In the Honduran region of Santa Barbara, since 1974, the villages of Pinito and Ladrilleras have appeared in public documents as officially flooded by the building of a dam called El Pino. El Pino Dam's construction project has embodied aspirations, hopes, and fears as, over the decades, it has been reanimated and later abandoned by multiple administrations. While not a single bag of cement has been laid on the ground, the project's approval has considerably impacted an array of actors, such as professionals involved in El Pino Dam's construction, public workers, and the inhabitants of areas programmed for flooding. In this article, I examine the heterochronic relations that emerge in the makings and unmakings of a cement-less dam and its surrounding area and how they configure a specific temporal configuration termed infrastructural temporal frictions. The heterochronic aspects of El Pino Dam's project are first analysed through a contextualisation of damming within more extensive Honduran histories. Afterwards, I explore the relationships between different temporalities related to the project by turning an ethnographic lens towards my participation in fieldwork conducted within Pinito and Ladrilleras as part of the most recent reanimation of El Pino Dam's construction scheme. Finally, issues of temporal agency take a central position in the analysis of two future-oriented ventures undertaken in Pinito and Ladrilleras.
Juan Mejía López (2026) studied this question.