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This paper presents a surrealist urban political ecology of cannibal capitalism beyond the city, through the case of the Iquitos-Nauta highway in the Peruvian Amazon. Inaugurated in 2005 after decades of corrupt construction, the highway has catalyzed a chaotic fusion of unplanned urban processes and paralegal extractive industries erupting from and surging back into the city of Iquitos. Armed mafias seize tracts of land and sell off lots to landless migrants; deforestation opens access to white sand mined for the concrete of the city; battery chicken farms abut nature reserves and exclusive resorts; spiritual tourists drink hallucinogenic plant medicines down the road from the municipal dump. All bisected by the howling speed and mangled flesh of the road itself. Drawing on extensive field research, I interpret the highway as a paradigmatic example of extended urbanization in response to the conceptual conundrum of how to grasp the structuring logic of this process without abstracting from the complexities of its disjunctive fragmentation. Cannibal capitalism is identified as the violent dynamic animating extended urbanization, which undermines the conditions of its own expanded reproduction, while surrealist modalities of montage, ethnography and psychogeography are deployed to convey the apocalyptic morphology of the expanding urban fabric.
Japhy Wilson (Mon,) studied this question.