Article

Environment and Planning D: Society and

Space
Illegible infrastructures: Road 0(0) 1–19
! The Author(s) 2018
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state-spaces in the DOI: 10.1177/0263775818788358
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Colombian Amazon

Sim

on Uribe
University of El Rosario, Colombia

Abstract
The Amazon is currently experiencing a rapid growth in the building of transport infrastructures.
While national governments have portrayed infrastructure development as greatly enhancing
economic and geographical integration, critical approaches largely describe such development
as a destructive process of resource extraction and dispossession. While these views differ
radically in relation to the ends and effects of current and future infrastructure projects, they
both conceive infrastructure as reflective of an inexorable process of state and capitalist expan-
sion region-wide. Less attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which this very process is
conditioned, and sometimes hindered, by a wide array of normative, social and political (dis)
orders. In this paper, I draw attention to the ever conflicting and contingent nature of infrastruc-
ture building through an ethnographic account of the land conflicts present in an ongoing road
project in the Colombian region of Putumayo. Specifically, I look at the tensions and disputes
arising from the project’s attempts to make a target space and population legible in order to make
them governable. By showing how such attempts have consistently failed and led the project into
various states of suspension and uncertainty, the paper sheds light on the deep embedding of
infrastructure in everyday dynamics of state-making and unmaking.

Keywords
Infrastructure development, logistical spaces, roads, government, state-building

Introduction
During the last two decades, the Amazon has seen a surge in investment in infrastructure.
Most of this investment is linked to the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional

Corresponding author:
Sim

on Uribe, University of El Rosario, Calle 12C No. 6-25, Ed. Santa Fe, Of. 208, Bogotá, Colombia.
Email: simon.uribem@urosario.edu.co
2 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0)

Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA),1 a massive regional initiative launched in 2000

which contemplates the development of national and transnational infrastructure projects in
the fields of energy, communications and transport. In the Amazon, one of IIRSA’s ten
‘Strategic hubs’,2 there were 72 recently completed or active projects (in the stages of
profiling, pre-execution or execution) in 2016, totaling an investment of 27 billion USD
(Cosiplan, 2016). The projects were distributed in eight geographical sub-zones and were
comprised mainly of port facilities, logistical centers, and ground and river transportation
gravitating around the Amazon River basin.
IIRSA’s cartographic representations of the Amazon envisage the whole region as a
logistical space composed of waterways, railways, highways, roads and river and sea
ports assembled along multimodal corridors. A prominent feature of such representations
is the presence of the Andes mountain range, seen as an obstacle hindering access to the
Amazon from the west and to the Pacific from the east. This vision is plainly expressed in the
following excerpt from IIRSA’s diagnosis of the Amazon Hub:

In this Hub, existing and planned infrastructure is marked by the presence of the Andes and the
vast Amazon Basin, the largest river basin in the world. Thus, two rather different realities
coexist. On the one hand, there is a territory framed between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean,
where road transportation prevails, followed by a small proportion of railways, both of which
enable a connection with a network of major ports located along the Pacific coast and shared by
Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. On the other hand, there is the Amazon basin, which has its
source in the eastern slopes of the Andes and finds its way to the Atlantic ocean through a vast
network of navigable rivers. (Cosiplan, 2016: 50–51)

IIRSA’s notion of physical infrastructure as the means to overcome geographical obstacles

obstructing national and regional integration is not new, and can be traced back to nine-
teenth and 20th-century utopian plans of continental and intercontinental railways, naviga-
tion, and communication networks (Mart
ınez, 2013; Salvatore, 2006; Sch€affner, 2008;
Uribe, 2017). However, the fact that the IIRSA constitutes the first government level coor-
dinated effort aimed at harmonizing transport policies region-wide and at securing long-
term funding for infrastructure, has been translated in the current development of new
projects or the reactivation of old ones. The high number of projects under construction
or in the planning process, together with the neoliberal emphasis on the catalytic role of
infrastructure in economic competitiveness, inevitably evokes a rapid process of ‘time–space
compression’ on a great scale, and of transformation of vast territories into spaces of capital
accumulation, absorption and circulation (Harvey, 2006, 1990). As a case in point, in his
latest work geographer David Harvey refers to IIRSA as an exemplary story that illustrates
‘how the world’s geography has been and is being constantly made, remade and sometimes
even destroyed in order to absorb rapidly accumulating surpluses of capital’ (Harvey,
2016: 15).
Much of criticism of the IIRSA has been framed within this narrative of capitalism,
laying emphasis on the linkage between infrastructure projects and state-sponsored extrac-
tive and agribusiness economies (Barkin, 2009; Fl
orez, 2007; Villegas, 2013; Zibechi, 2006),
land and resource dispossession (Chaparro, 2015; Oliveira et al., 2005) and neoliberal
dynamics of uneven geographical development (Chiarella, 2011; Kanai, 2016; Little, 2014;
Oliveira and Moura, 2014). While this literature has drawn attention to the political econ-
omy and ecologies of current and future infrastructure development in the region, it has
largely overlooked the extent to which such development is deeply embedded, and actively
participates, in the production of a wide array of normative, social and political disorders
Uribe 3

which in turn affects the planning and building of infrastructure projects in several ways.
Specifically, it has paid little attention to the manners in which infrastructure and state-
building are entangled practices that create and are shaped by interactions at different levels
and spatial scales. When seen from this perspective, current infrastructure development
appears less of a smooth and rapid process paving the way for capital expansion and
space shrinking, but rather like a highly fragmented, disrupted and unstable terrain.
In this paper, I draw on ten years of ethnographic research carried out on a road project
in the Putumayo region of Colombia with the aim of casting light on the political and
technical frictions, normative ambiguities, and social uncertainties inherent to the building
of transport infrastructure in the region. The project, aimed at building a 45-kilometer road
in the Andean-Amazon foothills, one of the world’s most biodiverse regions (WWF, 2011),
has implications at different levels. For Putumayo’s inhabitants, the project constitutes a
long-awaited promise to replace a single-track dirt road built in the 1930s, infamously
known as the ‘Trampoline of death’ due to its precarious and dangerous condition.
Regionally, within IIRSA’s projects portfolio, it is classified as the ‘anchor project’ or key
component of a large multimodal corridor aimed at connecting the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans through Brazil and Colombia. Finally, at national level, it is conceived as a crucial
infrastructure for the physical integration and control of a region heavily affected by
Colombia’s armed conflict, and is often portrayed as being synonymous with development
and peace-building.
Despite IIRSA’s emphasis on the centrality of the road within the Amazon Hub and the
political and social pressure at national and local levels, the project has fallen far short of its
target. Although the project was originally expected to be concluded by 2017 – during the
seventh year of its execution (IADB, 2009a) –, by the end of that year the works were
indefinitely suspended due to exhaustion of funds, with less than 30% of the road built
and amid legal problems concerning environmental and land issues. The image of unfinished
viaducts and bridges that appear to go nowhere and have since the stoppage of the project
become tourist hotspots for Putumayenses (Figure 1), powerfully captures the gulf between
the promise and uncertainty that infrastructure creates in a state of suspension.
Bureaucratic delays, legal vacuums, conflicts with communities inhabiting the project’s
zone and the complex geology and topography of the area, constitute some of the issues that
explain the large gap between the project’s goals and its actual performance. While some of
these issues will be discussed further in the paper, my aim here is not to describe in detail the
factors that account for the gap between the vision and implementation of this infrastruc-
ture, but to situate this gap within the practices of the state in the Putumayo. In particular,
I will focus on the subject of state legibility in the context of the road’s land policies as a
means to describe the legal, political, and social layers in which infrastructure is grounded
and aims to transform. In doing so, I seek to provide a more nuanced and dialectical
understanding of the state–society interactions produced by infrastructure.
The paper is structured in four sections. Section “Rendering time and space” discusses the
political and economic rationale of the San Francisco–Mocoa road project, laying emphasis
on its dual dimension as a space–time compression infrastructure within the IIRSA’s region-
al integration agenda and, at a national level, as a logistical government technique. With
regard to the latter, I examine the road’s goals and policies of socio-spatial legibility present
in the project’s models and policy assessments, pointing out how its area of influence was
turned into an object of government intervention and management. Section “Infrastructural
(il)legibility” focuses on the land right issues in this area, tracing their origins and the ways
in which they were transformed into an intricate land tenure system highly illegible to the
state and the project. Section “Becoming a ‘white elephant’” provides an ethnographic
4 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0)

Figure 1. Campucana Bridge, 2017.

Source: author photo.

account of the project’s efforts aimed at solving the land problems in its area of influence. In
showing how such efforts not only failed but had contradictory effects that significantly
affected the progress of the roadworks, I draw attention to the frictions and conflicts pro-
voked by infrastructure practices. Finally, in the conclusion, I present some reflections about
the relations between state practices and infrastructure in the Amazon region and highlight
the relevance that ethnography bears in the comprehension of these practices.

Rendering time and space

A significant, yet largely ignored aspect of infrastructure refers to temporality (Bowker,
2015; Hetherington, 2014; Hetherington and Campbell, 2014). The popular notion of infra-
structure as a ‘bridge’ to the future (Gupta, 2015), together with its capacity to embody
promises and expectations of progress, modernity development (Campbell, 2012; Harvey,
2005; Harvey and Knox, 2012; Larkin, 2013; Mrázek, 2002; Nishizaki, 2008), constitutes a
powerful image that emerges constantly in planning, engineering and political discourse.
This image is condensed and assumes a tangible form in the project’s models, an essential
component of infrastructure projects whose main purpose is to distract the observer
momentarily from the present and transport him to an imaginary future.
If one casts a glance at the numerous press notes, official PowerPoint presentations and
promotional videos for the San Francisco–Mocoa road project, one of the most striking
elements to be found, together with the detailed inventories listing the economic and social
benefits of the project, is precisely the rendered models (Figure 2). Of these there are many,
some dating from the design phase and others published at various moments during con-
struction work, and they focus on different elements or parts of the infrastructure: sectors of
road, moving vehicles and trucks, high bridges and large viaducts and tunnels, always
surrounded by a homogeneous environment. In spite of this diversity of elements, the proj-
ect models always emphasize or represent two specific features of the road. First, there is the
infrastructure itself, which invariably appears in the foreground and projects a frictionless
space–time, superimposed upon the mountainous topography of the Andes. In many ways,
Uribe 5

Figure 2. Rendered model of a section of the San Francisco–Mocoa road, 2014.

Source: www.varianteinterventoria.com/

this image invokes a ‘non-place’ (Augé, 1995), as it conjures a generic space and homoge-
neous time that exists only in relation to definite ends.
Secondly, there is the space surrounding the road, which always projects a seamless and
unvaried landscape. The visual effect that the project models create is in this sense simul-
taneously spatial and temporal, for they signal a radical rupture between a state of chaos
and disorder – the uneven and illegible geography of the Andes-Amazon frontier – and a
tamed, uniform space governed by the infrastructure. In sum, through the model, infra-
structure is projected both as a technology of time–space compression (Harvey, 1990), and
of space production (Kirsch, 1995; Lefebvre, 2009, 1991).
This dual function of infrastructure is evidenced in the project’s goals within the context
of the IIRSA and at national level. In the former, as the ‘anchor project’ of the Amazon
Hub project group no. 1, its ‘strategic function’ consists in improving the logistics of geo-
graphical and commercial integration at regional level, as well as facilitating the connection
between the Amazon Basin and the Pacific by overcoming the ‘geographical barrier’ of the
Andes (Cosiplan, 2016: 57). The temporal effect of infrastructure can be observed more
clearly in the radical impact of the future road upon the security and speed of the traffic of
goods and persons. Accordingly, the ‘project profile’ from the Inter-American Development
Bank (one of the project’s funding agencies), refers to the current road – the Trampoline of
death – as an obsolete infrastructure ‘without any kind of geometrical design’ and with
‘extremely dangerous driving conditions and a high toll of accidents causing death and
injuries’ (IADB, 2007: 2). In contrast to this desolating scenario, the projected road is
visualized as having an infrastructure with ‘careful technical specifications’ that guarantee
road safety, as well as enabling an average speed of 40 km per hour (at least twice the speed
of the current road), thereby making a significant reduction in transport time and costs
(IADB, 2007: 2).
At national level, the road not only promises to shrink geographical distances but also to
enable or facilitate state control over one of the country’s regions most affect by conflict.
This is emphatically expressed in the premise that the road ‘will foster a greater State
presence [in the Putumayo], strengthening local governance mechanisms’ (IADB, 2009a:
6 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0)

3). This premise is derived from the traditional vision of the Putumayo as a frontier territory
whose geographical isolation has been interpreted as being due to state absence or weakness,
thereby leading to the propagation of illicit activities and violent conflicts in the region. In
this sense, the road is perceived as an infrastructure that seeks to enable or strengthen state
authority over a conflict-ridden region or, following Mann’s notion of infrastructural
power, as a ‘logistical technique’ of government control and regulation over space and
society (Mann, 1984: 116).
The concept of the road as a government logistical technique is not limited to its direct
effects such as the improvement in the conditions of physical access to the territory, there-
fore leading to its political control. On a more profound level, its logistical significance is
linked to its objective of rendering certain spaces and populations legible in order to make
them governable (Scott, 1998). The project models are especially effective in this sense, as
they present the viewer with a space that appears perfectly legible, its topographical, social
and natural complexity highly simplified through the reproduction of standardized forms
and conventions. In other words, to quote Henri Lefebvre, the models create an ‘illusion of
transparency’ in which ‘space appears as luminous, as intelligible, as giving action free rein’
(Lefebvre, 1991: 27).
In the case of the San Francisco–Mocoa road project, the principle of legibility takes on
an additional connotation. The fact that the road design crosses a Forest Reserve located in
a zone considered as a ‘global conservation priority’ (WWF, 2011: 3), has resulted in numer-
ous environmental restrictions and compensation measures due to the current and potential
impacts of the project. Accordingly, legibility has been raised not just as an effect of the
infrastructure but also as an essential condition for its implementation, especially in relation
to the project’s goal to ‘conserve its ecosystems [of the region] and promote sustainable
economic and social development’ (IADB, 2009a: 3).
In practice, the need for legibility was addressed by the elaboration of extensive environ-
mental, political and social diagnostic studies on regional and local scales, as well as plan-
ning policies for the road’s area of influence. Notable among these studies is the Basic
Environmental and Social Plan for the Protected Forest Reserve of the upper Mocoa
river basin (Basic Plan onwards), conceived as a comprehensive plan for the management
of an area of about 70,000 hectares based on the generation of ‘unprecedented scientific
knowledge’ about it (IADB, 2009b: 97). The Basic Plan’s assessment reports gathered and
analyzed massive amounts of geological, biophysical, legal and socio-economic data which –
as with the project models – effectively project an ‘illusion of transparency’. Through them,
the physical and social complexity of the project’s area is simplified and turned into a series
of measurable variables subject to policy management. In this way, the Basic Plan’s reports
constitute a clear instance of the linkages between infrastructure building and political
control, where socio-spatial legibility is conceived simultaneously as a means and an end
in itself.
The road’s logistical function of reordering space and time highlights the relationship
between legibility and representation. Lefebvre’s reference to transparency as an ‘illusion’ is
suggestive here, as it implicitly relates legibility as an effect that representation creates of
reality rather than a relation of correspondence between representation and reality. At a
broader, geopolitical level, this effect cast important light on the role that modern calcula-
tion techniques play in reordering reality according to the representations such techniques
produce (Mitchell, 2002a, 2002b). In Colombia, where transport infrastructures have long
been deemed as a powerful means to civilize the frontier (Uribe, 2017), legibility practices
are strongly embedded in representations than in turn justify or legitimize state actions and
interventions.
Uribe 7

The project’s assessments constitute a clear example of this relationship between legibility
and representation. Such is the case, for instance, of the Basic Plan’s ‘Socioeconomic and
Cultural Diagnosis’, which classifies the inhabitants of the Forest Reserve as a ‘colonist
culture’ responsible for causing severe ‘ecological disturbances’ in the road’s area as a result
of ‘unsustainable’ practices such as ‘uncontrolled destruction of forests’, ‘aggressive attacks
on the fauna resource’ and ‘extraction of the [Forest Reserve’s] natural wealth’ (IADB,
2008: vol. 3: 17–21). Against this background, the image of the road as a political technology
governing space and time that the models of the project create is further reinforced.
The distance between legibility as a political goal and a policy outcome constitutes
another issue. Anthropological approaches to politics and the state have stressed the
different ways in which governmental techniques such as land surveys, mapping and
population censuses are evaded or contested, thereby only partially achieving their own
purposes (Carroll, 2006; de Certeau, 1998; Hansen and Stepputat, 2001; Krohn-Hansen
and Nustad, 2005; Scott, 2009, 1998). James Scott (2009), in particular, has delved exten-
sively into the myriad of practices through which certain populations manage to remain
illegible to the state and thus evade political coercion and control. However, in assuming
such practices as ways of resisting, avoiding or eluding state power or, similarly, as reflective
of the existence of ‘non-state’ spaces and populations, he reproduces rather than overcomes
the dichotomous constructions of political power and society.
Although the role of roads as governmental technologies of surveillance and control has
been variously emphasized (e.g. Fairhead, 1992; Masquelier, 2002; Selwyn, 2001; Wilson,
2004), an equally salient dimension of such infrastructures is concerned with how the state-
space is constantly re-configured and re-imagined through the frictions, disruptions, and
different forms of social engagement they produce (Bachmann and Schouten, 2018; Harvey,
2012; Harvey and Knox, 2015; Pasternak and Dafnos, 2017). In the following section, I look
at such frictions and engagements through an ethnographic account of the San Francisco–
Mocoa road project’s legibility policies. As I will show, the crucial aspect of these policies is
not the ways in which (il)legibility reflects or results from the ‘project’, ‘state’ or ‘community’
practices but, rather, how it constitutes an effect of the everyday interactions between these
spheres. Put differently, instead of conceiving (il)legibility in terms of the exercise of (or
resistance to) governmental power, I argue that it constitutes an ambiguous and volatile
terrain in which infrastructure’s techno-political and social worlds are constantly
co-produced.

Infrastructural (il)legibility
The photograph below (Figure 3), from May 2014, contrasts strikingly with the project
models discussed previously. In the background of the image, three backhoe loaders can
be observed working in a section of the road; a few meters closer there is a barbed wire fence
crossing the width of the road. The photograph refers to a land conflict between the gov-
ernment, the project, and Geromo, a local farmer who owns a plot of land affected by the
roadworks. The conflict, starting a few months before the photograph was taken, arose as a
result of the refusal on the part of the National Roads Institute (INVIAS), the state author-
ity in charge of the project, to award Geromo compensation for the area of his plot of land
affected by the road, using the argument that he was not the legal land owner. However,
Geromo claimed his right to compensation, alleging that although he did not possess the
land deeds, he had bought the plot of land from its previous owner fourteenth years ago by
means of a private document, which granted him legal ownership. Upon receiving notifica-
tion by INVIAS that the government would only offer compensation to the legal land
8 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0)

Figure 3. ‘The kilometer 8 fence’. May 2014.

Source: author photo.

owner, Geromo decided to erect two barbed wire fences, thereby marking the boundary of
the section of land crossed by the road which he deemed private property.
‘The kilometer 8 fence’, as the roadblock erected by Geromo was dubbed by the road
workers, not only implied the total suspension of the works in the area of his plot of land. By
impeding the passage of traffic through the fenced-off area, the construction company was
forced to transport machinery and personnel via a village path, which in turn led to the
establishment of road blocks by the neighboring inhabitants in protest at their path’s
destruction. Following months of tension with the construction company and threats of
forced eviction by INVIAS, Geromo, who at the time was also employed as road worker,
agreed to remove the fence ‘voluntarily’.
The fence incident may appear insignificant in comparison with the type of political and
technical problems usually faced by large infrastructure projects. However, the relevance of
this incident does not lie in its immediate or circumstantial effects but in the broader issues it
exposed – namely, a critical legibility problem in the project area which, as we shall later see,
became a permanent threat to the project itself. Although the main purpose of this section is
to discuss this problem within the context of the road project, it is important to recount its
origins, which go back to the campesino (peasant farmers) colonization and settlement of the
area traversed by the road. The history of this colonization is relatively recent and easy to
reconstruct, given that many of the descendants of the first settlers still live in the area.3
According to them, the first who settled in this part of the Andean-Amazon region were
campesinos from Nari~ no who migrated to the Putumayo in search of bald
ıo lands (lands that
were offered freely by the government to colonists in return for the land’s occupation and
exploitation during a determined duration of time). This initial settlement began in the
decade of the 1930s, and took place mainly in the areas adjacent to a bridle path constructed
by the Catholic missions towards the beginning of the 20th-century, an infrastructure which
takes roughly the same route as the road under construction.
Uribe 9

The first landownership deeds in the area date from the 1940s and 1950s and constitute an
important source in understanding the origin of subsequent conflicts such as that of
Geromo. In the majority of cases, these titles were derived from bald
ıo grant resolutions,
which required the visit of a topographer who would check the boundaries and area of the
plot of land, and based upon this information, would establish the cadastral plan. However,
older inhabitants of the area tell the tale that, given the remote location of the land plots and
the abrupt topography of the terrain, the topographers would rarely inspect the land or just
do so partially. On the other hand, it was common that they would take property informa-
tion directly from land grantees, leading to a proliferation of errors and inexact measure-
ments, a clear example of how in some instances illegibility results from the state practices
rather than people’s resistance to such practices). Furthermore, the cadastral plans from this
time were not georeferenced, and therefore the definition of property boundaries is limited
to topographical accidents or landmarks that were not easily recognizable or permanent
such as trees, ditches, paths and small creeks.
The cadastral history of those first land grants constitutes another, and more significant
source of the problem. Many of these land grants have changed over time due to total or
partial sales, subdivisions, inheritances and other types of transactions. The large majority
of these transactions were not carried out by following formal procedures but rather by
means of informal or non-official mechanisms, the most common of these being so-called
‘private documents’. These documents are classified ‘private’ by the state as they do not
comply with the minimum legal requirements of land deeds. In legal terms, this means that
they do not bear legal effects on the land property and, therefore, do not serve as legal proof
of land ownership.
Despite their lack of legality, private documents constitute a very commonly used mech-
anism of land transactions in the region that have very real effects on land tenure. People
regularly trade land by means of private documents in order to avoid the costs of formal
transactions and land taxes, or to evade legal controls over property. Yet, the most signif-
icant feature of private documents is that, while they are perfectly intelligible to those who
possess them, their lack of basic information present in land deeds such as land registry
numbers, cadastral plans or geographical coordinates, makes them illegible in the eyes of the
state (i.e. they cannot be located in the Land Registry Office records and sometimes cannot
even be identified on site).
As it became clear that land tenure issues represented a major threat for the road project,
the Basic Plan’s included a ‘Legal Diagnosis’ aimed at evaluating the magnitude of the
problem and devise solutions (IADB, 2008: vol. 4). This diagnosis identified 150 land
deeds (many with legal issues of different sorts) and 250 private documents within the ten
rural settlements located in the project’s area, a number that in practice could have been
much larger considering that – as I was told by different persons who worked on the
assessment – people often refused to hand over their documents. Moreover, the private
documents gathered were highly erratic in form and quality, some containing detailed infor-
mation about land transactions, while others were time-worn papers whose content was
literally illegible and thus useless in terms of geographical location and/or boundaries. One
description of a land plot located in the project’s zone sold through private document, for
instance, reads as follows:

[The plot of land has] a surface area of approximately 80 hectares and is located in the vereda
[rural settlement] Buenavista Grande along the old bridle path which runs from Mocoa to San
Francisco, in the Mocoa municipality, department of Putumayo, and is identified by the fol-
lowing general boundaries: To the east, borders with Buenavista Peque~no lands, a dry ditch in
10 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0)

the middle. To the west, borders with uncultivated land owned by the nation, the Marmol river
bed in the middle. To the north, borders with the Mocoa river and to the south, borders with
uncultivated land owned by the nation and encloses. (IADB, 2008: vol. 4, cadastral
annex Campucana)

The document, signed in May 2005 and notarized in Villa Garz
on (Putumayo), registers the
value of the transaction and the names of seller and buyer, but the only information it
provides about the land plot is reduced to the vague description quoted above. Thus, this
private document – together with the dozens of others filed in the Basic Plan’s archives –
only served to provide further evidence of the chaotic land situation in the project area.
The gap between the ‘official’ and ‘informal’ land tenure systems can be further illustrat-
ed by contrasting two cadastral maps of one of the rural settlements located within the road
project’s area. The first map was taken from the Instituto Geográfico Agust
ın Codazzi’s
(IGAC) cadastral system, which gathers and centralizes the cadastral information at nation-
al level (Figure 4(a)). The second is a digitalized copy of a handmade map sketched by
Ernesto,4 a campesino from the settlement in question (Figure 4(b)).5
The patent incongruities of the state and campesino maps reflect two distinctly different
forms of geographical knowledge and map-making. Although outdated (at the time I did
this comparison the cadastral data for this area was six years old), the state map conforms to
the formal rules of cadastral surveying, containing geographical features such as the admin-
istrative boundaries of the settlement, and displaying polygons with registry numbers for
each land plot (the registry number of one land plot is displayed in the figure to illustrate this
point). Moreover, it contains other standard or customary cartographic conventions such as
map scale, north arrow, and thumbnail map (not shown in the figure). All these features and
conventions are absent in Ernesto’s map, which in a strict, technical sense, could be better
described as freehand sketch of his vereda. Yet, the value of Ernesto’s map does not lie in the
degree in which it conforms to such conventions but in its capacity to capture what the state
map doesn’t.
Ernesto had detailed geographical knowledge of the road project’s area and of its com-
plex land tenure system. He had been hired on various occasions as trochero (trail opener) in
previous design studies for the road, and even by the government topographers in charge of
updating the official cadastre. Thus, even though he was not able to locate himself in the
state map (and neither did he see the usefulness of the map itself), he could identify and
account for some aspects and details that this map ignored. For instance, he marked as
tierras que tienen due~no (‘owned’) lands that the state map showed as vacant lands (bald
ıos).
‘Ownership’ of such lands (which he nevertheless recognized as state lands), he explained,
was not supported on written documents of any kind, but rather on tacit agreements which
granted people from the vereda the right of access and exploitation over lands adjacent to
the farms they ‘formally’ owned (through title deeds or other paper document). Thus,
instead of the state map’s continuous thick-line indicating the border between the vereda
and bald
ıo lands, Ernesto’s map displays a dotted line (bottom of figure), stressing the
undefined and ambiguous boundary between private and public lands.
Likewise, Ernesto identified geographical features such as trails and creeks, absent in the
state map. Most of these features are not displayed – or appear unnamed – in topographic
and physical base maps, and some are even difficult to locate on the ground. However, as
Ernesto explained, they are central within the sociospatial order of the vereda, for they
constitute geographical landmarks that often serve as boundaries between farms or with
other settlements. Most significantly for the argument here, Ernesto classified in his map the
legal status of the vereda’s farms in three categories: lands with title deeds, lands with private
Uribe 11

Figure 4. (a) Cadastral map of vereda Campucana (elaborated by author, cartographic base: IGAC National
Cadastral System, map sheet ID number 430-II-C and 430-II-D). (b) Ernesto’s map (digitized by author).

document and other/unknown. As observed in the map, the majority of farms fall within the
second and third categories, the last of which correspond, according to Ernesto, to lands he
did not know its current legal status or had ‘other’ status, meaning possession through
written (and sometime verbal) agreements different to title deeds and private documents.
Moreover, Ernesto stressed that changes on land tenure were common (due to land sales,
inheritances, subdivisions of farms and other transactions), so that his map his map could
change significantly in a few years period.
The first impression when comparing the state and Ernesto’s map side by side is the
co-existence of two visibly different and incompatible orders, the former representing the
limited reach of state law, and the latter exposing the dynamic and variegated forms of
regulation over and access to land. Still, the key aspect of such orders is not their conflicting
12 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0)

or opposing character but, on the contrary, the ways in which they are mutually produced.
In other words, if seen from the perspective of the state (infrastructure) practices aimed at
rendering legible the campesino’s ‘illegible’ spatial order, the subject to which I turn next,
Ernesto’s map will appear not as a reflection of the illegible nature of a ‘non-state’ space
(Scott, 2009), but rather an effect of such practices.

Becoming a ‘white elephant’

The Basic Plan’s ‘Legal Diagnosis’ not only exposed the large gap between the small uni-
verse of legal owners and the large (and illegible) mass of informal land holders. A more
troubling issue was the fact, corroborated by this same report, that most of the land deeds
and private documents corresponded to land plots located within the Protected Forest
Reserve of the upper Mocoa river basin (Forest Reserve onwards). Created in the early
1980s with the aim of building a hydroelectric plant for the Putumayo (an infrastructure
project that never materialized), the Forest Reserve legal status of ‘Protected Reserve’ means
that no human activity (including land tenure or settlement) is permitted within its borders,
except for the limited extraction of non-timber forest products. Nevertheless, at the moment
of its creation there were a good number of campesino families settled in the area, many with
legal lands deeds or land requests in the process of adjudication. Although the establishment
of the Forest Reserve meant that privately own lands within its borders had to be purchased
or expropriated by the government, this procedure was never carried out, and for many
years the Reserve remained a territorial entity that only existed on paper. This situation,
together with the fact that the geographical boundaries of Forest Reserve were only vaguely
demarcated, led to legal inconsistencies such as the government’s adjudication of lands after
the Reserve’s creation.
In order to tackle the chaotic state of land occupation within the Forest Reserve, the
‘Legal Diagnosis’ considered various options such as the purchase of land from legal land-
owners (with land deeds) and the eviction of settlers without land deeds; changing the degree
of protection of part of the Reserve, from ‘Protective’ to ‘Protective Productive’ (a legal
figure with less land and environmental restrictions); or by giving a differential legal treat-
ment to landowners with deeds previous and posterior to the Forest Reserve creation date.
Yet, the problem was that any alternative solution necessarily required the clarification of
the legal land situation within the Reserve, for which it was essential to have specific infor-
mation such as the existing number of land plots, location, owners, areas, etc. Given that
much of this information was very difficult or impossible to establish because many owners
did not possess land deeds but only private documents, this situation ended up as a bottle
neck in which the solution of land problems in the Reserve was frustrated due to its illeg-
ible condition.
Between the years 2010 and 2017, during which I carried out several fieldtrips to the
Putumayo, the land tenure problems within the road project’s area, including the Forest
Reserve, not only had not been resolved but in fact had become aggravated. Furthermore,
this situation paradoxically arose as a result of the project’s attempts to deal with it. From
2010, these attempts were carried out under a new scheme known as the Integrated
Sustainable Environmental and Social Plan (Integrated Plan onwards). The Integrated
Plan concentrated the different environmental and social management instruments
linked to the road project in one wide-ranging 8-year plan, including the Basic Plan.
More than half of its budget (11 million USD) was allocated to land-related components,
and included measures such as the expansion of the Forest Reserve (from 34,000 to 65,000
hectares), the elaboration of new land-use plans for the municipalities within the project’s
Uribe 13

area, and the development of governance strengthening projects with local communities
(IADB, 2009a).
Even though the ‘Legal Diagnosis’ had recommended a more exhaustive land survey
within the Forest Reserve in order to ‘[establish] the reality concerning land property and
tenure within such space’ (IADB, 2008: vol. 4, p. 15), the Integrated Plan did not make
any progress in this respect. In effect, the attempts made to clarify the landownership
situation ended up generating multiple tensions with the campesino settlers, leading to even
more illegibility for the project area. These efforts consisted essentially of sporadic
requests to the area’s inhabitants, asking them to deliver copies of their landownership
documents. However, the absence of information about the specific purpose of these
requests inevitably generated rumors among the campesinos. For example, many believed
that the project’s insistence on gathering the deeds and documents was due to the project’s
eagerness to identify those occupants without deeds in order to evict them. At the same
time, others maintained that they were all about to be evicted from the area and that the
landownership documents were going to be used in order to define those who would
receive compensation. These and other rumors, together with the recurring complaint
made by those who claimed to have handed over their documents to the Integrated
Plan’s officials ‘three and up to four times’, led in turn to a reluctance on the part of
many to hand over their documents, thereby frustrating or delaying the proj-
ect’s objectives.
The rumors and uncertainty surrounding the project’s intentions also generated other
effects. During the Integrated Plan’s failed attempts to determine the ‘reality’ of the land-
ownership situation in the project area, the cases of informal land sales increased. In the
majority of cases, the purchasers were inhabitants from other areas who were attracted by
the low costs of land and by the expectation of its rise in value due to the planned road, even
in the case of land plots without deeds. For example, Geromo claimed that given that the
government had refused to offer him compensation, he was thinking of selling his farm to
‘people from Mocoa’ interested in acquiring land near to the road. Furthermore, land
transactions were not only motivated by speculation about their future value, but also by
the possibility of claiming compensation in the case of expropriation.
While in some cases land transactions were done by word of mouth, in other they were
done by means of signs erected in the project’s area. These transactions were legally
illegible (due to being carried out through private documents), and thus the state’s capac-
ity to exert control over them was very limited, or even nil. As a result, a vicious circle was
set in motion, in which the very same measures designed to resolve the land problems in
the project area ended up by worsening the already critical legibility situation. Moreover,
alternative solutions such as the removal of tenants from their lands were in the context of
the project highly unpopular. The fact that the road was promoted as a model of sus-
tainable development meant that, at least in discourse, the project would work with and
not against local communities. This made social conflict a highly sensitive issue, especially
since the disbursements from the Inter-American Development Bank to the project were
conditioned on the compliance with numerous environmental and social safeguards,
including economic compensation for individuals or families affected by the road
(IADB, 2009a).
By August 2017, approaching the project’s time limit, the land issue was far from settled
and the prospect for the road project looked grim. With only a third of the road completed
and about 80% of the project budget already spent, the works had been indefinitely sus-
pended since January of that year. In February, at a public forum convened by the Mocoa
local authorities to discuss the future of the project, a delegate from INVIAS stated that the
14 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0)

road required an additional 600 million USD and ten years to be completed. Furthermore,
the problems faced by the project at this stage were not restricted to its financial situation.
The most difficult part of the road, a 26-kilometer segment inside the Forest Reserve, was
still to be built. Design problems and the severe environmental restrictions in this area
required the total re-design of this segment. At the same forum, an engineer working for
the construction company presented a video with rendered models of the new design while
proudly noting that the new route included 11 tunnels with lengths from 20 to 1000 meters,
and 51 bridges and viaducts totaling 15 kilometers. Although the models again projected
images of a perfectly ordered landscape traversed by winding stretches of immaculate con-
crete, skeptical faces were observed all over the room.
The images shown at the forum contrasted strikingly with the landscape at the project
site. During the days following the forum, the construction company closed its offices and
withdrew the little personnel and machinery still in the project area, confirming the rumors
of the project’s total suspension due to lack of funds. In its state of abandonment, the
roadwork became the site of routine visits by urban inhabitants of Mocoa who were
drawn by the spectacle of bridges and embankments in various stages of construction and
decay. For some, especially the more elderly, the landscape provided an evocation of the
history of another failed road project from the 1970s, now buried under the new
infrastructure.
During the following months, a rumor began to spread among the campesinos living
within the Forest Reserve that the government was about to expropriate the land plots
situated in a large extension of terrain, recently granted to indigenous communities of the
area. Although nobody knew the exact location of the new indigenous reserve, it was
observed that many people were ‘extracting timber’ from the Reserve or selling land fore-
seeing the potential threat of eviction. In the meantime, along with the studies showing the
new design plans for the road, teams of topographers and workmen contracted by the
project reappeared, again requesting landownership documents, thereby fueling new confu-
sion and speculation about the project’s future.
The shortcomings and contradictory effects of the road project’s land measures brings us
back to the relevance of Geromo’s story in understanding the relationship between infra-
structure building, legibility and political (dis)order. Within the project’s techno-political
rationale, Geromo stands out as an obstacle threatening the ‘illusion of transparency’ to
which infrastructure aspires, an illusion that sustains its twofold (logistical) function of
circulation in and control and regulation of space. Geromo’s conflict, in this sense, embodies
not just the physical (topographical) but also the social (politico-legal) frictions that infra-
structure encounters and seeks to remove, often in violent ways. Yet Geromo’s conflict
speaks also, and fundamentally, about how state practices participate directly or indirectly
in the production of such frictions. Geromo’s fence constitutes, in this sense, not so much
a material expression of resistance to governmental (infrastructural) power, but an effect of
its very practices that exposes the relations and entanglements through which political (dis)
orders are produced.
On a wider scale, Geromo’s story draws attention to the unstable condition of
infrastructure projects at regional level. The annual IIRSA reports classify projects in
the region according to their execution phases, showing global advances in the imple-
mentation of the agenda. As in the case of the project models, these macro-assessments
portray current infrastructure development as a smooth process that inexorably trans-
forms the region’s geography into a space of seamless capital and human flows. Yet,
the sole fact that IIRSA’s integration hubs and project groups result from the conjunc-
tion of numerous projects, primarily at national levels, draws attention to the highly
Uribe 15

complex and fragile nature of the network. The case of the San Francisco–Mocoa
project, a very short road that nevertheless constitutes the ‘anchor project’ of a mul-
timodal transport corridor of hundreds of kilometers and several other projects, is
telling in this respect.
The location of many of IIRSA’s projects in protected areas, campesino settlements,
indigenous reserves and other formal or informal figures of territorial organization gener-
ates friction and conflict that express different concepts and forms of spatial use. Critical
literature on IIRSA, as previously mentioned, has documented the presence of conflicts
linked to the building of roads, large hydroelectric dams and other infrastructures, drawing
attention to their linkage with neo-extractive economies and dynamics of accumulation by
dispossession throughout the region. However, the tendency to homogenize or assume such
conflicts as expressions of resistance faced with capitalist development policies supported by
the state, prevents the recognition of the state–society relations and interactions that
account for the ever-present gulf between the conception and materialization of infrastruc-
tures. The problems and conflicts of legibility discussed here in the context of an IIRSA
transport project demonstrate how, on occasions, this gulf is not external but intrinsic to
state infrastructure practices.

Conclusion
This paper examined the origins and persistence over time of legibility conflicts in the con-
text of the land policies and practices of a road project in the Colombian Putumayo. The
fact that the project’s goal of clarifying the chaotic land tenure situation in its zone of
influence was far from being met by 2017, almost a decade after this issue was first identified
and despite large resources spent on lands surveys, plainly demonstrates the large gap
between the conception and implementation of the project. My focus on this particular
issue, however, was not intended to emphasize the distance between the vision and materi-
alization of infrastructure projects, but to situate this gap within the discursive and material
practices of the state. Although the analysis was focused on one particular project – the San
Francisco–Mocoa road – the discussion about the conflicts surrounding this project inspire
some reflection about the past and present development of infrastructure in the
Amazon region.
On the one hand, the paper stresses the importance of understanding infrastructure
development and state-building as entangled processes. This is particularly the case in
regions deemed as frontiers zones, where the building of infrastructure and roads especially,
has long constituted a symbolic and material expression of the state (Harvey, 2014, 2005;
Kernaghan, 2012; Taussig, 1991; Thomas, 2002). In many places across the Amazon, includ-
ing the Colombian Putumayo, road building have been traditionally conceived as an essen-
tial element of the states’ infrastructural power (Mann, 1984), in terms of securing territorial
sovereignty or allowing the expansion of governmental control and capitalism over spaces
and populations considered ‘marginal’, ‘backward’ or ‘lawless’ (e.g. Brücher, 1968; Crist and
Nissly, 1973; Hegen, 1966; Wesche, 1974). The function of roads in rendering such spaces
and populations legible to facilitate their management or domination, constitutes a clear
instance of how the state is built through physical infrastructure.
Yet infrastructure is not built upon empty, homogeneous space. Infrastructure is rooted
in very heterogeneous physical and legal topographies (Kernaghan, 2012), which inevitably
leads to friction and conflict that dilate or even impede its materialization. Although in some
instances such conflicts and frictions emerge as a result of social resistance to infrastructure
plans and projects, in others they constitute an effect of infrastructure practices. Here I laid
16 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0)

emphasis on the conflicts that infrastructure produce or reproduce through an ethnographic

description of the legibility problems faced by the San Francisco–Mocoa road project. In
showing how the project’s policies did not only fail to overcome those problems but aggra-
vated them, I argued that infrastructure practices actively participated in the perpetuation
and production of legal and social disorders that eventually became a continuous obstacle
for the project.
Approaching infrastructure through an ethnographic lens, that is, by capturing the dif-
ferent and often contradictory visions, meanings and localized material practices that shape
its social and physical form, allows for a dialectical rather than linear or teleological under-
standing of the temporal and spatial configurations of the state. This does not imply ignor-
ing the pervasive and often violent effects of state (infrastructure) practices. It means,
however, as I have emphasized in relation to infrastructure’s legibility conflicts, overcoming
dichotomous constructions of political and social life and thus identifying the ways in which
these realms are deeply imbricated and co-produced.

Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented in December 2016 at the workshop “States of
Circulation” organized by the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I would like to thank the conference attendees for their thoughtful questions and feedback. I am also
very grateful to the guest editors of the special issue “States of circulation – the co-production of
political and logistical orders”, who have carefully read and commented on the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

Notes
1. IIRSA was replaced in 2011 by the South American Council of Infrastructure and Planning
(Cosiplan), a Sectoral Council part of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).
Although Cosiplan adopted a different institutional framework than IIRSA, its rationale and
goals have remained largely the same. To avoid confusion with the terminology, in this article I
will refer to this regional infrastructure scheme as IIRSA.
2. In IIRSA’s terminology, a hub is defined as a “multinational territorial space involving specific
natural resources, human settlements, production areas and logistics services” (Cosiplan,
2016: 241).
3. This account is based on personal interviews by the author carried out during the years 2010
and 2011.
4. Pseudonym requested.
5. Figure 4(a) and (b) was previously published by the author (Uribe, 2017). Reproduced here with
permission of the publisher.

ORCID iD
Sim

on Uribe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1865-3574
Uribe 17

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Sim
on Uribe is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, Government and
International Relations, University of El Rosario. His research interests revolve around the
intersection of infrastructure, the state, and the history of frontiers. His latest book, Frontier
Road: Power, history, and the everyday state in the Colombian Amazon (Wiley-Blackwell,
2017) critically examines the process of state-building in the Colombian region of Putumayo
through the history and ethnography of a road. His current research focuses on the rela-
tionship between political order and guerrilla infrastructures in the context of Colombia’s
armed conflict.