DREAM ROAD TO PAN AMERICA

Vigorous history of a highway intended to run the length of the Americas, as yet unbuilt.

The Pan-American Highway has existed—on paper, that is—since 1923, when U.S. boosters attempted to convince Latin America’s governments to throw in on a project that would allow unimpeded automobile travel from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. As it is, writes Brigham Young University history professor Miller, the highway is instead “two very long cul-de-sacs, each separated from the other by ninety-eight straight-line kilometers of tropical forest,” with Colombia and Panama the only countries on Earth without a single road link. There are geographical considerations, of course: Such a highway would pass through just about every ecosystem there is, courting dangers of everything from altitude sickness to malaria. But the political considerations are more significant still: Costa Rica has blocked off most traffic from neighboring Nicaragua to curb migration, and the U.S., of course, is busily trying to build a wall across the length of the border with Mexico. “You cannot get there from here because too many Americans up and down the hemisphere concluded that good fences rather than good roads made for good neighbors,” writes Miller. All this flies in the face of an odd reality. As Miller writes, by 2050 there are projected to be 60% more road miles in the world than today, but, as Indian statisticians have observed, the economic benefits will be largely elusive in the developing world. Corruption abounds, too, wherever roads are built. That fact has not daunted China’s ambitions in Latin America, and Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road global project is pushing billions of dollars toward the construction of “ports, railroads, airports, and highways,” the better to carry goods and revenues to Beijing—one reason for the U.S. to take more interest in the matter.

A well-written contribution to the history of infrastructure.