Simon Uribe, professor of the Urban Management and Development program at the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia, spoke about the practices and processes of state building in the Colombian Amazon through roads and highways. At different times, this infrastructure has been synonymous with land grabbing, racial violence, dispossession, deforestation and extraction, and decimation of traditional indigenous populations, which still demand respect for their ancestral territories and ways of life. In turn, they have been a central part of the historical and current demands by peasant and urban settlers for connectivity and integration with other departments and regions of the country.
Simon’s work is an historical and ethnographic account of roads in the piedemonte (Andes-Amazon region) since the colonial times. Capuchin missionaries built the first roads, based on trails used by indigenous peoples and using their free labor. Then, these roads were used by rubber and quinine exploiters. Later, the Colombian government used them as routes for promoting colonization since the early 1900s. This colonization strategy went hand in hand with a vision from the Academia in the 1960s to promote cultural expansion through roads into the Amazon. This vision of the Amazon as a frontier territory in need of occupation by the state remains to this day in the narratives of many key actors in promoting road infrastructure projects, such as the central government and development banks. Simón also talked about the FARC building roads but from a more bottom-up approach, based on the necessities of the people for trading in the coca economy.
The attendees raised questions regarding possibilities for changing the modus operandi of the state, and how these territories can be properly integrated, rather than being seen as the periphery of a state centered and located in the Andes. Simon responded that there is a need for bottom-up governance that gives priority to a development vision from the local populations. He also said that without considering the historical context of these infrastructures as well as the local needs, state measures such as the green infrastructure policy and the fight against deforestation will have limited impacts. Participants also discussed the possibility of generalizing the reflections of this study to other Andean Amazonian countries, where there have also been aspirations for connectivity, reflected in projects such as the Marginal de la Selva through the Andes, and its multiple transversal roads (carreteras de penetracion) towards the Amazon lowlands.
