Leaps of Faith across the Continental Gap: Ecological Causes for the Failure to Complete the Pan-American Highway

In 1914, after centuries of dreaming about it, civilization dug a ship canal across the Panamanian isthmus, a  central event in the history of global transportation that linked two great oceans. Soon thereafter, the same parties dreamed of building a road in the same place but going in a different direction, a pan-American throughway that would connect the two continents of North and South America. That dream became the great symbol of Pan-Americanism itself, the link that would unite a hemisphere in economic relations and international human friendship. Boosters argued that soon an Ohio family could load up their sedan and drive to Bolivia for a weekend getaway. But after almost a century during which the automobile has conquered nearly every hill and vale of this hemisphere’s geography, you still can’t get there from here. There are a variety of reasons why a road through what is now called the Darien Gap is not even on current blueprints: bad blood between Panama and Colombia whose border makes up the hemispheric divide; Northern fears of the too easy movement of illegal migrants and illicit drugs; Darien’s ecological protection, which can only be effected by preventing easy access. However, ecological realities of a different sort seem to explain the failure to build the road in the period, (c. 1930 to 1970) when a massive effort and investment had gone into the entire enterprise of the Pan-American highway. The rest of the network went in, but at Darien, the builders were turned back. My intent is to investigate the significance of environmental barriers in the failure to punch a simple road from one continent to another. What was the significance of the project to those who attempted to link the hemisphere, and what has been the symbolic significance of their failure?