The Pan-American Highway
John Moore
AP
In 1999 the Associated Press assigned Mexico City-based AP Photo Editor John Moore to do a long-term project looking at the cultural, economic and political effects of globalization along the original route of the Pan-American Highway.
The highway was first designed to run from Laredo, Texas to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Moore and AP reporter Niko Price traveled to all of the countries along the route - Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina. This stretch of road runs continuous, except for the Darien Gap in Panama, a dense stretch of jungle and river systems, which separates North and South America.
Preview
The project was completed from occasional trips along the highway throughout Latin America. The series of images was completed in September 2001, but the terrorist attacks and related news events – the international "war on terror" – delayed the release of the project until late 2002. Many of the photographs exhibited in Visa Pour l'Image were not earlier released in the AP edit. In the project, the highway appears as an occasional metaphor for globalization, as commerce moves across borders, and indigenous cultures adapt to a world economy which has left many people behind. The images provide a melancholy look at Latin America, struggling to maintain an identity against the relentless march of "progress."
