Policies designed to occupy and populate the Peruvian Amazon began about seventy years ago with the construction of a trunk highway connecting Pucallpa on the Ucayali River with Lima. Named after a Peruvian historian, the construction of the Carretera Federico Basadre is a landmark event in the nation’s history, because it provided the first reliable means of communication between the capital and the Amazonian provinces that make up more than fifty per cent of Peru’s territory. The next major initiative began when the government added a northern spur through the montane forests of the Huallaga Valley, which was intended to integrate its northern Amazonian provinces while opening a lush tropical valley to agricultural development. Construction of these two highways was financed with state resources in the 1970s, when a left-wing military government had limited access to international finance. After a return to civilian government in the 1980s, multilateral institutions financed several project-based initiatives, but these were soon sidelined when the country entered a period of civil unrest that impeded economic growth and foreign investment. The economy improved in the 1990s following the end of the civil war, and the government, then led by Alberto Fujimori, initiated a series of system-wide investments in transportation infrastructure using public money leveraged with loans from the IDB. The system-wide approach was complemented in 2000 with the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), which improved the strategic planning of highway investments in general, while promoting public-private partnerships (PPP) to…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Peru’s modern history of migration and settlement first appeared on EnviroLink Network.