Continental divide

Listen to this essay 26 minute listen Leônidas Borges de Oliveira drove the first 300 miles of the world’s longest road trip alone. The date of his departure, in early 1928, meant that the young Brazilian army officer also had the road almost entirely to himself. This gave him time to think about what he had taken on. The vehicle beneath him, a donated Ford Model T with a decade of delivering newspapers on the odometer, chattered with ease over alternating segments of fresh gravel and steaming asphalt that constituted Brazil’s new highway, connecting Rio de Janeiro with São Paulo. On both sides of the road, Oliveira surveyed the deforested Paraíba Valley, which had hosted the world’s first coffee boom – ranks of bean-fruiting bushes whose product had reached global markets in 60-kilo sacks on the backs of mules. Oliveira was among the first to see his nation at highway speed, and velocity could make the eroded landscapes of the past feel irrelevant. He believed he was chasing the future. His compatriots shared his optimism. With shining medals around his neck and a new Swiss chronograph on his wrist, Oliveira departed from Rio to the fanfare of two brass bands and a flourish of civic oratory. He arrived in São Paulo to cheering crowds and a press corps keen to follow his automotive exploits. Oliveira’s rapid progress on this first leg, not to mention his countrymen’s enthusiastic support, fortified his resolve to push on to his final destination: the United States’ capital at Washington, DC. Oliveira’s inspiration to make the long drive sprang from a novel idea, first proposed in 1923: the construction of an automotive highway that would link up the Western Hemisphere with a long ribbon of asphalt. Nobody knew exactly where the proposal had originated, and some official reactions in Latin America were tepid, but the popular response revealed an accelerating enthusiasm, and auto makers moved to capitalise on it. In 1924, the US Department of Commerce, which was headed by former auto executives, welcomed delegates from 19 Latin American nations to the largest promotional junket the US had organised to date, including a greeting at the White House by President Calvin Coolidge and a month-long highway tour that circled from New York to North Carolina and Minnesota to Michigan. The objective was to promote what Americans were calling a ‘Highway of Friendship’ – a Pan-American road, from the northern reaches of Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego, over which they hoped to see unfettered automotive travel and the emergence of stronger hemispheric cultural bonds. Scores of intrepid adventure motorists were electrified by the possibility of such a road, and they believed the best way to support the proposal was to drive it, even before contractors had broken any ground. Oliveira, short in stature but ruggedly muscular, sought a little personal glory, he confessed, and none could blame him for that. But the notion that most resonated with his irrepressible idealism was the raw concept of unrestricted mobility, the agency and facility to go anywhere in the world a person cared to go. The last Western nation to abolish slavery, Brazil codified in its 1891 constitution every citizen’s right to move about the landscape without legal or physical restraint, and to reside, work and form relationships wherever they chose. For Oliveira, the highway and the car represented the medium and the means that could make free movement an achievable reality on a new scale. His long, goodwill drive was launched to celebrate these ideals, and to make them concrete. What Oliveira ultimately wanted was an authentic Pan-American Union, two continents without passports, without customs, and without official barriers at the hemispheres’ many successive borders. Nearly a century later, the fraternal ideals that underpinned this dream and gave birth to the Pan-American Highway might appear unimaginably distant, subverted by nativist sentiment – but, in fact, remain alive in one of the two continents the road was supposed to link. First, Oliveira had to prove it could be done. A few dozen had tried to reach the US before him. In fact, the first to road-test potential routes for such a highway were not American drivers in new American cars but Argentines and Brazilians piloting either luxury European sedans entirely inappropriate to the terrain or topless American jalopies of dubious reliability. Nobody had succeeded in – or even committed to, as Oliveira had – driving the entire expedition without a detour, that is, on the actual ground without placing one’s vehicle on the afterdeck of a ship or on a railroad flatcar to surpass a series of known, impenetrable topographies. Everyone told him, and kept telling him all along his route, that what he proposed was impossible. Brazilian highway officials doubted he would get out of Brazil. He soon learned why he had so many doubters. Over his excursion, he found little mileage as easy as the Rio to São Paulo highway. The way was treacherous, and motorists had died in previous attempts. Indeed, Oliveira’s gruelling daily toil did not let up until he entered the US state highway system almost a decade later. His drive proved not only the world’s longest to date in accrued distance at 17,769 miles but also arguably the longest ever in elapsed time. Oliveira’s convictions kept him and two later companions at their task, plodding north, year after year. At every opportunity, he spoke with energy about the dreams surrounding the construction of a highway connecting the continents, of an imminent hemispheric fraternity, and his remarks were published approvingly in papers in every nation he passed through. At his arrival in Washington, however, US officials insisted that what he claimed to have done was impossible. Most were considerate enough not to say it to his face, and he had the honour of meeting President Franklin Roosevelt and speaking to a large audience at the Pan-American Union building. But almost nobody believed Oliveira’s claims. Engineers from the US Bureau of Public Roads had struggled to walk segments of the route, let alone motor along it. And they rejected his maps, which they described as not inaccurate but belated. The Americans had already projected the official route through spaces their surveyors had not yet dared to go. Where the road ran out, his men disassembled their vehicles, packed the components onto mules, and marched them on foot The evidence, however, suggests that Oliveira did exactly what he said he did. He arrived in Washington in early 1938 with a 500-page logbook of his itinerary, as well as photographs of himself and his companions posing with every mayor, governor and head of state they met along their route. They took informal photos at train stations, each city’s name in prominent signage, to prove they’d been there. The streets of most towns and villages they passed through had never seen a car before, and Oliveira’s team was welcomed as conquering heroes. The Brazilians even had a formal portrait done in Managua with the Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Sandino, who was possibly the biggest obstacle to intercontinental automobile travel from 1927-33. Sandino had thwarted, captured and even shot previous automotive adventurers who’d dared to pass through his territory. The photo, taken while Sandino was in peace negotiations, was his last; he was assassinated two days later at a military camp, gunfire that Oliveira claimed to have heard himself. In truth, Oliveira didn’t literally drive on four tyres over the entire route, though he cut no geographic corners. Where the road ran out or became too steep or narrow, his men disassembled their vehicles (he now had two Model Ts), packed the components onto mules, like sacks of coffee, and marched them on foot until the terrain again became drivable. As further proof, every step of the way, Oliveira’s maps detailed his progress, and he gifted copies of his charts to any state or national government that would receive them. Beleaguered by a whisper campaign in Washington against his drive, Oliveira returned to Brazil disillusioned, and he rarely talked about his extraordinary excursion during the rest of his life, which was spent at the lowest rungs of Brazil’s consular service. Despite his inimitable effort, he had been disbelieved and called a charlatan. Even though he never seemed to raise the question himself, some at home wondered if his nationality, or worse, his likely African and Indigenous ancestry, played a role in his rejection as a legitimate explorer. And, despite substantial publicity, Oliveira’s expedition was largely forgotten, even in Brazil, not to be recovered in historical memory until this century. The Pan-American Highway that Oliveira hoped to pioneer was indeed born in a burst of fraternal rhetoric. Officially, however, the road was never just about driving a car from Patagonia to Alaska, or vice versa, for the mere amusement of tourists. It was to be a modern network connecting every national capital, from Ottawa and Washington to Santiago and Buenos Aires. And this was to be only a beginning. The network was to then expand until it reached every province and shore, facilitating trade and resource extraction, breaking down old stereotypes and softening contested borders in friendly cultural exchanges. The ideals remained potent for half a century, and in 1966 the US declared the entire US interstate system part of the Pan-American Highway network. In a strictly material sense, this greater project has been a remarkable success, millions of miles of functional automobile paths that have revolutionised movement and left few spaces inaccessible to wheels. By 1915, the US paved a road from Canada to Mexico. In 1917, Peru pushed its first highway into the Amazon Basin. Already by 1925, Venezuelans could drive over the Andes in comfort, and from 1931 Cubans could motor the full length of their island. The US built a primitive road across Canada to Alaska in 1942, during the war, and Mexican contractors reached Guatemala in 1950. The overall progress was extraordinary. Ironically, however, the key link in the system through Central America, over which the US took control and about which there was incomparable publicity, was the slowest to advance. Not till 1962 did the US-built highway reach Panama City. And not far beyond the Panama Canal, the road came to a sudden halt at the boundary of an almost mythical space between Panama and Colombia known from 1955 as the Darién Gap. Since about 1980, not a single mile of progress has been made to close it. The Pan-American Highway would harden national borders almost everywhere it went, rather than open them The idealised Pan-American Highway has a troubled history that in some essential features parallels Oliveira’s ill-starred excursion. The road was announced in celebration and extraordinary idealism; it was pursued despite extreme exertions, diplomatic squabbles and ballooning expenses; and its construction spanned an unexpectedly long period, essentially a century. But the project sputtered out in disappointment and forgetting. Remarkably, the highway ended in a broadly held false memory. If Brazilians forgot Oliveira’s record road trip, Americans seemed to remember that we finished the highway. Even today, two thirds of the North Americans I’ve asked if it’s possible to drive from North to South America think that the Pan-American Highway was inaugurated and has long been open to general traffic. This historical confabulation formed early. American tourists in the 1970s, some pulling camping trailers, drove south in full expectation of crossing the intercontinental divide to vacation in South America. When they passed through the Native village of Chepo in eastern Panama, locals kindly informed them that there was no road through, but third- and fourth-generation US motorists could not seem to comprehend the idea of no road, so on they went. One Chepo resident sardonically observed that, within days, every driver returned north by the same road they’d come on. Set straight about the highway’s incompleteness by their own experience, some expressed a sense of having been defrauded by all the official highway hoopla. And just as Oliveira’s trip did not end in increased American brotherhood, the Pan-American Highway would harden national borders almost everywhere it went, rather than open them. If getting from one border to the next became increasingly easy, at the borders themselves, the road’s arrival threw up political, cultural and material barriers – walls, fences and even the Darién Gap itself, which at first was a geographical barrier universally condemned. By the late-1970s, the Gap came to be embraced as a permanent fixture by Panamanian officials, US diplomats and international environmentalists. The best current explanation for the highway’s unfinished status, the reason that Panama and Colombia are the only two bordering nations on Earth without an automotive connection of even the most rudimentary kind, is that Panama refuses to build a road they believe would serve as a superhighway for Colombian immigrants. The Gap is their border wall. Before highways connected the nations of the Americas, many borders were illegible – nobody quite knew where the lines were, and states made little effort to monitor human ingressions into national territory. These official absences at the border reflected rather open policies toward immigration and naturalisation before the 1920s. Brazil’s constitution, like those of other Latin American nations, rejected colonialism’s restrictions on migration and guaranteed free entry to anyone ‘when and how he may choose, independently of passport.’ Many Latin American nations paid immigrants to come, and gave them free land on arrival. Even in border towns like the two Nogales – one in the Mexican state of Sonora, and the other in Arizona, US – people knew where the border was, but movement across it was brisk and unregulated. Residents shopped, courted, and attended school with little regard for the line, which ran down the middle of a broad, shared main street, and the cities’ two mayors shared fire-fighting resources and cooperated on policing crime. At Ellis Island, the first US federal processing centre for immigrants, and at other official entry points, millions arrived each year literally undocumented, without passports, visas or birth certificates. Their names, identities and even nationalities listed on ship manifests were whatever they cared to declare, and customs officers waved through nearly all of them with little ceremony beyond a hasty medical check. Popular attitudes toward immigrants had fluctuated with economic conditions but, for decades, flaring anti-immigrant sentiment had had little effect on general policy. True, the US barred the entry of prostitutes in 1875, convicts and the insane in 1882, and polygamists in 1891, but other than the 1882 blanket ban on Chinese nationals, most legislation had rather narrow targets against individuals defined as undesirables. Otherwise, the doors were mostly open. Policies, however, changed abruptly in the 1920s, and the highway’s promotion had some impact on the reversal. The same year that Coolidge spoke in favour of building the highway, he also declared that ‘America must be kept American,’ and US Congress passed the broadly restrictive Johnson-Reed Act, whose discriminatory quotas reduced immigrant arrivals by a harsh 80 per cent. Latin Americans were not included in the act, but already by 1929 the US began detaining and repatriating individuals of Mexican descent, some of whom had been born in the US. Changes in attitudes and policies were not restricted to the US: Mexico and Central America followed suit almost immediately. Panama barred West Indians from entry in 1926. In the early 1930s, Mexico not only halted Chinese immigration but expelled without due process thousands of Chinese residents, many of whom had established successful, multi-generational businesses. In some cases, border restrictions seemed to arrive simultaneously with the highway. Costa Rican officials, who had recently promoted their open borders, established their first, land-based immigration controls just as the US constructed the highway connecting the nation to Nicaragua and Panama in the late-1930s. The barriers to migration were national, ethnic and racial, created to turn back the poor and car-less Significantly, restrictions on entry did not apply to tourists. Nor to adventurers. At the time of Oliveira’s drive, one could still cross borders without being aware of them but, increasingly, legal admittance to a nation required both passports and visas, and the red tape could be thick. Still, Oliveira found no insurmountable official barriers to his expedition’s actual progress. Indeed, the best way to identify yourself as a safe holidaymaker, or a legitimate explorer – someone who posed little threat of overstaying one’s welcome – was to arrive at the border by car. The automobile signalled one’s status and, if passage by car was fast on the highway, entry was almost certain – if not quick and painless – once at the border. But it was migrants, not tourists, who became the primary long-distance users of the Pan-American Highway and its tributaries. Despite motel construction and flashy campaigns promoting national scenic sites, automotive tourists never showed up in significant numbers on the road. This had less to do with the quality or unfinished status of the highway than with its extraordinary length. Boosters touted the highway as the world’s longest, expecting that moniker alone to draw motorists toward distant adventures, but the Pan-American Highway proved too long for the average American’s two-week paid vacation. Reporters imagined Ohio suburbanites driving to Rio de Janeiro as if on a whim. But a drive to South America, even without the inevitable hassle of shipping one’s car around the Darién Gap, was a commitment of many months, even if going just one way. The few who did get as far as Panama typically sold their cars to US military personnel in the Canal Zone and sailed or flew home because they could not face the hardship of driving all the way back. So those who took to the road in their millions didn’t come in cars with sunglasses on their noses. Rather, they sought new homes far from the places of their chance births. The majority moved on foot from rural areas to the largest cities in their own nations, the great urban migration that began in the 1930s, explained in part by new industrial jobs but greatly facilitated by new roads. Others went greater distances to settle in neighbouring nations: Colombians to Panama City; Nicaraguans to San José; Paraguayans and Bolivians to Buenos Aires. The most adventurous made the long trip to the US. While the highway made movement overland for migrants on foot substantially easier, once they arrived at a border, they typically came up against formidable legal obstacles. Even if they had secured the proper papers, they might be rejected because, without cars, they were identified as poor migrants. The administrative barriers to migration were national, ethnic and racial in character but, most specifically, they were created to turn back the poor and car-less. Hence, migrants circumvented officials by crossing borders where there were no roads. Nicaraguans arrived within view of Costa Rica on chartered buses that left them on a lonely highway that paralleled the border. Under the cover of night, they walked into Costa Rica where another bus picked them up and dropped them in San José the same day. Migrants moving north through Guatemala avoided the Mexican immigration office on the bridge over the Suchiate River, crossing the same on rubber rafts for a small fee, often within sight of authorities. To get across the US border, there were dozens of ways to get around official barriers, most of them now facilitated by Mexican cartels. The longest walk still takes place in the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama. Despite its distance and dangers, the Gap has been the most attractive point of entry onto migrant trails north because, without a road, neither Colombia nor Panama place officials or enforcement at the border itself, making it North America’s soft underbelly. Here, despite the hazards of the Gap, which includes a two-week trudge that has proven fatal for some, once at the border, you can walk across entirely unopposed. In the past, if Panama caught illegal migrants walking into the nation, they gathered them in jails and then marched them right back over the Gap. In recent years, with as many as a half a million coming through annually, including tens of thousands of children, Panama finds it easiest to put migrants on buses headed north, withholding passports until they arrive at the Costa Rican border. Important elements of the highway’s original ideals have endured even in the face of the dominant, contrary trends in immigration policy. Strikingly, beginning in 2010, nations in South America that in the past had been at war, often over the very boundaries that separated them, states whose individuals still retain an often palpable dislike for one another, came together to agree that, for the purposes of immigration, their borders would essentially cease to exist. Agreements strove to recharacterise immigration as a solution rather than a problem: the free movement of people was likely to decrease national tensions, enhance labour allocation, and recognise migrants’ basic human dignity by eliminating discrimination in work, healthcare and civil rights. While the EU seemed to be suffering setbacks, such as the loss of the UK, South America quickly gained an almost universal adherence. Hence today in South America, all those highways built at such great cost to connect national territories finally arrived at the destination to which Oliveira and others hoped: a union of American states. South America now houses the world’s largest free immigration zone, where the citizens of member nations, in addition to the familiar human rights of speech, religion, and assembly, now enjoy the basic right of free movement, to live, labour, and build (or reunite) families in any member country they choose. Regardless of their poverty, they can relocate to another nation without passports or visas and, upon arrival in their newly chosen home, they can start a business, send remittances, and enrol their children in public schools. Educational credentials are universally recognised, and new residents can be registered in national retirement programmes with credit for time employed in their nation of origin. And with just two years of residency, immigrants are eligible to apply for full citizenship. Nine nations have agreed to most of these terms, the exceptions being Venezuela, due to political challenges, and Suriname and Guyana, who are not yet parties to the treaty. The changes, of course, have not gone uncontested, particularly by conservative leaders such as Javier Milei, who insists on Argentina’s sovereign power over immigration, has suggested an Argentine Brexit, and even threatened Argentines with a loss of citizenship at home if they leave. Still, even in Argentina, the basic terms of the agreement hold, despite Milei’s populist bluster. The contrast with the US’s rising walls and Panama’s persisting Gap could not be starker. In 1932, the Darién Gap was wider than it is today, and it was the only place that Oliveira was forced to backtrack. He attempted to drive it even though the Colombian military had told him it was impossible. Broad swamps and malarial fevers forced the Brazilians to place their disassembled Fords on the deck of a boat for the first and only time. Oliveira, who might be in the running for the most optimistic person to have ever lived, opined that the Pan-American Highway would never be built overland though the Gap. The topography, he believed, was just too difficult. On that point, he was wrong. Humans have built roads through, over, and under terrain far more difficult than the Gap: Mexico’s Durango to Mazatlán Highway conquers the Sierra Madre with 63 tunnels and 115 bridges, one of them 400 metres high; the Faroese have tunnelled 600 feet below the Atlantic Ocean to connect their remote islands, one segment of which includes the world’s first subseafloor roundabout. In Panama, politics more than topography stand in the way of completing the road. The reality Oliveira could not yet see was that the fraternal ideals of free exchange and movement that he’d actively championed would die north of the Gap, foiling the highway’s long-anticipated completion. The South, however, has come to embrace Oliveira’s unswerving idealism, which would have pleased him. The myriad roads built across the South American continent in the past century, all without US help, permit the free flow of not just money, goods, ideas and wildlife, for which walls are mostly meaningless, but of human bodies, outside of whom no real meaningful rights exist. In South America, constitutional guarantees to free movement extend beyond national borders. Hence, a driving motive of the Pan-American Highway has now gone half the way there, but from the opposite direction its conceivers intended.