subsidiary, built the earth-filled Chihuahua Dam for irrigation and flood control at a cost of $4.7 million. Unfortunately, the state defaulted on notes the company held and, after a protracted contract dispute, Utah incurred a substantial loss. More profitable was building a $1.4 million zinc fuming plant, in 1952, for American Smelting and Refining Company in Chihuahua. In Colombia, Utah undertook the building between 1950-53 of the Coello Irrigation Project on a tributary of the Magdalena River, providing irrigation water to more than 37,000 acres on the right bank of the river between Chicoral and Espinal. A public corporation, the Caja de Credito Agrario, Industrial, y Minero, contracted Utah and two firms headquartered in Bogota to build the $1.5 million complex as a joint venture. Then in the early 1960s, Utah again became involved in Colombia on the Troneras Project— another earth-filled dam on the Guadalupe River, a $5 million joint venture between Brown and Root, Inc., and Utah of the Americas (a subsidiary). Around the same time, the Tres Marias Dam on the San Francisco River in Minas Gerais, Brazil, part of the colossal Corinto Project, reached completion. On the other side of the continent in Chile, Utah Construction joined a $50 million project to develop mine facilities for the El Teniente Mine, thirty miles south of Santiago at an elevation of seven thousand feet. This job included excavating a five-and-onehalf-mile standard gauge railroad tunnel and the constructing railroad facilities through this new tunnel to the mine. With the historic name of Compania Constructora Utah, a wholly owned subsidiary of Utah Construction & Mining handled the contract for the Sociedad Minera el Teniente, S. A., a Chilean corporation. The project aimed to improve facilities to produce an additional 100,000 tons of copper per year. Utah’s lone European venture was the construction of the Serre Poncon Dam on the Durrance River in southeastern France, between 1955-60. A joint venture with Compagnie Industrielle de