Date
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Cartographic Latin America
 
Presenters:
Julie Gibbings, The University of Edinburgh 
Cold War Cartographies in Latin America 
This presentation examines the history of geographic knowledges and technologies during the Latin America Cold War (1946-1991). After World War II, when the US government sought to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America, its agencies recognised the need for detailed knowledge of local conditions. Accurate maps were crucial. Beginning in 1946, the US Army Map Service operated a free geographical surveying, cartographical drawing, and map reproduction school at Fort Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone. Known as the Inter-America Geodetic Survey (IAGS), the school trained thousands of military and civilian personnel from across Latin America.  
 
Trained through the IAGS, Latin American geographers used new mapping technologies to support economic development and US-supported counter-insurgencies against leftist groups. Latin American guerrillas, as well as people displaced by war, also generated new cartographic knowledge as they sought to navigate familiar and unfamiliar territories and to build political futures beyond the view of the state. Maps, guarded closely by the military and sought after by guerrillas, defined strategic battlefields. At the same time, guerrillas and displaced peoples navigated space through Indigenous and local knowledges of landscapes that were laden with social meanings, historical memories, and embodied other-than-human beings, such as mountain spirits. This research will seek to reveal how geographic knowledges and technologies –– scientific, insurgent, and Indigenous ––shaped a crucial and neglected theatre of the Cold War.  
 
 
Sebastian Diaz Angel, Cornell University
 Cold War and “Sidewise uses of technology”: Nuclear excavations and flying think tanks to control the Amazon and combat communism (1964-1973) 
 
This presentation analyzes a series of mid-sixties proposal for using nuclear excavation experimental techniques to remove a series of navigable obstacles of the Amazon Basin, and to dam some Sout American rivers. The paper follows a transnational network of flying think tankers and cold-warriors who sought to use nuclear excavation techniques to flood massive swaths of the Amazon basin, build the largest artificial lakes on the planet and transform the major rivers of the continent into a series of massive interlocked, channelized, and navigable artificial reservoirs, connecting the Amazon, Orinoco, and Paraguay river basins. Organized around the Hudson Institute (HI) of New York this project -known as the “South American Great Lakes System” (SAGLS)- anticipated to recreate the Great Lakes of North America in the southern continent to provide (in theory) inexpensive riverine transportation, inexhaustible sources of hydropower, and a ripe landscape facilitating large scale mining, agroindustry, and counterinsurgency operations in previously “unexploited” tropical regions. The paper explores also how and why the project was publicly promoted as a nineteenth century engineering challenges just waiting for twentieth century technologies to be completed.