A century ago, the Pan-American road promised a new era of fraternity between the two continents. Did it succeed?

by Shawn Miller  BIO

The Peruvian coastal desert section of the Pan-American Highway in Huarmey, Peru. Photo by Ricardo Ribas/SOPA Images/Getty Images

is professor of history at Brigham Young University in Utah. His books include An Environmental History of Latin America (2007), The Street is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro (2018) and Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World’s Longest Highway (2026).

Edited byAlizeh Kohari

Leônidas Borges de Oliveira drove the first 300 miles of the world’s longest road trip alone. The date of his departure, in early 1928, meant that the young Brazilian army officer also had the road almost entirely to himself. This gave him time to think about what he had taken on. The vehicle beneath him, a donated Ford Model T with a decade of delivering newspapers on the odometer, chattered with ease over alternating segments of fresh gravel and steaming asphalt that constituted Brazil’s new highway, connecting Rio de Janeiro with São Paulo. On both sides of the road, Oliveira surveyed the deforested Paraíba Valley, which had hosted the world’s first coffee boom – ranks of bean-fruiting bushes whose product had reached global markets in 60-kilo sacks on the backs of mules. Oliveira was among the first to see his nation at highway speed, and velocity could make the eroded landscapes of the past feel irrelevant. He believed he was chasing the future.

From the book O Brasil através das três Américas by José Roberto Faraco Braga

His compatriots shared his optimism. With shining medals around his neck and a new Swiss chronograph on his wrist, Oliveira departed from Rio to the fanfare of two brass bands and a flourish of civic oratory. He arrived in São Paulo to cheering crowds and a press corps keen to follow his automotive exploits. Oliveira’s rapid progress on this first leg, not to mention his countrymen’s enthusiastic support, fortified his resolve to push on to his final destination: the United States’ capital at Washington, DC.

Map of the Pan-American Highway (outside the US), 1946. Courtesy Wikipedia

Oliveira’s inspiration to make the long drive sprang from a novel idea, first proposed in 1923: the construction of an automotive highway that would link up the Western Hemisphere with a long ribbon of asphalt. Nobody knew exactly where the proposal had originated, and some official reactions in Latin America were tepid, but the popular response revealed an accelerating enthusiasm, and auto makers moved to capitalise on it. In 1924, the US Department of Commerce, which was headed by former auto executives, welcomed delegates from 19 Latin American nations to the largest promotional junket the US had organised to date, including a greeting at the White House by President Calvin Coolidge and a month-long highway tour that circled from New York to North Carolina and Minnesota to Michigan. The objective was to promote what Americans were calling a ‘Highway of Friendship’ – a Pan-American road, from the northern reaches of Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego, over which they hoped to see unfettered automotive travel and the emergence of stronger hemispheric cultural bonds.

Scores of intrepid adventure motorists were electrified by the possibility of such a road, and they believed the best way to support the proposal was to drive it, even before contractors had broken any ground. Oliveira, short in stature but ruggedly muscular, sought a little personal glory, he confessed, and none could blame him for that. But the notion that most resonated with his irrepressible idealism was the raw concept of unrestricted mobility, the agency and facility to go anywhere in the world a person cared to go. The last Western nation to abolish slavery, Brazil codified in its 1891 constitution every citizen’s right to move about the landscape without legal or physical restraint, and to reside, work and form relationships wherever they chose. For Oliveira, the highway and the car represented the medium and the means that could make free movement an achievable reality on a new scale. His long, goodwill drive was launched to celebrate these ideals, and to make them concrete.

What Oliveira ultimately wanted was an authentic Pan-American Union, two continents without passports, without customs, and without official barriers at the hemispheres’ many successive borders. Nearly a century later, the fraternal ideals that underpinned this dream and gave birth to the Pan-American Highway might appear unimaginably distant, subverted by nativist sentiment – but, in fact, remain alive in one of the two continents the road was supposed to link.

First, Oliveira had to prove it could be done. A few dozen had tried to reach the US before him. In fact, the first to road-test potential routes for such a highway were not American drivers in new American cars but Argentines and Brazilians piloting either luxury European sedans entirely inappropriate to the terrain or topless American jalopies of dubious reliability. Nobody had succeeded in – or even committed to, as Oliveira had – driving the entire expedition without a detour, that is, on the actual ground without placing one’s vehicle on the afterdeck of a ship or on a railroad flatcar to surpass a series of known, impenetrable topographies. Everyone told him, and kept telling him all along his route, that what he proposed was impossible. Brazilian highway officials doubted he would get out of Brazil.

He soon learned why he had so many doubters. Over his excursion, he found little mileage as easy as the Rio to São Paulo highway. The way was treacherous, and motorists had died in previous attempts. Indeed, Oliveira’s gruelling daily toil did not let up until he entered the US state highway system almost a decade later. His drive proved not only the world’s longest to date in accrued distance at 17,769 miles but also arguably the longest ever in elapsed time.

Leônidas Borges de Oliveira with Franklin D Roosevelt and members of the Brazilian Highway Expedition in Washington, DC, on 27 January 1938. Courtesy the Library of Congress

Oliveira with the Brazilian ambassador to the US. Courtesy the Library of Congress

Oliveira with Henry Ford in Detroit, Michigan, US. Courtesy Museu Mario Brava, Bariri, Brazil

Oliveira received by the Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas at the Catete Palace in Rio de Janeiro on his return to Brazil in 1938. Courtesy Museu Mario Brava, Bariri, Brazil

Oliveira’s convictions kept him and two later companions at their task, plodding north, year after year. At every opportunity, he spoke with energy about the dreams surrounding the construction of a highway connecting the continents, of an imminent hemispheric fraternity, and his remarks were published approvingly in papers in every nation he passed through. At his arrival in Washington, however, US officials insisted that what he claimed to........

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