The social and political life of Latin American infrastructures

When Luis Fernando Camacho, the right-wing governor of the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz, was arrested on 27th December 2022 in relation to his involvement in the ‘coup’ of 2019, the immediate response of his supporters was to form roadblocks, occupy public spaces, and, prevent residents of Santa Cruz from moving around the department’s eponymous capital city. The Bolivian State Prosecutor’s office in Santa Cruz was also burned to the ground in mysterious circumstances.

Two weeks later, on the 8th January 2023, followers of Brazil’s outgoing far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, himself already safely decamped to Florida, occupied the Presidential Palace and other high-profile government buildings in Brasília, shortly after the centre-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had been sworn into office for the third time. Bolsonaristas destroyed much of the building, ransacking its contents, smashing windows, and despoiling works of art, before eventually being removed by security forces. Images of Bolsonaristas marauding through the Presidential Palace cloaked in Brazil’s iconic yellow football shirt were beamed live across the world, a stark visual reminder of its national political divisions.

These two events tell us a great deal about Latin America in the early twenty-first century, not least the centrality of infrastructure to Latin American politics. We explore this in our new edited collection, The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures, which analyses diverse infrastructures in multiple sites, from a sparkling new tram network in Ecuador to a crumbling old nuclear plant in Cuba.

In the introduction to the book, we argue that infrastructures have relational and experimental qualities and are best understood as open-ended processes rather than static and stable configurations. Conceptualising infrastructure as a relational and experimental process draws attention to the temporal and historical dimensions of infrastructure. Latin American infrastructures have been forged through long-run processes of accumulation, commodification, and colonialism, as Eduardo Galeano’s famous metaphor of the ‘open veins of Latin America’ suggests. However, they have also been at the centre of resistance to these processes, including socialist struggles to overcome capitalist structures and relations, as was the case during the Unidad Popular government in Chile in the early 1970s, and indigenous struggles to resist colonial-capitalist development, as has been seen most clearly with the Zapatistas in Mexico. Our book provides further evidence of these movements of resistance and hope, as well as the efforts of imperial powers, especially the US, to contain them through infrastructure.

Several chapters in the book show that infrastructure gives the state form and proximity through its material visibility, as a ‘state effect’. The ‘poetic quality’ through which a state represents itself to its citizens through infrastructure means that a state’s effects are intimately connected to its affects. Indeed, the state and infrastructure are often conflated, and the regard in which citizens hold the state is shaped by the mediating force of infrastructure. This helps explain why infrastructures of the state are the sites of protests against it. By blocking, occupying or destroying state infrastructure protestors challenge the authority of the state and reconfigure political relations. Such actions also give protestors the opportunity to disturb the ‘seamless connectivity’ of infrastructures and show how it feels to live in a ‘space of disruption’.[1]

Infrastructures also bring considerable promise, and it is thus not a coincidence that several chapters in our book deal with emotions, such as longing, abandonment, hoping, and dreaming. The promise of infrastructure lies in its power to transform, acting in the present as a – perhaps literal – bridge to the future. Efforts to shape the present and future through infrastructure are never politically neutral. Rather: ‘Infrastructures are important because the future they bring about always favours one set of political actors over others.’

When viewing state infrastructures as chrono-political projects, it is significant that in Latin America infrastructure projects are tightly bound to the notion of ‘development’. Infrastructure projects as development are bound with chrono-political objectives to modernize citizens living at the periphery of the state by creating the ‘material, social, and ideational conditions that configure lifeworlds’. Escobar argues that the effect of development can therefore be to alienate those being developed from their own social reality. Several chapters in this book highlight this as a real concern among many people directly affected by infrastructure construction. Yet they also show that infrastructures are sometimes welcomed precisely for their transformative, modernizing qualities.

The glistening visions of state infrastructure projects imagined by politicians, bureaucrats, planners, and engineers are often far removed from the infrastructural reality on – or below – the ground. Infrastructures may fail or break down either due to internal disruption and decay or because of a breakdown between the infrastructure and the domain of relations it is supposed to sustain, or that are required to sustain it. In fact, the complexity and fragility of infrastructure mean that it might be best to think of it as functioning ‘against the odds’, indicating its emergent and experimental qualities.

While infrastructure breakdown or collapse can cause considerable dislocation, it can also create space for infrastructure users to construct or refashion infrastructure and, in doing so, build collective autonomous capacity away from the state. In the Ecuadorian Andes, for example, rural communities have used collective practices like mingas and asambleas to take autonomous control of water infrastructure and services. Hence, as some of the chapters in our book show, the meaning and purpose of infrastructure can be adapted by citizens acting relatively autonomously of the state. This brings vitality and plurality to Latin American infrastructures and politics and, in some cases, opens up horizons beyond the capitalist state.

Yet, as recent events in Bolivia and Brazil have clearly demonstrated, infrastructural politics can also move in other directions. The political movements behind Camacho and Bolsonaro both have important infrastructural dimensions. Narratives of the construction of core infrastructures by the municipal government, civic committees and local residents have supported the right-wing autonomous movement led by Camacho. Meanwhile, political support for Bolsonaro has been bolstered by the construction of infrastructures that have facilitated the expansion of agriculture, forestry, and mining. Indeed, elites who have benefited from these infrastructures are believed to have paid to transport Bolsonaristas to Brasília to attack the Presidential Palace.

One core challenge for Lula will be to develop an alternative political-material project that uses infrastructures to build unity and hope rather than sow hatred and division. The structures and conditions of twenty-first-century capitalism and coloniality will be powerful constraining forces for his and other left governments across Latin America. Nevertheless, harnessing infrastructure to promote equality, plurality and democracy can support left governments in their efforts to build broad-based movements that can chart a progressive course through the latest capitalist crisis.

Footnotes

[1] Harvey, P (2022) Foreword in Alderman, J and G. Goodwin, ‘Introduction: infrastructure as relational and experimental process’ in The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures, ed. J. Alderman and G. Goodwin (London, 2022), pp. 1–26.