Modernity Derailed: The Collapse of Peru’s Electric Train Project, 1986–87

This paper explores the sudden demise of a proposed massive public transportation system in Lima, Peru. In October 1986, President García inaugurated an ambitious electric train project to serve a sprawling capital city of six million people. Less than a year after construction crews poured concrete for a short span of the elevated railway, the $800 million project lay dead in its tracks, a victim of financial woes, technical problems, and poor planning. A newspaper described the abandoned concrete platform as a “giant boa constrictor extending toward the sky but not reaching it.” Although failed modernist projects are hardly rare in industrialized or developing nations, the Peruvian project is unique for two reasons: Peru launched the railway at a precarious moment when Maoist guerrillas had plunged the country into near chaos, and Peruvians successfully resuscitated the electric train in 2011. The railway thus presents a unique opportunity to explore how an underdeveloped country confronted technological modernity at distinct junctures twenty-five years apart.

This paper explores Peru’s electric train not as a “universal” or neutral technology but as a complex socio-technical artifact that was only as strong as the social, political, and economic networks in which it embedded. Recent science and technology scholarship attempts to dismantle the firewall between the technical and social and between science and politics. This approach rejects the notion that technology arrives in ready-made contexts and instead examines how artifacts create context by gathering about them spokesmen, particular interests, and public matters. My research takes seriously the engineers, politicians, urban planners, potential passengers, journalists, and other human and nonhuman actors that propelled this technological project. This research speaks to technological projects in Latin America and beyond because it underscores the complex integration of technology and society.