Representative Roads: The Political Significance of Constructing Peru’s Central Highway and Pan-American Highway, 1930–45

When analyzing the history of transportation infrastructure, and roads in particular, historians tend to examine them and their influence as parts of a system. Yet, certain roads can emerge as political symbols that embody much larger historical changes. This paper analyzes how two road projects in Peru came to embody much larger shifts in the nation’s politics and relationship to automobile mobility: the Central Highway and the Pan-American Highway. Constructed between 1930 and 1945, both roads came to represent not just transportation goals, but the broader political changes occurring in Peru.

The Central Highway was constructed in some of the most challenging political and geographic conditions of the 1930s. The highway offered a new route between Lima and the Central Andes – a zone with valuable mining and agriculture previously served only by the foreign-controlled Central Andean Railway. The Central Highway required thousands of workers to clear paths, build bridges, and dig tunnels though some of the highest Andean peaks. Becoming a symbol of economic and national progress during the depths of the Great Depression, the Central Highway helped build national support for the expansion of a national road network.

The paper also analyzes an initially-small highway paralleling Pacific that, by the early 1940s, emerged as a symbol of new hemispheric diplomatic shifts. As the Coastal Highway was renamed the Pan-American Highway, the road became an important symbol of Peru’s increased economic and diplomatic ties to the United States during World War II. The Pan-American highway signaled the start of a closer relationship between Peru and the United States that would be supported partly through the export of US automobiles and engineering tactics.