Crumbling Roads: Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and Roadbuilding Projects in Colombian Amazonia, 1930s–90s

In September 1932, a group of Peruvians took over the Colombian port of Leticia, on the Amazonas River, triggering a war between Colombia and Peru over the definition of their national borders in the Amazon rainforest. While both countries had ratified a boundary treaty in 1928, it faced domestic opposition in Peru, where powerful rubber barons denounced the treaty had ceded to Colombia a territory they considered their personal property. Shortly after the attack on Leticia, the Colombian government realized it had no means to reach, let alone defend, the country’s southern border. In response, the Ministry of Public Works launched an ambitious and unprecedented plan to build 870 miles of roads in the region. The plan deemed roads as the material condition to strengthen the Colombian state in Amazonia and facilitate the extraction of forest products and the arrival of settlers.

The war was short, as was the Colombian state’s support for the roadbuilding plan. Once a new treaty ratified Colombian sovereignty over the contested area, the plan’s budget plummeted. During the following decades, most roads crumbled under the action of the rainforest. However, the sporadic interest of the Colombian state in Amazonia alone does not offer a comprehensive account of the plan’s failure over the twentieth century. The roads had replaced complex Indigenous transport systems, in which the Native population used their thorough knowledge of the region’s environment to take advantage of the same events that later would deteriorate the roads—such as seasonal flooding. This paper underscores that the dismissal of Indigenous environmental and geographic knowledge is a critical reason why infrastructure projects have failed in regions like the Amazon rainforest. Moreover, it contends that the Indigenous transport systems and the roads that replaced them denote two radically different ways of understanding and inhabiting the same territory.