Illegible infrastructures: Road building and the making of state-spaces in the Colombian Amazon

Abstract

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.

States of circulation: Logistics off the beaten path

“…This is exactly what Simon Uribe (2019) shows in his discussion of the planning and construction of a trans-Andean highway through the Amazon rainforest. In the glossy development plans, the highway and the surrounding landscape feature as unvaried, unpopulated non-places augmenting the promised transition of untamed geography to a regulated state of order.…”

“…Finally, Simon Uribe (2019) analyzes ethnographically a section of the huge collection of infrastructure projects envisioned to create seamless circulation, economic integration, increased state presence and even “civilization” across the Amazonian borderlands. He zooms in on the problems associated with land tenure illegibility that have brought sections of the project to a complete halt due to conflicts over expropriation and compensation of land for the new roads and bridges.…”

Logistical geographies

“…Stepputat and Hagmann (2019), for example, show how since the 1990s efforts to forge a breakaway Republic of Somaliland have been inseparable from attempts to facilitate and secure circulation within and via that territory, most notably through establishing a Berbera port and corridor. In turn, Uribe's (2019:900) analysis of the troubled planning and building of a trans‐Andean highway through the rainforest of the Amazon shows the inherent limits to state power in such projects, arguing that “…infrastructure is not built upon empty, homogeneous space. Infrastructure is rooted in very heterogeneous physical and legal topographies…which inevitably leads to friction and conflict that dilate or even impede its materialization.”…”

Frail modernities: Latin American infrastructures between repair and ruination

“…In many areas of the continent, sometimes spanning full regions, the promises of up-to-date systems materialized into disparate infrastructural imbroglios in which "fluids link to grids, informal infrastructures meet formal ones, people-led to state-led, illegal to legal" (Penfield 2019, 232). Instead of being the utter manifestation of the modern State and capital imperial gaze, these patchwork infrastructures "actively participated in the perpetuation and production of legal and social disorders" (Uribe 2018, 16), disorders that "eventually became a continuous obstacle for the projects [themselves]" (Uribe 2018). Also, and in clear contrast with the previous unabashed optimism permeating the development of large-scale projects, an important amount of social movements in the region emerged as a reaction against the development of large-scale infrastructures, such as HidroAysén in Chile (Merino and Bello 2014) or the Supervía in Mexico (Sosa-López 2017).…”