The Ever-Open Veins of Latin America
The MAP region, waterways, and the Interoceanic Highway, Brazil–Peru. Map created by Scott Walker, courtesy of Harvard Map Collection.
In Peru’s biodiverse and mineral-rich Amazonian region of Madre de Dios there exists a rush for natural resources: gold, gas, and exotic plants and animals. Triangulated with the borders of Brazil and Bolivia, this southeastern zone of Peru has long been a site for human and environmental extraction. It bears the ironic acronym of MAP: “M” for Madre de Dios, “A” for Acre (in Brazil), and “P” for Pando (in Bolivia). From Spanish conquests for El Dorado to the international grab for rubber, this triple-frontier border area continues to attract fortune-hunters seeking to cull from the botanical and mineral wealth of the Amazon rainforest. Such multispecies economies of human and environmental extraction are intertwined with the project of European colonialism; they form “life in traffic” (Goldstein 2022; Goldstein forthcoming), often traveling far from their point of origin.
I first crossed into Madre de Dios, Peru from Brazil, traveling along the Interoceanic Highway in 2011. Recently constructed between the Amazonian border zone to Cusco in the Peruvian Andes, the highway was the first paved thoroughfare to run through previously forested and mountainous areas. The social and environmental changes along the highway, which, true to its name, runs between Peru’s Pacific Coast and Brazil’s Atlantic, were dramatic. Deforestation, now well documented along the highway, had already become visible to the traveler’s eye (Baraloto et al. & Chirif). What also became apparent during my research journey along the highway was that the infrastructure itself facilitated gold mining, biopiracy (the expropriation of biological materials like plants and the traditional medical knowledge), and the accompanying industry of sex-work. Human trafficking fills the demand for various kinds of labor in and around the mines. Women work as cooks, waitresses, bartenders, and sex-workers—or all the above. There’s not always such a clear line and the work isn’t always voluntary. But in areas of economic precarity, choices are limited.
Despite the upsurge in international attention around sex-trafficking and gender-based violence in Madre de Dios, many women claim positions of power. They own mining concessions and extractive technologies (though the men often do the work) and women often run brothels. These women complicate facile assumptions about gender inequalities and humanitarian aid interventions because they do not fit neatly into the category of “victim.”
Like the precious plants (and animals) and minerals (mostly gold) extracted from the MAP region, people also travel along the Interoceanic Highway, with varying degrees of consent. Completed in 2011, the Interoceanic Highway is the basis for the human and nonhuman traffic along its tarmac. Touted as an economic boon, this trans-national infrastructure project has not achieved the proposed market integration. Rather, it has increased not only deforestation but also disease in the Amazonian regions, and, in some places, destitution (Jensen et al.; Perz et al.; Tallman et al.).
The Interoceanic Highway functions as both an actual road and a figural one. Roads have an iconic image in the imaginary of the United States, one that purports to speak of freedom, an ease of spirit, and an upward mobility that is vehicular and socio-economic. Cars represent a fundamental component of the so-called American Dream. But as so many scholars have rightly questioned: whose dream and on whose backs? At the same time that new roads during the New Deal and national parks became federal patrimony, Native Americans were yet again pushed off the land and the labor of the African American Conservation Corps to build the parks was rendered invisible (Finney Black faces, “It matters”).
In Latin America, the extension of the “American Dream,” with its roads snaking through a continent with the most extensive rainforest on the planet, has terrible consequences. In the 1970s, when some of these first roads across the continent were built, Eduardo Galeano wrote The Open Veins of Latin America. He voiced his sharp concern at the continuing extraction of precious minerals from the geological veins of Latin America and the siphoning of human bodies to labor in the export of natural resources in the so-called postcolonial period. Decades later, his words continue to hold an unbearable likeness to the extractive capitalism enabled by road infrastructure throughout the continent.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank restructured loan programs in the 1970s that Galeano criticized continue to leave their scars on the body of Latin America today. The World Bank funded the first section of the Interoceanic Highway before realizing, in the 1980s, how deeply flawed in execution the project was. In 1987, Barber Conable, then president of the World Bank, made an uncharacteristic statement for an institution that otherwise didn’t engage in self-reflection. He stated that the project (an unpaved portion of what would become the Interoceanic Highway in Brazil was “a sobering example of an environmentally sound effort which went wrong. The bank misread the human, institutional and physical realities of the jungle and the frontier” (Fearnside and Shabecoff). While the World Bank has shied away from funding the final paving of the Interoceanic Highway’s leg between Brazil and Peru, other banks have not. The effort, while perhaps never environmentally sound, also did not adequately conduct social impact studies beforehand.
Ethnographic research along the Interoceanic Highway with sex-workers, biopirates, people vulnerable to biopiracy, land dispossession from road-building, mining, and logging is, in many ways, a life-long project if not also engagement in people’s lives. The resulting book examines the long durée of colonial projects and rubber booms in the MAP region to contemporary multispecies traffic occurring along and off-the-side of the Interoceanic Highway. The veins of Latin America remain ever-open, with oil, natural gas, and precious metals that travel on an increasing network of paved thoroughfares.
About the Author
Dr. Ruth E. Goldstein’s research interests center on the gendered aspects of human and nonhuman health, a quickly heating planet and environmental racism. Her current book project Life in Traffic: Women, Plants, and Gold Along the Interoceanic Highway examines the socio-environmental consequences of this transnational infrastructure project, with a particular focus on intersections of race, gender, and indigeneity.
Works Cited
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Chirif, Alberto. Peru: Deforestation in Times of Climate Change. Tarea Asociación Gráfica Educativa, 2019.
Fearnside, Philip. "Brazil’s Cuiabá-Santarém (BR-163) Highway: The environmental cost of paving a soybean corridor through the Amazon." Environmental management 39.5 (2007): 601-614 DOI 10.1007/s00267-006-0149-2.
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Perz, Stephen, et al. "Regional integration and household resilience: Infrastructure connectivity and livelihood diversity in the southwestern Amazon." Human ecology vol. 41, no. 4, 2013, pp. 497-51. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-013-9584-x
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Southgate, Todd, et al. "Ecosyndemics: The potential synergistic health impacts of highways and dams in the Amazon." (2022)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113037