The Amazon is currently experiencing a rapid growth in the building of transport infrastructures. While national governments have portrayed infrastructure development as greatly enhancing economic and geographical integration, critical approaches largely describe such development as a destructive process of resource extraction and dispossession. While these views differ radically in relation to the ends and effects of current and future infrastructure projects, they both conceive infrastructure as reflective of an inexorable process of state and capitalist expansion region-wide. Less attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which this very process is conditioned, and sometimes hindered, by a wide array of normative, social and political (dis) orders. In this paper, I draw attention to the ever conflicting and contingent nature of infrastructure building through an ethnographic account of the land conflicts present in an ongoing road project in the Colombian region of Putumayo. Specifically, I look at the tensions and disputes arising from the project’s attempts to make a target space and population legible in order to make them governable. By showing how such attempts have consistently failed and led the project into various states of suspension and uncertainty, the paper sheds light on the deep embedding of infrastructure in everyday dynamics of state-making and unmaking.
Uno de los rasgos comunes en la historiografía sobre los procesos poscoloniales de formación nacional en América Latina ha sido la noción de la soberanía como una fuerza civilizatoria encarnada en el estado, el cual se ha asumido a su vez como un aparato que se expande siguiendo una trayectoria centrífuga, absorbiendo gradualmente territorios y poblaciones por fuera de su control o resistentes al mismo. En esta lectura, el fracaso o éxito de los estados se ha concebido frecuentemente como un efecto de su capacidad —o incapacidad— de extender su poder a la totalidad del territorio bajo su jurisdicción, y de construir y sostener en el tiempo una identidad política homogénea.
Roads are usually conceived as technologies aimed at improving peoples’ economic and social welfare. As they are commonly portrayed as synonymous with mobility and with access to markets, jobs and services, their existence tends to be assumed as a major catalyst for development. This view often obscures the ways in which they affect people’s lives. This article seeks to shed light on this dimension of transport infrastructure through a historical account of a road in Colombia’s Andean-Amazon region. Infamously known as the Trampoline of death, this road has turned into an infrastructural landscape heavily invested with feelings of fear, isolation, disconnection and abandonment. Although these feelings are usually assumed as expressions of political and territorial exclusion, I will argue that, at deeper level, they reflect the violent ways in which this region has been discursively and materially included into the state.
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