Minding the Gap: Pan-Americanism's Highway, American Environmentalism, and Remembering the Failure to Close the Darién Gap

Abstract

The Pan-American Highway, proposed in 1923, was Pan-Americanism's most publicized idea, and the dream of a hemispheric highway inspired automotive adventurers from Canada to Argentina to attempt—and largely fail—to drive off-road from one American continent to the other. Despite a fifty-year consensus about the proposed highway's economic, cultural, and diplomatic benefits and even with the considerable momentum of automotive civilization behind it, one still cannot drive between North and South America. This article considers the hazards of the Central American environment and the early vibrancy of North American environmentalism as explanations for the failure to complete the highway. It commemorates, in a sense, an “event” that did not happen.