The rutted, two-lane road running 88 miles (142 kms) east from Colombia’s southern city of Mocoa to the city of Pasto bends sharply around razor edge ridges wrapped in mist. The journey, involving an ascent of over 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) in the cloud forest, is one of Colombia’s most dangerous. Hundreds of drivers have died in avalanches of mud and rock. Dozens more have slipped off the road into deep precipices and canyons. So drivers do not go unprepared. They stop at the edge of cliffs to pray for the dead. They stop at small chapels lining the route to light candles and pray for protection.

For the locals who use it regularly, the old road from Mocoa in the department of Putumayo to Pasto, which is in the department of Nariño, has been a curse since it was built in the 1930s. Each trip means stopping repeatedly and backing up to allow a vehicle to squeeze past in the opposite direction. Residents here are tired of the road. They are tired of watching people die on it. But now the prayers of the citizens of Putumayo and Nariño are being answered: a US$183 million project, which includes widening and surfacing some sections of the old road and building a 28-mile (45-km) new stretch, is underway and will be finished by 2010.

“This new road will shave several hours off our traveling time, reduce costs by at least half and allow our products to arrive in good condition,” says Darío Marín, president of Pradera Verde, a small fruit-processing company along the route. Marín complains that the existing bumpy, pockmarked road damaged his products. “It will be a benefit to milk-product producers, fish farms and other business,” he says.

“Everyone is for this new road,” adds José Ignacio Muñoz, director general of Corpoamazonia, the development and environmental authority for the Colombian Amazon departments of Amazonas, Putumayo and Nariño. “It will spur development, which has been severely impeded by the existing one.”

The new Mocoa-Pasto road is part of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), a US$55 billion project of South American nations to integrate their highways, waterways, energy grids and pipelines. Like many IIRSA projects, the road upgrade will bring progress. It will make travel between Mocoa and Pasto easy and serve as a central link in a 3,050-mile (4,900-km) IIRSA-planned network of roads and waterways connecting the Atlantic port of Belén do Pará in Brazil to Colombia’s Pacific Port of Tumaco, 176 miles (284 kms) to the west. Analysts say the network will spur trade, giving Brazil’s goods access to Asia, and facilitate the entry of Colombian products into Brazil.

But like many IIRSA projects, the new road also poses real risks. It could open the once-isolated Mocoa region to logging, mining and oil operations and attract thousands of migrants from both Colombia and neighboring nations. Environmentalists say an intense increase in development activity could wreak havoc on southwestern Colombia’s Andean-Amazon Piedmont region, which the road traverses. It could destroy biological corridors uniting Andean and Amazon ecosystems and threaten more than 250 species of mammals, including the Humboldt’s woolly monkey (Lagothrix lagothricha), the spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and the andean tapir (Tapirus pinchaque).

Worse still, it could upend the traditional lives of thousands of Kamëntsá and Inga Indians, critics say. Those Indians, believed to be descendants, respectively, of Polynesian islanders and the Incas, have lived for centuries from hunting and subsistence agriculture.

“We worry about settlers looking for work in road-building and agriculture,” says Jesús Quinchoa, the Inga governor of the several-hundred-member Inga-Colón community, which lies close to the road in the Sibundoy Valley. “We worry about them cutting down the trees, driving off our animals and bringing in prostitution.”

The balancing of development against cultural and environmental concerns is a common challenge raised by IIRSA, which was born at a 2000 meeting in Brasília of South America’s presidents and involves some 335 projects funded by governments and such multilateral organizations as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Andean Development Corporation (CAF).

Proponents say IIRSA, comprising 10 hubs, will create a network of much-needed infrastructure running from Colombia to Chile across the Amazon and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They claim it will generate trade and investment, forging the common South American identity that has been the continent’s goal since it achieved independence in the 19th century.

Bolivians, for example, would gain improved transport with an IIRSA-funded highway connecting the country’s altiplano to Brazil’s northern states, which, in turn, would be served by a planned IIRSA Interoceanic Highway linking northern Brazil with the Pacific coast of Peru. The economic benefits, experts say, will be enormous. Bolivians will be able to boost the volume and variety of their exports by gaining them far better access to Asia.

Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay also can look forward to a series of roads and bridges running from 20 degrees south latitude to 30 degrees south latitude and connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts. Proponents say the integration will boost trade in the soybean, hydrocarbon, and metal-mechanics industries, among others, and the increased activity will spur commerce elsewhere in the region.

Critics argue such forecasts ignore IIRSA’s potentially devastating environmental impacts, ultimately undermining the very economies the project seeks to help. IIRSA, they say, will create opportunities and pathways for millions of impoverished laborers to migrate into protected areas and indigenous lands, threatening three of the world’s greatest environmental hotspots: the Amazon wilderness, the Tropical Andes, and the Cerrado.

“IIRSA is motivated by the very real need to promote economic growth and reduce poverty among its member nations,” writes conservation biologist Timothy Killeen in “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness,” a 2007 study of IIRSA. “However the rush to integrate economies of the region should not be made at the expense of the natural resources that are the foundation of these same national economies... Failure to foresee the full impact of IIRSA investments will bring forth a combination of effects that will create a perfect storm of environmental destruction, thereby degrading the greatest tropical wilderness area on the planet.”

One feared effect of the Mocoa-Pasto road is a surge in unsustainable logging. Colombia’s underdeveloped timber industry is enthusiastic about exploiting the potential of the Andean-Amazon piedmont, 85% of whose 3.7 million acres (1.5 million has) remain covered with natural forest. The road from Mocoa to Pasto, which runs through the piedmont, would create the possibility of forestry concessions. Analysts say it would allow high-quality hardwood to be sent to China and other Asian markets through the Pacific port of Tumaco.

But unless regulated to ensure sustainable forestry practices, an expanding timber sector—and illegal logging—would fragment biological corridors, release huge quantities of greenhouse gases and alter hydrological cycles. That, experts warn, would make the region warmer, drier and unfit for its native biodiversity.

Similar concerns exist with respect to mining and hydrocarbon exploration.

Colombia’s Putumayo and Nariño regions are rich in hydrocarbon resources and have large, mostly unexploited reserves of copper and molybdenum. Those sectors could flourish in the region if IIRSA infrastructure made the area more accessible. With easy access to the port of Tumaco and expanded electricity service for the running of oil refineries and smelters, they could experience booms.

But more mineral and oil and gas extraction also would increase the potential for soil and water pollution—and fuel potentially unmanageable migrations of laborers looking for work.

“To the extent that poverty exists and people are marginalized, we face this unsustainable exploitation of natural resources,” says Muñoz of Corpomazonia. “It is why we need more resources to hire personnel, exercise controls and enforce the law.”

Colombia’s constitution requires that builders consult with local communities on infrastructure projects and that those communities be entitled to sue in court if their concerns are not taken into account. Yet, in a Sept. 2007 journey along the proposed, new 28-mile (45-km) stretch of the Mocoa-Pasto road, representatives of non-governmental organizations found that local inhabitants were largely ignorant of the potential implications of the project and its impact on their lives.

Local residents uninformed

During that journey, these representatives crossed small farms teetering on the edge of mountain slopes and the 79,000-acre (32,000-ha) Forestry Reserve of the Mocoa River’s Upper Basin, with its teeming primary forests, rivers and fauna ranging from monkeys to migratory birds.

They found that locals seemed happy about the economic opportunities a better road would bring and approved of an accompanying electrical expansion to remote hamlets. But they were unaware that the project was part of a larger continental network that could bring potentially massive increases in migration, resource extraction and development to their region.

Many locals did not even know that one of the road-building companies has been trying to win permission to shorten the route by running a portion of it next to La Cocha Lagoon, a Ramsar site and one of the most important refuges for aquatic birds in Colombia’s southern Andes. La Cocha also has dozens of private reserves dedicated to organic farming and environmental conservation.

“We are not against the Mocoa-Pasto road, but we want it to be done right,” says Elizabeth Tabares, president of Ecotono, a non-governmental organization that works with the support of the international green group WWF. “Unfortunately, it is not being done right. Most people know little about this project and are in no position to make their voices heard.”

Meanwhile, signs of change are in the air. Indians along the Pasto-Mocoa road say new settlers have arrived and the price of land near the road has soared. That is particularly worrisome to the Ingas, who lack title to much of their ancestral territory and fear their small reservations are becoming inadequate.

“These settlers will enter our territory, open pastures with slash-and burn agriculture and sell the trees for profit,” says Inga Governor Quinchoa. “There will be contamination of rivers and noise from the highway. And we’ll be unable to afford the land we need to shelter our growing numbers and maintain our culture.”

Readying for the rush

The Ingas and some environmentally inclined peasant farmers are preparing for what they see as an impending onslaught. Their first line of defense is environmental action plans.

The Ingas, for example, have teamed up with WWF to inventory rivers, flora, fauna and holy sites on their territory, categorize areas according to their most appropriate use, and lay down rules ensuring that economic development is sustainable. They have started nurseries using seeds of native trees. They are reforesting. And they are learning silvopastoral techniques that permit them to raise cattle in a forest environment free of costly fertilizers that can damage watersheds.

A green group known as Putumayo Option Foundation is helping peasant farmers become self-sustaining through similar techniques for their cattle, fish farms and vegetable plots. Indians and peasant farmers alike hope such efforts will help ensure a future for their families, so younger members don’t gravitate to extractive industries or road companies.

Still, many worry the road project’s impacts will be overwhelming. The Ingas, who use the hallucinogenic vine yagé—containing dimethyltryptamine or DMT—in shamanic ceremonies, dream of otherworldly solutions.

“We have been thinking of using the magic of the elders to close off our territory and make it invisible, so that the unwelcome cannot enter,” says one member of the tribe. “It would be a magical enclosure in which all our wisdom and resources would be safe.”