The Broken Promises of the Pan-American Highway

The Pan-American Highway has always sounded like an idea too elegant to fail. A single road linking the Americas. A continental artery running from Alaska to Patagonia. Distance dissolved by asphalt. Difference bridged by movement.

It was never just a road.
It was a promise.

The highway was meant to embody Pan-Americanism: the belief that the nations of the Western Hemisphere could be bound together through cooperation rather than domination, partnership rather than force. Infrastructure would do what politics could not. Connectivity would stand in for solidarity.

A century later, the road is still fragmented. And so is the promise it was built to carry.

Infrastructure Is Never Neutral

The Pan American highway. Well, at least the promise of it. Note the Darien Gap in the yellow box.

From the beginning, the Pan-American Highway was as much an ideological project as an engineering one. Roads do not simply connect places; they reorder them. They make territory legible to states, profitable to capital, and governable through speed and circulation.

The language surrounding the highway was lofty—unity, cooperation, hemispheric destiny—but its material priorities were clear. The road was designed to move goods efficiently across borders. It was far less concerned with how people lived along it.

In Mexico and Central America, the Pan-American Highway often functions as a freight corridor cutting directly through towns and cities. Long-haul trucks barrel past schools, markets, and bus stops. Pedestrians and cyclists negotiate danger daily. Mobility is optimized for throughput, not for life.

The road moves commerce smoothly.
It does not move people safely.

This imbalance is not a design flaw. It is the design.

The Broken Promise Made Visible: The Darién Gap

Nowhere is the failure of Pan-Americanism more visible than in the Darién Gap—the infamous break in the highway between Panama and Colombia.

The gap is often described as a technical problem, an environmental obstacle, an unfortunate interruption in an otherwise continuous system. But the Darién Gap is not an anomaly. It is a revelation.

The Darien Gap. © OpenStreetMap contributors, cmglee, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

To complete the highway through the Darién would require confronting Indigenous sovereignty, ecological devastation, militarization, and migration. It would force planners and politicians to admit that “connection” is not benign—that roads carry violence as well as mobility.

The gap persists not because it cannot be filled, but because filling it would expose the contradictions Pan-Americanism has never resolved.

In that sense, the Pan-American Highway is not unfinished.
It is honest.

The Darién Gap tells the truth the rest of the road tries to obscure: hemispheric unity was always conditional, selective, and imposed from above.

Pan-Americanism Without Equality

Pan-Americanism promised cooperation, but it never resolved the problem of power. It spoke of unity while preserving hierarchy. It imagined a hemisphere bound together, but on terms largely set by the United States.

Goods were meant to move freely.
Sovereignty was not.

The highway reflects this perfectly. Capital flows north. Raw materials flow north. Influence flows south. When people attempt to move along the same corridor—especially migrants traveling north—the road becomes a site of surveillance, enforcement, and death.

The Pan-American Highway is continuous for supply chains.
It is discontinuous for human life.

This is not a historical footnote. It is the living legacy of a political vision that substituted infrastructure for justice.

The Return of Intervencionismo

That legacy matters now because Pan-Americanism has returned—not as a cooperative ideal, but as an openly coercive practice.

In January 2026, the United States carried out a military intervention in Venezuela that resulted in the forcible seizure of President Nicolás Maduro and his transport to the United States against his will. U.S. officials described the act as a lawful capture. Venezuelan officials and many governments in the region called it a kidnapping and a violation of sovereignty.

The terminology matters less than the fact itself:
a sitting head of state was taken from his country by foreign military force.

The intervention was accompanied by explicit discussion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, future licensing arrangements, and post-Maduro governance. Law enforcement language sat alongside resource calculus. Democracy talk sat alongside extraction plans.

For much of Latin America, the message was unmistakable.
Pan-Americanism still means that sovereignty is conditional.

From Roads to Raids

Seen in this light, the Pan-American Highway reads less like a failed dream and more like an early blueprint.

It imagined a hemisphere integrated for commerce but governed through hierarchy. Connected by roads, disciplined by power. Cooperation promised in rhetoric, intervention delivered in practice.

The Darién Gap marks where the fantasy breaks down geographically.
Venezuela marks where it breaks down politically.

Both expose the same truth: Pan-Americanism was never built to withstand equality. When consent falters, force fills the gap.

What the Highway Actually Teaches Us

The lesson of the Pan-American Highway is not that connection is impossible. It is that connection without equity is hollow.

Roads cannot substitute for political imagination. Infrastructure cannot redeem a history of intervention simply by running across it. Connectivity does not become solidarity just because it is paved.

If Pan-Americanism is to mean anything now, it would require starting where the highway failed:
with restraint rather than speed,
with sovereignty rather than management,
with care rather than throughput.

Until then, the Pan-American Highway will remain what it has always been:
a continental monument to a promise that was never fully kept—
and a reminder that unity imposed from above always leaves a gap.

Bridges and Borders: A Reading Guide to U.S.–Latin American Relations

The United States and Latin America have always lived in each other’s imaginations. Sometimes as partners, sometimes as rivals, often as projects of desire. From the Monroe Doctrine to the banana trade, from exchange programs to border walls, the hemisphere’s story is one of ambition and misunderstanding — of bridges built and borders reinforced, often at the same time.

This reading guide offers a way into that long, complicated relationship. It’s meant for anyone curious about how culture, policy, and everyday life intertwine across the Americas. These books reveal not just what governments did, but how people felt about empire, progress, and belonging — and how those feelings shaped history.

(Last updated October 2025)

The Imperial Imagination

Before there was foreign policy, there was fantasy. The U.S. imagined Latin America as a testing ground for its ideals—tropical, pliable, and waiting for improvement—while Latin America saw the U.S. as both model and menace. These books explore the ideas that made empire feel inevitable.

Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (1998)
The book that redefined the field—revealing how culture and power intertwine in hemispheric history.

Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006)
How Latin America became the proving ground for U.S. interventions—political, military, and ideological.

Kristin Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (2007)
A study of how U.S. women participated in empire through consumption, turning global goods into domestic virtue.

Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2002)
The classic argument that American culture and empire grew up together, shaping each other’s myths.

Performing the Hemisphere, Heritage, and Identity

Hemispheric friendship was never just negotiated—it was staged, curated, and performed. Fairs, films, and travel offered scripts for how the Americas should see one another. These works trace the performances that sold cooperation while concealing hierarchy.

Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (1997)
A lively look at how Cuba became the U.S.’s tropical playground—and a mirror for its desires.

Lisa L. Munro, Desire as Empire: Consuming Indigenous Identity in Transnational Imaginations (forthcoming)
Explores how Guatemala used art, film, and design to sell “Indigeneity” to the world, revealing how culture became both diplomacy and exploitation.

Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession: Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (1995)
Shows how conquest was always a performance—rituals of claiming and seeing that still echo today.

Bananas and the Business of Empire

Bananas built empires—literally. Railroads, ports, and plantations remade Central America in the image of U.S. capital. These accounts, from corporate propaganda to narrative nonfiction, show how empire traveled by freight train and steamship.

Peter Chapman, Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (2007)
A crisp narrative history of the fruit that became a global industry and a political metaphor.

Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King (2012)
The biography of Samuel Zemurray, the hustler who personified the energy—and ruthlessness—of U.S. expansion.

Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (2008)
The global story of the banana’s rise and its ecological collapse, showing how monoculture and empire grow hand in hand.

Charles Kepner and Jay Soothill, The Banana Empire: A Case Study of Economic Imperialism (1935)
A remarkably early critique of United Fruit’s control of land, labor, and politics.

Stacy May and Galo Plaza, The United Fruit Company in Latin America (1958)
A company-sponsored defense that inadvertently reveals how empire justified itself in the language of “development.”

Desire, Development, and the Cold War

After World War II, the United States promised development instead of direct control. Aid programs, universities, and cultural diplomacy offered friendship wrapped in reform. These books uncover how goodwill became a foreign policy strategy.

Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (2004)
A devastating study of counterinsurgency and idealism, and how both were shaped by Cold War politics.

Shana Klein, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion (2020)
Explores how aesthetics and agriculture worked together to make empire look natural and beautiful.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)
Shows how neoliberalism took root in Latin America under the guise of reform, revealing economic policy as a new form of control.

Legacies and Afterlives

The story of hemispheric relations doesn’t begin or end with the Cold War. The hemispheric ties built over a century still shape migration, violence, and belonging. These works bring the story to the present, showing how the borders between public and private, love and power, remain porous in both the past and present.

Rachel Nolan, Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala (2024)
A haunting investigation of how the disappearances of Guatemala’s civil war morphed into the international adoption system.

Oscar Martínez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (2013)
Firsthand reporting on the human costs of hemispheric inequality, told from the top of a train.

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017)
A spare, luminous reflection on migration and bureaucracy, written from inside the U.S. immigration system.

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016)
Expands our sense of empire by tracing forced labor systems that long predate modern borders

The Americas have always been bound together by movement — of people, capital, and imagination. These books help us see that history not as background, but as the main story.

Mobility Justice in Latin America: Sidewalks, Bike Lanes, and the Politics of Belonging

On a recent bike ride through Mérida, I stopped for a wheelchair user traveling in the bike lane. They had no other choice: the sidewalk beside us was broken, too narrow, and blocked by parked cars. I dismounted and yielded, but the moment lingered with me. Why does this city — and so many others across the Americas — make movement so hard for its most vulnerable residents?

Mobility is more than getting from point A to point B. It is about who gets to move freely, safely, and with dignity. The way we design sidewalks, bike lanes, and streets tells us everything about whose lives count. In cities across Latin America and the United States, policy choices about infrastructure quietly shape who belongs and who doesn’t.

We often treat infrastructure as neutral — concrete poured without politics. But no sidewalk, street, or parking lot is built outside of power. These choices create winners and losers. Free parking may sound like a public good, but as Donald Shoup has argued in The High Cost of Free Parking, it encourages car dependence, spreads cities outward, and consumes space that could otherwise be housing, green areas, or public gathering places. Latin American planners made their own fateful choices in the mid-20th century, often importing U.S. models wholesale. Ring roads promised efficiency but instead encouraged sprawl and car dependency. Wide avenues privileged vehicles over people. The results are visible today: congested streets, fractured neighborhoods, and sidewalks that are at best an afterthought.

If you want to see inequality in action, look down. In Mérida, homeowners are legally responsible for repairing the sidewalks in front of their homes. Some keep them pristine; others patch them haphazardly; many leave them cracked or impassable. The result is a fragmented patchwork where a simple walk can become an obstacle course — especially for older adults, parents with strollers, or anyone with limited mobility. This isn’t unique to Mexico. As of 2025, an estimated 40% of Denver’s sidewalks don’t meet disability standards. Imagine the percentage in Mérida, or Mexico City, or countless other Latin American cities. Sidewalks are one of the cheapest forms of infrastructure, yet they remain chronically neglected. And when they fail, people are forced into the streets, where they compete with cars for space — often at deadly risk.

There are moments, though, when cities reclaim their streets. Mexico City closes its central avenues every Sunday for Muévete en Bici, a weekly ciclovía that draws hundreds of thousands of residents. Mérida’s own biciruta just turned 18, filling Paseo de Montejo with families, food vendors, and cyclists. These events prove what many urbanists argue: when given the chance, people flock to car-free streets. But a weekly celebration is not enough. Mobility justice requires more than symbolic gestures. It demands permanent infrastructure — wide sidewalks, continuous bike lanes, affordable public transit — that redistributes space every day, not just on Sundays.

The stakes are high because mobility is equity. A student who cannot safely bike or bus to school is at a disadvantage before class even begins. A worker who spends two hours each way commuting from the periphery of a sprawling city loses time, money, and energy that wealthier residents keep. A wheelchair user navigating broken sidewalks experiences exclusion in its most literal form. When mobility fails, equity fails. And when equity fails, democracy weakens. Cities that prioritize cars over people send a clear message: some lives are worth more than others.

What would it mean to take mobility justice seriously? It would mean funding sidewalks before highways, expanding bike networks before widening roads, and ensuring transit is not just available but affordable. It would mean rethinking parking minimums, as Mexico City did when it adopted the policy “Menos cajones, más ciudad” — “Less parking, more city.” It would also mean reframing mobility as a public right, not a private luxury. Just as we accept that education or clean water are collective responsibilities, so too should we see movement as essential to participation in civic life.

The challenges of Latin American cities echo those of the United States, though the contexts differ. In both regions, mobility reflects deep inequalities. In the U.S., suburban sprawl and underfunded transit trap low-income residents in cycles of car dependency. In Latin America, weak regulations and uneven infrastructure create dangerous and fragmented mobility systems. But solutions can also travel. Latin American ciclovías inspired similar programs in U.S. cities. U.S. disability rights movements have pushed for stronger accessibility standards that could inform Latin American reforms. The question is whether policymakers are willing to learn across borders, or whether they will remain locked in car-centric paradigms.

Every broken sidewalk, every missing curb cut, every unprotected bike lane is a policy choice. It is easy to think of infrastructure as background noise, the stage on which life unfolds. But it is more accurate to think of it as the script. It determines who appears on stage, who gets a speaking role, and who is silenced altogether. Mobility justice is not just about concrete and asphalt. It is about belonging. It is about recognizing that the freedom to move is inseparable from the freedom to live fully in one’s city.

That day in the bike lane, I stepped aside to let the wheelchair user pass. It was a small moment, but it underscored a larger truth: individuals can yield, but only cities can ensure safe passage. Until we design infrastructure with justice in mind, vulnerable people will keep being forced into dangerous spaces. Mobility justice means asking, over and over again: who gets to move, and who doesn’t? Until the answer is “everyone,” our sidewalks, streets, and cities will remain unfinished.

Boutique Imperialism: Desire and U.S. Power in Guatemala

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Adoption as Global Policy and Market

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Cultural Diplomacy in a Fractured Hemisphere

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.