Reflections on Roads and the Terrors of Militarisms/Colonization and its Aftermath

Who are roads built for? In many ways, Harvey and Knox’s book examines this question and seeks to demonstrate how this is a largely political question. They establish the aspirational quality of this modernist project so that all peoples can access and use the roads. Evidently, even after Penny’s conversation with the locals after the road to Cusco was built for example, many residents did use the roads to visit Cusco. Yet, as their book shows, the use and benefits of such modernist projects were unevenly allocated, distributed, and consumed.

It is in this spirit of uneven use of roads that I am reminded about the ways in which roads facilitate the logistical transport and mobility of state-sanctioned authority. Police is one example of this logistical transport of state-sanctioned authority. It brings to mind the example from Chapter 6 about how riot police from Cusco travelled on the roads to then dull down the protesters with batons and teargas. Also, I am also moved to think about the ways in which roads were facilitated for military use, a different form of state-sanctioned authority. Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez talks about this precisely in her book Securing Paradise. Writing on the construction of roads, Gonzalez argues that roads were primarily created for military use, and in the case of the Philippines in the service of colonialist projects. The history of Peru’s roads, as the book demonstrates, is also riddled with stories of the military, police, alongside the other experts on roads.

As I reflect more on this reading, I also am concerned with the violences incurred by modernizing colonialist projects, in its past and contemporary manifestations. I especially think about the Mrazek’s book that we read for the first week of this course. As the Dutch created infrastructures that facilitated mobility and transport (i.e. trains), there was inherently an authoritative model through which the colonialists still attempted to maintain power. In the case of anticolonial struggles, the use of war and military power were used to quell resistance and insurgency. We see this in the image of the “other youth” Mrazek reproduced on page 158 of his book. This reproduction is a fervent reminder of the lives lost to calls for anticolonial struggle and the retaliation against colonial modes of power and governance. Although of course Harvey and Knox’s ethnographic work in Peru takes place hundreds of years after colonial conquest and after a couple of decades since its military coups, the militarized protection afforded corporate projects were again used against dissenters, albeit without any fatal injuries. 

Additionally, a quick google search displayed that the period when Route 26 and the Iquitos-Nauta road were built is a period of time when political modes of governance fluctuated between aspirational democracy and militarism (1930-1979). In some ways, I begin to wonder how to integrate Harvey and Knox’s work within and against this broader timeline. They do mention army rule and colonizers in their piece, but I am wondering what role, if any, did militarism and shifts in political power have on the responses to political protest. How would Spain’s prior colonization of Peru facilitate racialized projects that might have affected how degrees of expertise and dissent become registered in Peru’s infrastructural projects?

Works Cited

Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuña. Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai'i and the Philippines. N.p.: Duke UP, 2013. Print. 

Mrázek, Rudolf. Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002. Print.