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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: Antipode Book Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Frontier Road uses the history of one road in southern Colombia—known locally as “the trampoline of death”—to demonstrate how state-building processes and practices have depended on the production and maintenance of frontiers as inclusive-exclusive zones, often through violent means.
- Considers the topic from multiple perspectives, including ethnography of the state, the dynamics of frontiers, and the nature of postcolonial power, space, and violence
- Draws attention to the political, environmental, and racial dynamics involved in the history and development of transport infrastructure in the Amazon region
- Examines the violence that has sustained the state through time and space, as well as the ways in which ordinary people have made sense of and contested that violence in everyday life
- Incorporates a broad range of engaging sources, such as missionary and government archives, travel writing, and oral histories
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Colombia’s amputated map
The frontier as a space of exception
Rethinking the state and the frontier
Map of the book
Part I:
1 Reyes’ dream
Two frontiers
‘The base of a new geography’
The secret of the state
2 A Titans’ work
A mission’s tale
The General’s last sigh
The odyssey
Rituals of state‐making
3 Fray Fidel de Montclar’s deed
Burdens and loads
A tale of two towns
The annihilation of theory in practice
Stagnation and decay
State and frontier revisited
Part II:
4 The
trampoline of death
A frontier highway
Reyes’ ghost
Jesús
Franco
Guillermo
Uneven frontiers
5 On the illegibility effects of state practices
‘The illusion of transparency’
The Forest Reserve’s cadastral ‘confusion’
Becoming illegible: a short case study
Entangled maps
‘The art of being governed’
6 The politics of the displaced
The displaced
The making of a community
The struggle for resettlement
Villa Rosa
On continuity and change
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 01
Figure 1.1 Rafael Reyes 1913.
Figure 1.2 Indigenous exchange routes of the
piedemonte
c. XVI‐XIX.
Figure 1.3
Chart of the Nueva Granada, divided into provinces, 1832 to 1856, Uti possidetis of 1810. Territorio del Caquetá
shown at the bottom of the map.
Figure 1.4 ‘Map showing the explorations made by the Reyes’ brothers in South America and the projected Intercontinental Railroad’ (detail).
Chapter 02
Figure 2.1 Fray Fidel de Montclar, n.d.
Figure 2.2 Road layouts, 1906–1908.
Figure 2.3 Road crew, c.1910.
Figure 2.4 Road crew demolishing a rock cliff, n.d.
Figure 2.5 The Capuchin road (section Pasto‐Mocoa), 1912.
Figure 2.6 The road, Sachamates‐Cerreños section, n.d.
Figure 2.7 Inauguration ceremony in Santiago, 10th March 1912.
Figure 2.8 Inauguration ceremony in Mocoa, 14th March 1912 (Delegates shown at centre).
Figure 2.9 ‘Triumphal entrance of the Governor and the Apostolic Prefect to San Francisco’, 12th March 1912.
Figure 2.10 Dynamiting the mountain, Vijagual creek, c.1911.
Chapter 03
Figure 3.1 Section of plan of Puerto Asís, c. 1917.
Figure 3.2 Puerto Asís orphanage, 1931.
Figure 3.3 Puerto Asís, panoramic view, 1928.
Figure 3.4 Antonio Díaz carries on his back the jaguar or ‘tigre mariposa’ hunted by him, 1930.
Figure 3.5 Santiago, 1920.
Figure 3.6 Copy of Sucre’s 1917 cadastral plan, 1922.
Figure 3.7 Sucre’s cadastral plan, chart no.3.
Figure 3.8 Capuchin cattle farm in the Sibundoy Valley, c. 1912.
Figure 3.9 Pasto‐Puerto Asís road. Road sections and building dates, 1906–1931.
Figure 3.10 Culvert (bottom right) and bridge (centre left) on the Mocoa‐Urcusique section, 1914.
Figure 3.11 Fray Florentino de Barcelona (on horse) crossing a suspension bridge over Pepino River, Mocoa‐Urscusique section, n.d.
Figure 3.12 Road crew, Mocoa‐Puerto Asís section, 1928.
Figure 3.13 Fray de Montclar supervising the road works on the Mocoa‐Puerto Asís section, 1927.
Chapter 04
Figure 4.1 Towns along the
carreteable
Pasto‐Puerto Asís and feeder roads.
Figure 4.2
Las Lupas
(2010).
Figure 4.3 Landslides across the Lupas, 1969.
Figure 4.4 ‘PELIGRO. ZONA D DERRUMBESE’. San Francisco‐Mocoa road, Km 95 (2010).
Figure 4.5 Jesús behind the wheel of his truck (2010).
Figure 4.6 Back cover of Franco’s book.
Figure 4.7 Guillermo Guerrero. Junín (2010).
Chapter 05
Figure 5.1 Requests to purchase and sales of land plots in the road project site (December 2010).
Figure 5.2 Campucana’s official cadastral map, 2004.
Figure 5.3 Campucana’s peasant cadastral map, 2010.
Chapter 06
Figure 6.1 Guaduales, April 2010.
Figure 6.2 Section of Villa Rosa, May 2010.
Figure 6.3
Minga
for the construction of the path. Villa Rosa, November 2010.
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Antipode Book Series
Series Editors: Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota, USA and Sharad Chari, CISA at the University of the Witwatersrand, USA
Like its parent journal, the Antipode Book Series reflects distinctive new developments in radical geography. It publishes books in a variety of formats – from reference books to works of broad explication to titles that develop and extend the scholarly research base – but the commitment is always the same: to contribute to the praxis of a new and more just society.
Published
Frontier Road: Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian AmazonSimón Uribe
Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets and Finance in Global Biodiversity PoliticsJessica Dempsey
Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the CaribbeanMarion Werner
Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in CapitalismBrett Christophers
The Down‐deep Delight of DemocracyMark Purcell
Gramsci: Space, Nature, PoliticsEdited by Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer and Alex Loftus
Places of Possibility: Property, Nature and Community Land OwnershipA. Fiona D. Mackenzie
The New Carbon Economy: Constitution, Governance and ContestationEdited by Peter Newell, Max Boykoff and Emily Boyd
Capitalism and ConservationEdited by Dan Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy
Spaces of Environmental JusticeEdited by Ryan Holifield, Michael Porter and Gordon Walker
The Point is to Change it: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of CrisisEdited by Noel Castree, Paul Chatterton, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner and Melissa W. Wright
Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature‐SocietyEdited by Becky Mansfield
Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the AcademyEdited by Katharyne Mitchell
Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of InsecurityEdward Webster, Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout
Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature‐Society RelationsEdited by Becky Mansfield
Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the MayaJoel Wainwright
Cities of WhitenessWendy S. Shaw
Neoliberalization: States, Networks, PeoplesEdited by Kim England and Kevin Ward
The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global EconomyEdited by Luis L. M. Aguiar and Andrew Herod
David Harvey: A Critical ReaderEdited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory
Working the Spaces of Neoliberalism: Activism, Professionalisation and IncorporationEdited by Nina Laurie and Liz Bondi
Threads of Labour: Garment Industry Supply Chains from the Workers’ PerspectiveEdited by Angela Hale and Jane Wills
Life’s Work: Geographies of Social ReproductionEdited by Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie A. Marston and Cindi Katz
Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and White Working Class YouthLinda McDowell
Spaces of NeoliberalismEdited by Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore
Space, Place and the New Labour InternationalismEdited by Peter Waterman and Jane Wills
Frontier Road
Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian Amazon
Simón Uribe
This edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Simón Uribe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of WarrantyWhile the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Uribe, Simón, author.Title: Frontier road : power, history, and the everyday state in the Colombian Amazon / Simón Uribe.Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016044212| ISBN 9781119100171 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119100188 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Roads–Colombia–Putumayo (Department) | Infrastructure (Economics)–Colombia–Putumayo (Department) | Roads–Design and construction.Classification: LCC H359.C7 U75 2017 | DDC 338.9861/63–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044212
Cover Images: Image 1: Lorry making the route between Mocoa and San Francisco, c. 1950 (Reproduced by permission of the Archive of the Diocese of Sibundoy)Image 2: San Francisco‐Mocoa road © Simón Uribe, 2010Cover Design: Wiley
To Antonio, and to the memory of Roberto Franco and Guillermo Guerrero
Series Editors’ Preface
The Antipode Book Series explores radical geography ‘antipodally,’ in opposition, from various margins, limits or borderlands.
Antipode books provide insight ‘from elsewhere,’ across boundaries rarely transgressed, with internationalist ambition and located insight; they diagnose grounded critique emerging from particular contradictory social relations in order to sharpen the stakes and broaden public awareness. An Antipode book might revise scholarly debates by pushing at disciplinary boundaries, or by showing what happens to a problem as it moves or changes. It might investigate entanglements of power and struggle in particular sites, but with lessons that travel with surprising echoes elsewhere.
Antipode books will be theoretically bold and empirically rich, written in lively, accessible prose that does not sacrifice clarity at the altar of sophistication. We seek books from within and beyond the discipline of geography that deploy geographical critique in order to understand and transform our fractured world.
Vinay GidwaniUniversity of Minnesota, USA
Sharad ChariCISA at the University of the Witwatersrand, USA
Antipode Book Series Editors
Acknowledgements
Several people and institutions have supported me through the long process of completing this book. Fieldwork and archive work were conducted in Barcelona, Bogotá and Putumayo from 2009 to 2011, and was funded with research grants from the Wenner‐Gren Foundation, the London School of Economics, the University of London and the Abbey‐Santander Travel Research Fund. During this period, many people contributed directly or indirectly to the research. I would like to express my deep gratitude and indebtedness to all of them, including those whom I may forget to mention here.
In the Putumayo, I owe special thanks to Judy and Guillermo Guerrero, Don Hernando Córdoba and his family, Doña Ruth, Humberto Toro, Franco Romo, Gerardo Rosero, Narciso Jacanamejoy, María Cerón, Humberto Tovar, Elvano Camacho, Rigoberto Chito, Guillermo Martínez, Mauricio Valencia, Guido Revelo, Silvana Castro, Felipe Arteaga, Adriana Barriga, Jorge Luis Guzmán, Bernardo Pérez and Gladys Bernal, Edgar Torres, and Alejandro and Rocío Ortiz.
In Barcelona, I want to thank Fra Valentí Serra, who granted me access to the Provincial Archive of the Capuchins of Catalonia (APCC), a rich source for the history of the road; and also to Lina González and Santiago Colmenares for their great hospitality and comradeship. The archive work in Barcelona was complemented by research in the Archive of the Diocese of Sibundoy in Putumayo (ADS), possible thanks to the help of Gustavo Torres; and in the National Library and the National Archive in Bogotá (AGN), carried out with the assistance of María Elisa Balen and Joaquín Uribe. In New York, where I spent an academic semester as an exchange student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, I was fortunate to have the guidance of Michael Taussig, who offered generous advice and also introduced me to Timothy Mitchell and Richard Kernaghan, both of whom gave me useful insights during the early stages of the project. I would also like to thank Bret Ericson, Nando, Nicolás Cárdenas and Orlando Trujillo, who made my stay in New York enjoyable.
The bulk of the writing was done between 2011 and 2013, and was funded with a writing grant from the Foundation for Regional and Urban Studies (Oxford) and a scholarship from Colciencias (Bogotá). During this time, I received academic advice and personal support from several people. In the UK, I am especially indebted to Sharad Chari and Gareth Jones, who provided continuous guidance and support throughout my PhD research, which forms the basis of much of the book. In Colombia, Stefania Gallini and the Environmental History research group, Augusto Gómez, María Clemencia Ramírez, Martha Herrera and the members of the Umbra research workshop, offered valuable feedback during the writing process. Last but not least, posthumous thanks and appreciation go to my friend Roberto Franco, who first awoke my interest in the Amazon region and its history.
The people at Wiley‐Blackwell did a brilliant job in turning a raw manuscript into a finished book. Two anonymous reviewers meticulously read the different versions of the manuscript, providing thoughtful comments and critiques. Jacqueline Scott and the series editors provided efficient and generous guidance throughout the process. I want to express my thanks to them, as well as to the different persons who collaborated in the different stages of the edition and production process.
Finally, my deep gratitude goes to my friends and family, who supported and endured me all the way. And, of course, to María Elisa, for her company and unconditional help; in numerous ways this book is hers as well.
Introduction
The 148 kilometres that separate Mocoa from Pasto are terrifying. So say the drivers that daily cross the páramos,1 valleys and inhospitable selvas along the road between the two cities, a journey that can take up to 10 or 12 hours and sometimes much longer depending on the state of the road or the action of the guerrilla … This is the road traversed by the conqueror Hernán Pérez de Quesada, who defied the abysses, páramos and numerous water courses that criss‐cross it, accompanied by 270 soldiers, 200 horses and ten Indians that guided him in the conquest of the south. It was also the route that by 1835 was used by merchants eager to arrive at the Putumayo River to transport rubber, quinine and tagua by canoe to Manaus and Belen de Para and to return with iron, salt, liqueurs and other foreign goods.
On account of the obstacles this road imposes on travel to the Putumayo, General Rafael Reyes turned Mocoa into a prison and there exiled his political enemies. This road was also traversed by the Colombian troops who defended the national sovereignty during the conflict with Peru in 1932 … Through this same road came the stream of colonos on the pretext of transforming the region; and also those who fled political violence, immigrants attracted by the discovery of oil, and finally those deluded with the coca boom.
To get in or out of this region is uncertain … For this reason [drivers] do not hesitate to have a drink of aguardiente in order to control their nerves and face the fractured rocks, slopes flowed [sic] with high pressure water, creeks and brooks, and a dense mist that makes this place a world apart.
‘Pasto‐Mocoa road: 148 km of fear’ (El Tiempo, 3rd November 1996).
This is one of the many depictions of a road connecting the Andean and Amazon regions in southwest Colombia (see Figure I.1), infamously known as El trampolín de la muerte [the trampoline of death] due to its sheer and precipitous topography. These depictions appear from time to time in the national press, travellers’ blogs, YouTube videos and TV news reports. On the occasion that a bus falls off a cliff or is buried under an avalanche, leaving a death toll of more than 10 or 20, or when travellers are trapped in landslides and have to be air‐lifted, these descriptions multiply. During such events, condemnations and promises proliferate: journalists portray horrific scenes of mud, wreckage, blood and unfound corpses while reiterating the archaic state of the road; locals lay blame on the government for perpetual neglect; the president announces the imminent launch of a long‐awaited road project that will finally redeem a country’s rich yet forgotten margin of the state; politicians accuse each other while promising a ‘definite solution’ if they are elected. Repetition turns each tragedy into farce, as characters re‐play the same script, replicating the staple fare of the frontier: isolation, confinement, violence, lawlessness, backwardness, abandonment, neglect, terror and fear.
Figure I.1 Colombia’s Andean‐Amazon region.
Through reiteration and replication, this vocabulary has become indissoluble from the geographical imagery of the road, affixed to the various names by which it has been baptized (‘wages of fear’, ‘the longest cemetery in the world’, ‘shortcut to hell’, ‘the dumb death’). The most popular of these terms remains the trampoline of death, which sharply captures the sense of being under constant threat of plunging into a bottomless void. Each of these names, together with the written and visual accounts they echo, conveys the striking features of this infrastructural landscape: its almost impossible layout, which from the distance looks like a thin, meandering path carved in a vertical forest; the palpable fragility and instability of the entire infrastructure, denoted by all sorts of ‘danger’ and ‘caution’ signs and evinced by persistent landslides wearing away the road surface, crumbling slopes and culverts eroded or collapsed by the action of water; its unsettling atmosphere, composed by the coming and going of roaring engines muffled by thick masses of fog crawling up the cordillera; and the ubiquitous remnants of deadly events, differently marked with plaques, shrines and fragments of debris scattered throughout the road.
To traverse the trampoline of death’s exceptional landscape would most probably make the traveller feel that he is inhabiting a ‘world apart’, as the journalist euphemistically puts it. Still, for the inhabitants of regions traditionally deemed as peripheral, isolated, excluded from or yet to be assimilated into the state, regions most commonly known in official and academic language as fronteras internas (internal frontiers), infrastructures like the trampoline of death have long been the norm rather than the exception. In Colombia, where the sum of these regions is still variously estimated to comprise from three‐quarters to one‐half of the country’s total area, such infrastructures, commonly branded as trochas (trails), abound, their ruinous and neglected state often projected to the entire territory and population they encompass. This image is similarly echoed in the frontier, where these infrastructures are heavily invested with enduring feelings and memories of isolation, exclusion and abandonment from the state. Inversely, the building of smooth paved roads annihilating spatial barriers and shrinking geographical distances constitutes an everyday expectation, one that powerfully embodies the long‐awaited promise of development, progress and inclusion.
The evocative power that roads have as physical structures that express feelings and visions of modernity, backwardness, abjection or development, has been widely stressed.2 This affective dimension of roads is especially manifest in ‘peripheral’ or ‘marginal’ spaces, where they are conspicuous by their incomplete or precarious state.3 Precariousness and incompleteness, however, do not undermine the vital role roads have played in the history of these regions. This role is both related to their function as intrinsic technologies of state‐building and to their singular significance in such spaces, where they have been customarily seen as infrastructures aimed at symbolically and physically civilizing ‘savage’ or ‘backward’ lands and populations through the interwoven ends they are meant to assist and achieve: colonization, sovereignty, legibility, security and development.4
This view prevailed for many years in scholarly accounts of the frontier in the Amazon, where they came to be regarded as a primary means to materialize popular slogans such as ‘land without men for men without land’.5 The racial, environmental and social violence that this image sustained has been amply documented and criticized, throwing light on the conflicts shaping frontier processes throughout the region.6 The road from Pasto to Puerto Asís, of which the trampoline of death is one of several fragments (Figure I.1), provides a clear example of the state’s civilizing project and the violence this rhetoric has historically sustained. This violence can be traced through the road’s many characters, conflicts and events, as well as in the entangled political and social dynamics it has assisted. Although this violence has not deprived the road of its promise of connection and inclusion, it has revealed the political economies and ecologies of infrastructural development region wide. More significantly, this violence speaks of the spatio‐temporal process of state‐building and of the role the frontier has played throughout it.
Frontier Road critically examines this process through an ethnographic and historical exploration of this singular infrastructure, from its inception in the nineteenth century to the present and through its various shapes and transfigurations: indigenous and cauchero (rubber tapper) trail, missionary bridle path, colonization dirt road and interoceanic megaproject. In reconstructing this history, I show how the Colombian Amazon was constituted and assimilated into the order of the state as a frontier space and, in turn, how this condition of frontier became vital to the existence of this order. In this sense, I argue that this territory has never been excluded from the spatial and political order of the state, but rather incorporated to this order through a relationship of inclusive exclusion. The meaning and nature of this relationship, to be discussed later in this chapter, confronts traditional notions of the state and the frontier. Yet the purpose of the book, as I hope will become clear in due course, is not just to question such notions, but also, and more importantly, to expose how they have helped legitimate a hegemonic political, social and spatial order.
Colombia’s amputated map
Among the various connotations of the term ‘frontier’ (territorial or national boundary, zone of contact between different cultures, fringe of settled areas, safety valve), one of the most lasting connotations has been that of wild and untamed spaces embodying the antithesis of civilization. This image has long pervaded representations of the Colombian Amazon and other ‘internal frontiers’, consistently portrayed in the media as no man’s lands or stateless territories occupied and controlled by subversive or outlaw forces.7 Most significantly, this constitutes an image that constantly surfaces in the historiography when elucidating Colombia’s ‘unfinished’ or ‘failed’ project of nation building. This is particularly the case of the scholarship concerned with the country’s long history of violence and political conflict, the origins and persistence of which tend to be explained in terms of a ‘fragmented’, ‘weak’, ‘precarious’, ‘absent’ or ‘co‐opted’ state.8 These adjectives are especially pervasive when alluding to internal frontiers, and regularly overlap with moral ones so that isolation and neglect are conflated with backwardness, lawlessness and violence.
When seen from a long‐term perspective, this view is often linked to the broader premise that the country’s geography constitutes a key factor explaining the singular features of its economic, social, and political history. Expressions such as ‘fragmentation’, ‘isolation’, ‘atomization’, ‘dispersion’ and ‘complexity’ form part of a shared vocabulary used within the historical and geographical literature to depict the manifold direct or indirect, and mostly negative, influences of geography on the country’s historical development.9
An illustrating example of a geographical approach to Colombia’s history can be found in Colombia. Fragmented land, divided society (Safford and Palacios 2002), a reference book that provides a condensed historical account of the country from pre‐Columbian times to the late‐twentieth century. The burden of geography on the country’s history, strongly emphasized in the book’s title and its cover (showing the gloomy portrait, typical of nineteenth‐century iconography, of a White traveller carried through the cordillera on the back of a sillero, see Figure I.2) is summarized at the beginning of the introduction as follows:
Colombia’s history has been shaped by its spatial fragmentation, which has found expression in economic atomization and cultural differentiation. The country’s historically most populated areas have been divided by its three mountain ranges, in each of which are embedded many small valleys. The historical dispersion of much of the population in isolated mountain pockets long delayed the development of transportation and the formation of an integrated national market. It also fostered the development of particularized local and regional cultures. Politically, this dispersion has manifested itself in regional antagonism and local rivalries, expressed in the nineteenth century in civil war and in at least part of the twentieth century in intercommunity violence
(Safford and Palacios 2002, p. ix).
Figure I.2 ‘The mount of Agony’, engraved by Émile Maillard after a sketch by André and Riou.
Source: André 1877, p.363.
Throughout the book, the authors strongly emphasize the relationship between the country’s spatial and political fragmentation, and how this situation has historically been both a cause and a reflection of Colombia’s long‐standing difficulties in attempting to build a solid nation state. The internal frontiers, on the other hand, are conspicuous by their absence, except when it comes to stressing the violent dynamics associated with them, or with their marginal significance within the country’s history. One of the few references made to them in the text, for instance, reads: ‘Colombia’s other great forested region, the Putumayo and Amazonia, was visited by few Spanish‐speaking Colombians until the twentieth century. And even now these regions are only partly integrated to the national polity and economy’ (Safford and Palacios 2002, p.9); another alludes to the boom of extractive economies at the dawn of the twentieth century: ‘In more than half of the territory of Colombia, a violent frontier society emerged of which the national state had little knowledge and over which it had even less control’ (p.278).
Even more telling is the map that accompanies the book’s introduction (Figure I.3), where such territories are partly removed or dissected, partly shown blank and otherwise filled with the map conventions. This amputated map, different versions of which can be found reproduced indefinitely in official atlases and history textbooks, strongly reflects and reinforces the dominant image of the frontier as vast peripheral zones falling within the country’s geographical borders yet lying beyond the limits of the state.
Figure I.3 ‘Relief map, with some cities at the end of the colonial period’.
Source: Safford and Palacios 2002, p.2, quoted from McFarlane 1993, p.11.
The prevailing, and seemingly obvious, answer to the question of why a significant portion of the country still constitutes an internal frontier, is that the state has historically been too weak or simply unwilling to reach and control its peripheral regions. As noted, this constitutes an explanation in which geography is given a great causal weight, and which manifests itself in statements such as ‘Colombia tiene más geografía que estado’ [Colombia’s geography surpasses the state] (cited in García and Espinosa 2011, p.53), an often quoted expression from the former vice president Gustavo Bell. This explanation, moreover, largely stems from a tendency to conceive the state in a Weberian way or – as the classical definition goes – as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber 1998, p.78, emphasis in original). Put differently, in this view the state’s degree of ‘success’ – or failure – is measured against its capacity to exert physical control or domination over a given territory.
In accordance with this view, the relation between the frontier and the state is perceived as a sort of zero‐sum game where the expansion of one is expressed in the contraction of the other or – in Ratzelian terms (1896) – as an ‘organic’ outward movement from centre to periphery against which the strength of the state is measured. The preservation and proliferation of all sorts of frontiers in the body politic of nation‐states, suggests however that the former constitute spaces whose role is central for the very existence of the state (Serje 2011; Hansen and Stepputat 2005; Das and Poole 2004). In what follows, I relate this role with the notion of exception as a way to elucidate its nature and show how it leads to a different understanding of the state.
The frontier as a space of exception
If we see the frontier as a space that does not lie outside the order of the state and yet at the same time a space that is by definition opposed and external to this order or, at a broader level, as a condition of ‘being outside, and yet belonging’ (Agamben 2005, p.35), the question is how to situate this space within the architecture of this order. In addressing this question, we need to look at the relationship between exception, sovereign power and violence. This relationship was first theorized by Carl Schmitt (1985 [1922]), who argued that the legal figure of the state of exception is a crucial mechanism to guarantee the existence of the state. The main premise underlying this argument, which underpins the German legal‐theorist critique of liberal constitutionalism, is that the integrity of the state is constantly threatened by situations of conflict and disorder. As such situations cannot be totally anticipated and hence legally prescribed, the sovereign, whose raison d'être is the preservation of the state, cannot be subjected to the rule of law but instead allowed to suspend the law in the name of exception. In Schmitt’s words, the rationale behind the state of exception – which he characterizes broadly as ‘a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like’ (Schmitt 1985, p.6) – resides in the premise that ‘there is no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists’ (Schmitt 1985, p.13).
Schmitt’s view of the state of exception as a sine qua non of sovereign power is of paramount importance in appreciating the role of frontiers in the constitution of the state and other forms of political rule. Schmitt himself later examined this role in the context of Europe’s appropriation of the New World, a process that according to the author consisted of a series of bordering practices through which the Americas were juridically delimited as a ‘free space’ within which ‘force could be used freely and ruthlessly’ (Schmitt 2006 [1950]).10 Schmitt’s description of this process sharply captures the way in which the New World was built as vast frontier space, and how this space was instrumental in the making of a global (European) imperial order centred on the secular sovereignty of territorial states. Still, from Schmitt’s perspective, the frontier is seen as a transient moment in the historical development of Europe’s state system, just as the state of exception is justified as an imperative yet contingent means to protect the integrity of the state. It is through Giorgio Agamben’s reconceptualization of this concept that we can come to understand the frontier as an immanent – rather than a spatially and historically bounded – condition of sovereign power.
Drawing upon Walter Benjamin’s dictum that the state of exception has turned into the rule (Benjamin 1969, p.257), Agamben argues that the essence of exception is not that it designates a geographical or juridical space external to law but that it constitutes a relation that lies at its very heart and thus cannot be dissociated from it. In this sense, he points out that ‘the exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule’, to which he adds that ‘we shall give the name of relation of exception to the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion’ (Agamben 1998, p.18). Put differently, in Agamben’s reading of sovereignty, what characterizes the exception is not the act of juridical designation and suppression of ‘chaos’ (Schmitt) nor the ‘state of nature’ that precedes civil society (e.g. Hobbes), but a relationship of inclusive exclusion through which state power is constituted and preserved.
Agamben’s contention that the state of exception constitutes a paradigm of government rather than a contingency measure allows an understanding of frontiers as spaces lying at the core rather than the periphery of the state order. This centrality, however, requires conceiving power in a topological rather than a topographical way – that is, not in terms of location and distance but in the spatial overlaps and porous borders between inclusion and exclusion or inside and outside (Allen 2011; Harvey 2012). The inclusive‐exclusive relationship between state and frontier (the act by which the former subjects the latter by situating it in a relation of exteriority to law and order) is a clear example of a power topology that operates by establishing margins and borders that simultaneously include and exclude, or, in Agamben’s own terms, by defining a ‘threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other’ (Agamben 2005, p.23).
The bond between sovereignty and violence is firmly grounded in this topological relation of inclusive exclusion. This is so because as long as sovereign power resides in the permanent – and inalienable – capacity to suspend law in the name of exception, the preservation of ‘chaos’ (regardless of its temporal, spatial or political expression and its different incarnations: barbarian, primitive, savage, outcast, etc.) and its placing in a relation of opposition to ‘order’ is fundamental in every sense. Violence is exercised and legitimized through this relation of opposition, and remains unsanctioned as long as this relationship is maintained.11
There are plenty of instances of this (sovereign) violence in the spatial history of Colombia’s Amazon frontier, many of which are rooted in this relationship of opposition and evidence how the frontier and the state have been constructed as two antagonistic yet indivisible orders: antagonistic, as they have been built up through a series of binary constructions (‘civilization’ vs. ‘savagery’, ‘order’ vs. ‘chaos’, ‘Andes’ vs. ‘selva’, ‘White’ vs. ‘Indian’ and so forth); and indivisible, for these same constructions have, since their inception, been mutually dependent and reinforcing. Put differently, this constitutes a relationship of opposition that has to be perpetuated, for it is through this opposition that the illusion of legitimacy of the state is sustained.
Rethinking the state and the frontier
The view of frontiers as spaces underpinning political control and violence has been variously formulated in the Colombian context.12 Among this literature, the most systematic and exhaustive attempt so far to relate the production of frontiers with the origins and historical trajectory of the nation state is found in Margarita Serje’s (2011) El revés de la nación. Territorios salvajes, fronteras y tierras de nadie [The reverse of the nation. Wild territories, frontiers, and no man’s lands]. Serje’s work constitutes a far‐reaching journey throughout the multiple metaphors and discursive constructions through which territorial peripheries, margins or frontiers have been crafted in time and space, as well as the vital role these constructions have played in the consolidation of a hegemonic project of nation state.
This journey, which the author describes as ‘an ethnography of the production of context’, encompasses a wide array of characters and representational forms, from nineteenth‐century foreign travellers and criollo elites’ narratives and visions of the country’s geography, to contemporary academics’ discourses on the ‘fragmented’ character of the nation state in its various expressions, to official and non‐governmental old and new recipes for ‘development’, and to NGO’s and hippies’ essentialist views on the preservation of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. The notion of context is of particular relevance, as it illustrates the process through which these narratives and views have become entrenched or established, thus determining ‘a particular way of reading and interpreting reality as well as the ways in which it is possible to intervene upon it’ (Serje 2011, p.37).
Serje’s work constitutes a valuable effort to critically interrogate the historical and historiographical silences, erasures and misrepresentations through which frontier spaces have been discursively constructed, along with the continuous violence this process has entailed. Frontier Road is also concerned with the role of frontiers in state‐building discourses and practices, and shares the view that state power is intimately linked to the preservation of different sorts of margins and borders. My focus on infrastructure, however, seeks to emphasize the importance of investigating not only the discursive but the material dimensions and everyday workings of power, an aspect that is absent in Serje’s view of the frontier. In this sense, this book departs from, and aims to question, the view of such spaces as abstract constructions whose reality is solely confined to the realm of representation.
As I previously observed, there is little question about the violence that hegemonic constructions of the world have on people’s lives and the spaces they inhabit. However, I argue that any attempt to unveil or historicize the genealogy of such constructions, must deal not only with their discursive or rhetorical dimensions but also with the localized contexts and material forms in which they originate and develop. Such an attempt will reveal that margins, peripheries or frontiers are not a passive locus of sovereign power (or, conversely, resistance) but concrete spaces where the power and knowledge practices of the state, capital or development are unevenly manifested and variously contested (Das and Poole 2004).13
In describing how the spatial history of the frontier has been shaped by a relationship of inclusive exclusion, I lay stress on the asymmetrical and violent nature of this relationship. Still, the very notion of relationship, uneven as it might be, implies interaction, which in other words means that margins or frontiers are not mere discursive projections of state or amorphous amalgamations of landscapes and peoples subjected to domination or, contrarily, sites of state resistance or avoidance. While this seems an obvious point, such notions of the frontier are commonly held and usually stem from the habit of seeing the state as an abstract force detached from or standing above society and nature. I would like to question this view by suggesting that state‐building processes can only be fully comprehended if we take into consideration their discursive and material dimensions and, more crucially, the ways in which they are connected and mutually produced.
There are two related corollaries that stem from this assumption that are central to my argument on infrastructure. The first is that any attempt to approach the state ethnographically (e.g. by deconstructing and mapping the layers and practices through which it is configured, performed, contested and subverted) will find that it is far from a homogeneous and monolithic structure. This point has been particularly highlighted in anthropological literature, which has cast light on the relationships and interactions between the state and society, community, and culture.14 Paying close attention to these relationships and interactions, as this literature suggests, represents a central task in studying the state, for they constitute an inherent – rather than incidental – aspect of state‐making.
The second corollary is that these relationships and interactions cannot obscure the ways in which the power and agency of the state depends on its image as a self‐contained and autonomous entity. In other words, as argued by Timothy Mitchell (2006), the task of studying the state implies not only refusing to take for granted binary constructions of political and social reality but accounting for why and how these constructions are produced. Regardless of the way we conceive the state (an ‘instrument’ of class domination, the ‘monopoly of violence’ on a given territory, an ‘effect’ of governmental or power technologies) this dual nature is essential to grasp the way in which it is crafted and manifests itself in practice. The main reason is that, in order to understand how power operates and is maintained, we have to account for the layers (material and discursive, symbolic and physical, concrete and abstract) through which it is produced and maintained.
Infrastructure, and roads in particular, provide a powerful means to examine state‐building processes through those layers and the imbrications between them. At a very basic level, roads are physical structures that shape space in different ways, by enabling (and sometimes hindering) movement, settlement and control. Quite often, moreover, roads are part of larger policies and plans, from colonization schemes to the establishment of trade networks and the policing of territories. In this sense, they are structures that involve multiple actors and conflicts, and embody bureaucratic, ideological and political practices. Roads are built through engineering as much as they are built through such practices, and in this way not only constitute state technologies that shape or reshape space but configure spaces where the layers of the state are made visible.
Map of the book
In writing a spatial history of the Colombian Amazon that attends to such layers and their connections, I have sought to attend to the localized and concrete effects of power without losing sight of the larger power structures and processes at play. Thus, in retracing the history of the road, my central purpose has not been to build a chronological narrative of this infrastructure, but rather to situate its different characters, conflicts and events within the wider, long‐duration process of state and frontier‐making in the Amazon.
The first part of the book delves into the origins and consolidation of this process by narrating how the road was conceived and built, a story that begins with the early‐nineteenth‐century post‐independence quest for geographical integration, and culminates in the early 1930s with the conclusion of the 230 kilometre bridle path connecting the Andean city of Pasto with the port town of Puerto Asís. This part draws extensively on government and missionary reports, travel narratives, cartographic representations, photographs and other archive sources in Bogotá, Putumayo and Barcelona. These documentary sources, which together constitute a practice of state‐building, shed important light on the creative destructive process through which the Amazon was discursively and physically constructed as a frontier space.
Chapter One looks at the colonial genealogy of this process, as reflected through the rhetorical construction of the Andes cordillera as a physical and symbolic barrier separating ‘civilization’ from ‘savagery’. The preservation of this image in nineteenth‐century historical, geographical and cartographical representations of Colombia, constitutes a central background against which the vision of roads as powerful civilizing infrastructures emerged. In discussing how this vision became dominant, this chapter examines the exemplary figure of Rafael Reyes, a central character in the history of the Amazon and Colombia. The anatomy of Reyes in his different roles of entrepreneur, explorer and president, as well as a pioneer character in the history of the road, serves to reveal the violent ways through which the Amazon region was incorporated into the imaginary and spatial order of Colombia’s nation state.
Chapters Two and Three tell the story of how this vision was put into practice. This is largely a story of struggle and violence amongst humans and between humans and nature that involves statesmen, Indians, missionaries, engineers, workers, colonos and other characters directly or indirectly engaged in the colossal project of opening a route across the rugged topography of the Andean‐Amazon region. I place special emphasis on the relationship between the symbolic violence implied in the civilization/savagery dichotomy and the different forms of physical violence that this dichotomy sustained: the opening of the road ‘breaking’ the Andes through human labour and dynamite, the harsh political disputes over its control, the rampant grabbing of indigenous lands, and the persistent manifestations of confinement and abandonment from the colonos who worked in the road or arrived through it. The road’s quotidian conflicts and dramas, together with the larger dynamics this infrastructure assisted or supported, fully epitomizes the ways in which the Amazon was assimilated into the order of the state as a frontier space. In discussing the rituals and practices through which this order was crafted and reinforced, I reflect on the notion of hegemony, and particularly on how it allows understanding of the everyday workings of state power.
From the early history of the road, the second part of the book turns to an ethnographic exploration of some of the instances in which the frontier–state relationship manifests in the daily life of the frontier, and of the different responses it elicits. Although these instances are diverse, they all draw attention to how transport infrastructures affect and shape people’s lives in numerous ways. Chapter Four, for instance, reflects on conversations with different people (a local historian, a truck driver and a road activist), whose narratives bring to the fore the affective and lived realities that the trampoline of death provokes, from the hazardous practice of driving through its fragile and precipitous topography to enduring sentiments and memories of isolation, death, abandonment and fear. At the same time, however, these narratives show how frontier peoples make sense of and call into question their relationship with the state in spatial, historical and moral terms.
Chapter Five explores the question of state legibility in the context of a controversial road megaproject aimed at replacing the trampoline of death. The passage of the new road through an area of forests rich in biodiversity has been a point of contention on environmental and social grounds. Moreover, while the project has been promoted nationally and regionally as a prime example of sustainable development, the many conflicts and obstacles it has faced reveal the widening gap between its goals and outcomes. This gap was particularly evidenced in the policies and practices aimed at clarifying the complex land tenure situation in the project’s area of influence. These policies and practices exposed the forms of knowledge and expertise through which this area was turned into an object of government intervention. However, they not only failed in bringing legibility to the area but actually made it more illegible. Through a detailed account of this process, I show how this ‘illegibility effect’ was produced, and how it generated multiple interactions and conflicts between state authorities, project officers and local communities.
Finally, Chapter Six focuses on the turbulent resettlement process of a community of forcibly displaced people illegally occupying a section of the road project’s area. Through an ethnography of this community, this chapter investigates the political practices through which displaced peoples struggle for their rights, from the ‘pirating’ of public services and strategies to avoid eviction, to the everyday disputes and negotiations with local politicians and state institutions. I emphasize the unstable and often violent character of such practices in order to draw attention to the potentials and limits of what I call ‘the politics of the displaced’, as well as to highlight the exclusionary politics through which displaced peoples are included into the order of the state.
From the nineteenth‐century utopian plans to civilize the Amazon through the building of waterways and road networks to the everyday conflicts and practices related to the current road megaproject, Frontier Road shows how a frontier was made and how it has remained. As noted, this is a story that involves many characters and events. Some of them encompass the entire Colombian Amazon and beyond, others the region of Putumayo – where the road is located – while others are confined to the physical space of this infrastructure or even fragments of it. All, however, relate to a territory that is relatively well defined in historical and geographical terms. Nevertheless, in reflecting upon these events and characters, I argue that the real meaning of frontiers transcends a specific spatial, temporal, or social context, and rather speaks of a condition of inclusive exclusion, regardless of the ways or forms in which it is expressed and materialized. I conclude this book by posing the road in parallel to other situations that affirm the violent effects of this condition, and render visible the borders and margins through which it is sustained in time and through space.
Notes
1
The term
páramo
refers to a grassland ecosystem located mainly in the upper parts of the northern Andes, in altitudes generally ranging from 3,000 to 4,500 metres above sea level.
2
This dimension has been especially addressed by ethnographic accounts of roads outside the so‐called ‘modern West’. See, for example: Campbell (2012); Columbijn (2002); Dalakoglou (2012); Harvey (2005); Kirskey & van Bilsen (2002); Lye (2005); Nishizaki (2008); Pandya (2002); Pina‐Cabral (1987); Roseman (1996); and Thomas (2002).
3
See, for example: Campbell and Hetherington (2014); Harvey (2014); Harvey and Knox (2012); and Kernaghan (2012).
4
A clear example of this view can be found in Frederick Jackson Turner’s classic account of the American frontier, where he defined the development of transport networks westward as ‘lines of civilization’ and their frantic expansion as ‘the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent’ (Turner 2008, p.22).
5
This view was particularly prevalent from the 1940s to the 1970s among geographers and frontier historians influenced by Turner, Bowman, Bolton and other classical frontier theorists, who often portrayed roads as vital technologies to advance and develop the frontier. See, for example: Aiton (1994); Brücher (1968, 1970); Crist & Guhl (1947); Crist & Nissley (1973); Hegen (1963, 1966); James (1941); Townsend (1977); and Wesche (1974).
6
Since the 1970s, many scholars began to critically examine frontier processes, recurrently criticizing and denouncing their violent character. Dispossession of indigenous lands, environmental destruction, uncontrolled resource extraction and social conflict constitute some of the interwoven dynamics most commonly cited in this literature to describe such processes (see, for instance: Duncan & Markoff 1978; Foweraker 1981; Schmink 1982; and Schmink & Hood 1984). In the context of the Colombian Amazon see: Ciro (2009); Domínguez (1984, 2005); Fajardo (1996); Gomez (2011); Ortiz (1984); and Pineda (1987, 2003). A number of studies and monographs have specifically addressed the social conflicts and environmental impacts associated with road building, though most of this literature has focused primarily on the Brazilian Amazon (e.g. Fernside 2007; Moran 1981; Nepstad
et al
. 2001; Oliviera & de Moura 2014; Oliviera
et al
. 2005; Perz 2014; and Stewart 1994).
7
For a general historiographical review of the concept of frontier see Londoño (2003); Weber (1986) and Weber and Rausch (1994). In the context of Colombia see García (2003); Polo (2010); and Rausch (2003).
8
See, among others: Bolívar (1999, 2003); Bushnell (1993); García
et al
. (2011); González (1977); González, Bolívar and Vásquez (2003); Guhl (1991); Palacios (2007); Pécaut (1987, 2003); Safford & Palacios (2002); and Uribe (2001, pp.271–294). This argument has also been used to explain political fragmentation and interregional conflicts following independence and throughout the nineteenth century (e.g. Jaramillo 1984; Palacios 1980; and Park 1985).
9
Such influence has been emphasized in history and geography textbooks alike, as well as historical monographs. Among others, see Guhl (1976); Legrand (1986); McFarlane (1993); Melo (1986); Rausch (1999); and Reichel‐Dolmatoff (1965). For a similar approach discussing the effects of Colombia’s geography on economic development see: Gallup, Gaviria and Lora (2003); and Montenegro (2006). The costs and technical difficulties imposed by Colombia’s topography on the building of railroads and roads constitutes a problem that has also been repeatedly emphasized by transport historians and scholars (e.g. James 1923; Morales 1997; Pachón & Ramírez 2006; Rippy 1943; Safford 2010; and Salazar 2000).
10
More recently, Schmitt’s concept of exception has been taken up by a growing number of scholars interested in examining the relationship exception and political rule in a wide array of historical and geographical contexts. See, among others: Belcher
et al
. (2008); Legg & Vasudevan (2011); Mbembe (2003); Minca (2007); and Minca and Vaughn‐Williams (2012).
11
Although Agamben’s genealogy of the state of exception has been rightly criticized for neglecting the role in this process of colonialism and imperialism (Gregory 2006; Shenhav 2012), his theoretical and spatial approach to this concept has influenced a wide array of scholarship concerned with the subject of colonial and postcolonial sovereignty. This scholarship has critically examined the different ways in which exception has become constitutive to sovereign power in numerous historical and contemporary contexts and spaces, from colonial regimes and imperial projects to counter‐subversion and anti‐terrorism legislations, and to occupied territories, border crossings, refugee and migrant detentions camps, among others (see Svirsky and Bignall 2012 for a collection of works exploring the relevance of Agamben’s work for colonial and postcolonial studies). Some authors, moreover, have theorized or explored the concept of frontier through the lens of exception, stressing how political sovereignty is often dependent on and realised through the production and maintenance of different types of margins or borders (e.g. Das Poole 2004; Hansen and Stepputat 2005; and Sundberg 2015).
12
For a discussion on the role of nineteenth‐century imageries of frontier regions in the historical development of the nation state see Arias (2005); Múnera (2005) and Palacio (2006). In the context of the Amazon, the most thorough examination of the mimetic connection between colonial violence and representation can be found in Michael Taussig’s
Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. A study on terror and healing
(1991). Ramírez (2011) has explored the relationship between dominant representations of peasant communities and practices of state legitimation and violence in the context of the 1990s
cocalero
movements (in this same context see also Vásquez 2006). More recently, Wylie (2013) has examined the literary constructions of the Putumayo from the mid‐nineteenth century to the present.
13
In the specific context of the Colombian Amazon there is a growing number of studies exploring and discussing local or endogenous processes of state‐making, focusing mainly on actors, social conflicts and everyday political practices; see, particularly: Ramírez (2011); Ramírez
et al
. (2010); Torres (2007, 2011); and Zárate (2008). The issue of infrastructure, however, remains largely unexplored in the region, although it is becoming a topic of ethnographic interest in other parts of the Amazon (see, for example, Campbell 2012; Harvey 2012; and Harvey and Knox 2015).
14
For a general overview of this literature see, among others: Das and Poole (2004); Hansen and Stepputat (2001); Krohn‐Hansen and Nustad (2005); Sharma and Gupta (2006); and Trouillot (2001). Other historical and ethnographic studies that have paid special attention to the social and cultural forms in which the state is embedded and reproduced include Carroll (2006); Coronil (1997); Kernaghan (2009); Nugent (1994); and Taussig (1997).
Part I
1Reyes’ dream
Is not the secret of the state, hidden because it is so obvious, to be found in space? (Lefebvre 2009, p.228)
The December 30th sessions of the Second Pan‐American Conference, hosted by Mexico from October 1901 to January 1902, were marked by a special event. On the date in question, General Rafael Reyes (see Figure 1.1), Colombian plenipotentiary to France and one of the country’s delegates to the Conference, spoke of his explorations in the Amazon region in the 1870s, during which time he and his brothers were exporting quinine to Europe and North America. The presentation was not part of the ordinary Conference schedule, and despite the repeated insistence of his colleagues to ‘reveal’ his discoveries, Reyes, we are told, fearing ‘he might be suspected of seeking notoriety by drawing public attention to his own person’, was reluctant to break his ‘modest silence’ (Reyes 1979, p.5). Surely this gesture was more about a gentleman’s etiquette, for the General not only jealously treasured his expedition notes but did not miss a chance to entertain his colleagues in private with his stories. No doubt he had repeatedly referred to his recent encounter in New York with President Theodore Roosevelt, to whom he gave an account of his journeys and presented his ambitious navigation project of the Amazon and its main tributaries. Mr Roosevelt, the eulogistic chronicler tells us, after enthusiastically listening to Reyes’ account of the immense territory ‘revealed’ by him and his brothers, uttered the following words: ‘That region is a New World undoubtedly, destined to promote the progress and welfare of humanity’ (Reyes 1979, p.5). Supposedly, following this encouraging encounter, Roosevelt had personally recommended that the US representative at the Conference use his ‘best influence’ in order to persuade the other delegates to give special consideration to his project. As for the Colombian General, with his discoveries having been praised by Roosevelt in such terms, he now felt it was a ‘moral duty’ to share them with his colleagues in Congress.
Figure 1.1 Rafael Reyes 1913.
Source: Library of Congress.
