The Pan-American Highway’s Contact Zone: Legacies in the Darien Gap

Originally conceived in the 1920s, the Pan-American Highway was to promote Panamericanism and automobility while linking all the national capitals of the Americas. Running from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the highway’s only break is in the Panama and Colombia borderlands, which is known as “the Darien Gap.” The forested and, at places, swampy areas of the Darién Gap were long considered a challenge, and motivated the Pan American Highway Congress’ decades-long efforts to back the construction. With the U.S. financing much of the huge infrastructure, it was the Latin American-led Darién Subcommittee that actively pushed for the road through the Americas. And just when it seemed like a done deal, in 1972 the Sierra Club began a campaign against the U.S. Department of Transportation’s funding of the highway through the Gap. With fears about South America’s endemic hoof and mouth disease spreading to North America, the Sierra Club-led coalition of environmental organizations was ultimately successful. This paper focuses on what happened in that contact zone with the highway extended, but not constructed through the Gap: the development of Panama’s surveying and mapping, the creation of Darién National Park on the border, the formation of Indigenous Emberá and Wounaan villages that cleared them from the highway route and spurred their land rights efforts, the establishment of the logging industry that cleared timber from the highway route, and the migration of cattle ranchers to the region. It closes with the irony today: although the Darién Gap still exists, it has been constantly eroded by trafficking and a growing network of secondary roads.