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A riverine society: Iquitos and the precarious urbanization of Amazonia

Part of: The Socio-Environmental History of Port Cities after the Global Turn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2025

Adrián Lerner Patrón Open the ORCID record for Adrián Lerner Patrón [Opens in a new window]
Adrián Lerner Patrón*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Cambridge , Cambridge, UK
*
Email: al2093@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

Steam navigation in the 1850s and the Rubber Boom beginning in the 1890s connected the Amazonia to the world. This article studies Iquitos, a major riverine port city in Peru, to interrogate the kind of urban environmental regime produced by the contrast between the modernizing impulse of the rubber era and the conditions of the rainforest and the customs of its peoples. Studying urbanization as an eco-technical process that involves both the longue durée and contingent critical junctures reveals pervasive connections between social inequalities and environmental conditions. The long-term trajectory of Iquitos reveals a vicious cycle of urban inequalities and precarious urbanization.

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Urban History , First View , pp. 1 - 16
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Riverine ports ‘unlocked’ Amazonia.Footnote 1 Steamers reached the Amazon rainforest through the world’s most powerful fluvial system in the 1850s. Half a century later, thousands of kilometres upstream from Belém do Pará, the old colonial Portuguese port city near the Amazon estuary, new cities became meeting points between the South American interior and the world. The Amazon Rubber Boom was the main reason. Global demand for the latex of wild rubber trees reached coastal Pará in the 1850s, then moved deep into the rainforest, following the Amazon and its great tributaries. By the 1890s, it had reached Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia. City growth at key nodes in the fluvial system was both a consequence of this process and one of its preconditions. Port infrastructure and urban services were indispensable for the circulation of people and commodities, and for the establishment and functioning of the merchant houses that dominated the rubber economy.

The Rubber Boom was a critical juncture not only for the formation of this urban network but also for setting the long-term characteristics of the cities. Throughout the nineteenth century, cycles of extraction and export of a ‘miracle commodity’ became an established way for Latin American nations to integrate into global trade and for regional elites, suddenly awash with resources, to launch grand modernization projects.Footnote 2 Often based in cities, these elites tended to idealize European urban modernity and prioritize urban public works. Urban improvements highlighted fundamental contrasts between built environments and rural landscapes, and between the degrees of civilization attributed to the inhabitants of metropoles and those of the countryside.Footnote 3 Export booms coincided with the age of ‘the social question’ in Latin America, and growing cities became its crucial loci. The preoccupation of national elites with inequalities and the condition of the poor, and their social and political consequences, was exacerbated by the contrast of these factors with ideals of modernity, by the embrace of scientific and statistical methods to understand them and also by the scale, density and proximity of these problems. Issues such as hygiene, housing conditions, crime and social practices were both more visible and more easily measured in large agglomerations where different social strata interacted.Footnote 4 Environmental conditions were always significant in elite discourse, in particular in relation to public health. Historians of Latin America have been paying attention to these issues for some time. But only in recent years have they focused on cities as sites of social conflict from perspectives that explicitly centre environmental themes.Footnote 5

The Rubber Boom’s explosiveness made Amazonia stand out against this pattern. It created astonishing wealth in regions that national elites considered inhospitable wilderness, and whose populations they deemed lacked civility. These conditions fostered particularly ambitious modernizing drives in Amazonia’s largest cities: Belém and Manaus in Brazil, and Iquitos in Peru. At the same time, the difficulties of access to the world’s largest tropical rainforest, and the long histories of local peoples and their interactions with outsiders, posed unique challenges to the notion of the modern city as a self-contained, discrete ‘modern’ environment. These conditions also fomented urban regimes characterized by extreme inequalities, especially in Manaus and Iquitos, where the Rubber Boom transformed small villages into boomtowns. Much less studied than its Brazilian counterparts, Iquitos in particular offers ideal grounds to analyse the sudden shift unleashed by the Rubber Boom. It was furthest from the epicentre of the rubber economy in Pará and less connected to the Brazilian networks that shaped it. It was part of a country ravaged by political instability and wars, historically less focused on its Amazonian territories. To this day, moreover, Iquitos remains fundamentally and historically a port city: unlike Manaus and Belém, which are connected to the highway grid in Brazil, it can only be accessed by water and air.

This article investigates the kind of urban environmental regime created in an Amazonian port city. Studying urbanization as an eco-technical process requires combining temporal scales: the longue durée of environmental phenomena but also the contingent, critical junctures during which social and political factors alter the city’s trajectory. The task is then to identify critical periods within long-term processes, and to zoom in and out to understand their internal logic as well as their enduring impacts.Footnote 6 The history of Iquitos since the Rubber Boom reveals direct, two-way connections between social inequalities and environmental conditions. The convergence between the modernizing urge of regional elites and the socio-environmental conditions of Iquitos led to a vicious cycle of urban disparities. The developmental path laid out by the Rubber Boom became permanent, with its links to violent insertion into markets and explosive capital accumulation, and its foundation on a modernizing impulse to remove all traces of traditional Amazonian socio-environmental conditions, peoples and lifestyles. More than a century of city growth was characterized by a long pattern of social and environmental precariousness. Not even major socio-demographic transformations such as the rubber bust, the eruption of informal urbanization during the middle of the twentieth century, the advent of a reformist military dictatorship, or that of neoliberalism, could alter this path of precarious urbanization.

This pattern is visible in the links between urbanization, indigenous and riverine populations and water (the dominant element in the ecology of the Amazon and a central feature of its social life). Elite efforts to create modern environments radically separate from the rainforest only highlight the subversion and ultimate impossibility of their project. Connections between cities, peoples and nature, and their social consequences, could be obscured and sometimes, paradoxically, intensified by dominant scientific discourses. Despite the crucial roles they played in city life, the indigenous and riverine urban working classes were often rendered invisible, treated as externalities in a city that revolved around rural extractive activities. In this sense, the urban environmental history of Peru’s crucial Amazonian port city illustrates the extraordinary ways in which a foundational period of global connection created a longer-lasting urban riverine society.

The Amazon Rubber Boom

Iquitos was established in territories once inhabited by the Iquito peoples from whom it took its name.Footnote 7 Founded as a missionary hamlet in the 1750s, it remained a tiny, isolated village until the mid-nineteenth century. It became a provincial capital in the 1860s and that of the Department of Loreto in 1897.Footnote 8 The advent of steam navigation to Amazonia was the critical breakthrough. International treaties in the 1850s and 1870s created the legal framework to open up the Amazon.Footnote 9 Because of its location in the river system, the Peruvian government selected Iquitos as its Amazonian hub. The government invested heavily and succeeded in creating incentives for commercial activity and the creation of a permanent fluvial port. Upper Amazonian commodities now reached global markets through the Atlantic, and the region received foreign products, technology, peoples and capital.Footnote 10

When demand for Amazonian wild rubber exploded in the industrialized world in the 1860s, Iquitos was uniquely positioned to benefit. By the 1880s, it was the booming centre of a network connecting Amazonian tree-tappers to docks, industries and consumers. It was here that many of the import-export and outfitting houses that dominated the intricate, debt-based exploitative rubber economy, as well as the services, commercial businesses, officials and workers that accompanied them, were concentrated.Footnote 11 The merchant houses that controlled the economic life of the city were remarkably heterogeneous in their origins, counting Peruvian, French, German, British, North African, Portuguese and Brazilian companies among the most powerful concerns, and several Chinese firms largely focused on retail. While their lead export was rubber, the other economic activities of these companies varied. They imported goods and were often involved in wholesale and retail commerce in Iquitos, in smaller Amazonian towns along the rivers (through itinerant peddlers known as regatones) and in the outfitting of consumer goods and tools for the rubber tappers, an undertaking that combined trade and the provision of credit. Besides all manner of durable consumer goods, the import-export houses provided Iquitos with most of the materials needed for the creation of capital and infrastructure. A sample from 1904 shows that among the largest quantities of products were rice, soap, canned food, lard, crackers, unspecified categories of ‘food’ and ‘commodities’ (géneros) as well as gunpowder, metallic tools, alcohol and the special jars used to collect tapped rubber.Footnote 12

Part of this merchant class became a new local elite invested in shaping their city according to contemporary models of urban modernity. Meeting that objective would reflect their own achievements as civilizing agents, provide the amenities they craved, attract more immigrants and capital, and generally transform the image and experience of a wretched, peripheral boomtown into one of a modern city.Footnote 13 These changes gave Iquitos its distinctive rubber-boom appearance. The central area of the city, along the Amazon, underwent an aggressive modernization and embellishment process starting in around 1905. As might be expected in the Amazonian setting, major projects focused on sanitation, including sewage, running water and street paving. But efforts were also made to implement an electric grid, major private and public buildings, ornamental improvements and, as we will see, critical port infrastructure. The reach and success of these urban reforms should not be exaggerated, because they targeted only a fraction of Iquitos and they could not be sustained after the Rubber Boom went bust. The city developed in the form of a narrow strip of modernized riverfront, with some imposing buildings, squares and facilities surrounded by much larger settlements. In these extensive and nearby outskirts, which housed most of the population, conditions were far from glamorous: streets were covered with mud, with housing concentrated in wooden shacks with thatched roofs and no sanitary infrastructure.Footnote 14 Still, the infrastructure projects created during this era became a fundamental blueprint.

At the core of these interventions was a radical environmental aspiration. The goal was to expunge the jungle from the city. Amazonian elites, like their counterparts elsewhere, conceptualized the modern city as fundamentally different from ‘nature’ and providing a decisive break from traditional lifestyles. The creative destruction at the core of this modernization targeted everything fitting these stereotypes: intrusions of wilderness, the customs of popular classes and, in general, the traditional, indigenous and riverine lifestyles of the rainforest. A porous relationship between the port city and rainforest was central to the opening up of Amazonia. The inhabitants of the forests, in some cases under conditions of extreme exploitation, extracted latex from wild trees, which was then processed in cities and exported as rubber. Debt-based networks of outfitters, lenders, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats linked cities and hinterlands. And yet, ruling elites often defined the city as the antithesis of the rainforest. ‘Civilized’ life in permanent built environments was the opposite of the ever-changing ways of riverine peoples, whose customs and rhythms followed the patterns of Amazonian nature and, above all, those of water, its dominant element.Footnote 15

At the same time, the riverine system was the main reason for Iquitos’ existence as well as its rise to prominence and permanence. The maligned indigenous and riverine peoples performed essential roles in the functioning of the Amazonian economy, from the tapping of rubber trees to the blue-collar jobs that kept Iquitos working. Both nature and people were infrastructure.Footnote 16 This tension between displacement and dependence was the key dynamic of the historical trajectory of Iquitos.

When rubber plantations in Asia took over global markets in the 1910s, the Amazon rubber economy collapsed.Footnote 17 But if the bonanza did not last, the city did. Rubber was a rural industry, so the bust led to decades-long rural–urban migration. For all the talk of decline, Iquitos continued to grow, from a minuscule village to 9,500 people in 1902, 22,000 in 1928 and 58,000 by 1961.Footnote 18 But there was a different kind of growth after 1920: slower, in poor informal neighbourhoods and often on or near water. These new populations challenged the urban order, turning the modernizing impetus of local elites into a permanent state of affairs.

The Amazon River and Iquitos’ waterfront

The key topographic markers around Iquitos are the Amazon and the smaller Nanay and Itaya rivers. The Amazon altered its course at least five times between the mid-eighteenth and the late-twentieth centuries.Footnote 19 Its path had changed direction before the 1840s, leaving Iquitos isolated, and the town languished. After the 1840s, the river changed direction again and flowed through Iquitos. This allowed the epochal transformations brought by the steamship to make Iquitos their Peruvian heart.Footnote 20

In 1905, Liverpool’s Booth Steamship Company, a leading player in the rubber economy, inaugurated a pier with a state-of-the-art floating dock in downtown Iquitos.Footnote 21 However, the pier was marred by a major setback. Already in 1899, parts of the cliff in the central district, close to the city’s Prefectura, had crumbled into the river.Footnote 22 Now back in the centre of town, the Amazon hit the riverbank with increased volume and power.Footnote 23 In 1910, just when rubber prices peaked, the swollen river threatened to erode other sections of the waterfront during the heaviest rain season. The indigenous pier and hamlet of Belén, adjacent to downtown Iquitos and at the time set to become part of the city, suffered the worst effects.Footnote 24 New collapses occurred in 1915 and 1916 as waterfront erosion became the scourge of Iquitos.Footnote 25

Booth’s floating pier risked being detached, with potentially calamitous economic consequences. In 1920, it was dismantled and reinstalled more securely to prevent further deterioration.Footnote 26 During the 1920s, after the bust, nearby streets suffered damage.Footnote 27 In 1928, after several landslides, the authorities finally had the pier moved 300 metres downstream. In 1936, after the cliff crumbled in the new location, the government hired a Navy engineer to fix the problem. His report concluded that the new spot, too, was unsustainable. The pier ought to be moved to Punchana, another riverine hamlet absorbed by the city, two kilometres downstream. Despite recurrent problems and technical reports suggesting relocation, Booth’s pier remained downtown. After numerous landslides between 1940 and 1944, on 5 May 1944 the floating deck finally broke off and floated downriver.Footnote 28

In the face of this debacle and the continuing deterioration of the waterfront, the government commissioned a new study in 1948. The first report on the subject to use aerial photography confirmed previous diagnoses: the Amazon’s current hit the bank particularly hard between Belén and the city centre, eroding it at a rate of five metres per year, and validated the need to move the pier to Punchana.Footnote 29 After several complementary studies, the pier was finally moved there in 1956. The 1948 report also documented the formation of a periodically flooded, swampy beach below and in front of Belén.Footnote 30 Already a large neighbourhood, by 1940 Belén had grown into a new urban space. Its inhabitants built stilted and floating homes and businesses. These were traditional all over Amazonia, but such a concentration in a Peruvian city was new. Around the market in Belén, which had been built in response to popular demand, the people of Lower Belén created hybrid landscapes and ways of life that exposed the ties between the worlds of the city and the rainforest. In canoes and small motorboats, they used the waterways to trade between Iquitos and the forest. They also used the seasonal flooding to grow produce and fish for subsistence or sale.Footnote 31

Lower Belén was a reminder of the presence of traditional rural Amazonian lifestyles in the city, but also of the nationwide growth of urban informality. Belén was the most recognizable poor neighbourhood in Iquitos, suffering from meagre sanitation, erosion, lack of running water, unsafe building materials and frequent fires. The growth of the lower section on the beach made these issues more pressing, as was shown by a series of devastating fires and the recurrence of diseases influenced by environmental conditions, from intestinal infections to mosquito-borne epidemics.Footnote 32 Lower Belén was the most visible space of precarious urbanization in the Peruvian Amazon.

Only a few hundred metres downstream, riverbank collapses reached a critical point in the 1960s. Property values in Iquitos were strongly linked to proximity to the riverfront, a traditional venue for socializing that housed imposing official buildings.Footnote 33 The road that bordered the river further downstream was affected by the collapses. It was the only land connection between central Iquitos, Punchana and Bellavista (another urbanizing hamlet and the main port to the Nanay River). Authorities ordered the evacuation of entire blocks. Eventually, even the new pier in Punchana suffered damage.Footnote 34 By then, calls for riverfront protection had become ubiquitous. Government agencies commissioned a number of costly technical studies in search of solutions.Footnote 35 An emergency committee for riverbank protection was created in 1963, and throughout the 1960s it consumed a large part of Loreto’s public works budget.Footnote 36

The heterogeneous body of research produced during those years reflects the impossibility of separating Iquitos as an ecosystem from Iquitos as a social formation, painting a broad, long-term image of the interactions between built environments and their ecological media. The nature of the studies reflects this diversity. They included geomorphological, limnological and socio-economic analyses, bathymetric charts and cadastral maps. The city’s riverfront was studied from the air, from underwater, in relation to the Amazon’s currents, but also with regard to social factors such as land ownership and use. In fact, it had long been clear that the compatibility between the chemical composition of underground wastewater and that of the soil was important to the stability of Iquitos’ riverine sections.Footnote 37 In 1918, for example, when parts of the waterfront were paved, engineers worried that erosion could cause disaster in poor riverine neighbourhoods such as Belén, right next to the city centre, or Punchana, towards which the city was growing.Footnote 38 Many public works were abandoned after the rubber bust in the 1910s. Because of this, and because the general policy towards such neighbourhoods provided, at best, selective access to services, by the 1960s communities such as Belén and Punchana still lacked most water utilities. Water nevertheless circulated in plain view and underground, polluted and uncontrolled, causing sanitary problems as well as structural damage.Footnote 39

This accumulation of knowledge should have made clear that the crisis of the cliffs was directly related to the interplay between the force of the Amazon River, the phreatic zone and water table, precipitation regimes and the city’s drainage systems and wastewater infrastructure. Where they existed along the river in Punchana and Belén, septic tanks and pipes were overflowing. Their waters constituted a ‘sewage table’ with a chemical composition that corroded the waterfront.Footnote 40 The river accelerated this process, but the collapses were largely anthropogenic, caused by the city’s historical interaction with the river. Rather than the ideal modern artefact discrete from ‘nature’, Iquitos was part of a complex ecosystem that included the human and the non-human. In other words, the urine and excrement of the poor helped to erode the city’s most valuable waterfront real estate. Urban policy, however, perpetuated the distinction between the city and Amazonian nature, which it had to overcome, and from which it needed protection. Riverfront defence and water-control-related aspects of sanitation were treated as separate problems. Authorities associated erosion only with the Amazon River. In the process, they spent fortunes while leaving Iquitos’ poorest people to their own devices.

Staying afloat: environmental marginalization

After a century of urbanization, an iconic aspect of Amazonian urban landscapes had also become a symbol of their precariousness: the popular neighbourhoods in floodplains that challenged notions of urban order based on the stability of the built environment. Their legal status was as fragile as their material conditions. As was often the case in twentieth-century Latin America, their inhabitants were permanently threatened with eviction.Footnote 41 In Iquitos, the most notorious and popular informal neighbourhood, known as a barriada or pueblos joven, was Belén.

Much of the land of Belén had been bought by a company called J.C. Arana y Hermanos, later the Peruvian Amazon Company, built on rubber-tapping in the Putumayo river region and now remembered for its brutal treatment of local indigenous peoples. The Arana family went on to dominate the economy and politics of Iquitos for most of the twentieth century.Footnote 42 In the meantime, Belén became what one author called Iquitos’ ‘neural engine and main port-market for staple products’, but also a hub of poverty and socio-environmental problems.Footnote 43 By 1920, its shacks had expanded to the nearby hills, to the edges of the Itaya and the Amazon and to the shores of lakes in their confluence. Belén periodically suffered from fires and destructive floods, and malaria was chronic.Footnote 44

As in most places, poor, informal neighbourhoods in Iquitos were stigmatized as ‘marginal’, but were integral to life in the city.Footnote 45 Barriadas were home to more than 70 per cent of the urban population.Footnote 46 Lower Belén itself had no fewer than 3,500 people.Footnote 47 Immediately adjacent to the modern city centre and a major marketplace, for decades it remained integral to the urban regime. It housed immigrants and all kinds of outsiders and dozens of businesses. To this day it is often portrayed in exotic terms, either with semi-parodic expressions like ‘the Venice of the poor’ or as a bohemian quarter with a booming Ayahuasca industry, usually led by indigenous shamans.Footnote 48 In the late 1960s, almost two thirds of the population of Belén came from Amazonian regions outside of Iquitos.Footnote 49 The neighbourhood was shaped by indigenous cultures coming into contact with urban life, where the jungle and city met. Belén’s market best exemplifies this role. Parts of Lower Belén were, in practice, extensions of the market. Peasants and fishermen lived in Belén and sold their products in the market, known for its astounding diversity. The market was a few metres up the slope from where some of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants lived, cultivated and fished. Others travelled for days in slow boats and canoes to bring back produce. In the market’s famous section dedicated to traditional healing, Iquiteños could hire ‘witches’ or buy potions that promised health and success in business and love.Footnote 50

As in other informal neighbourhoods in societies fractured by enduring inequalities, the flipside of cultural wealth was material poverty. The low water season exposed shores covered with garbage. A local writer, while attempting to paint a sympathetic portrait, inevitably succumbed to tropes that linked Belén with the non-human:

An underworld of mud, garbage, poverty, buzzards, rats, mosquitoes, frogs, bats, flies, lice, disease. Women and men, tuberculous; children, withered by malaria, dysentery, parasitism, malnutrition. Children with their bellies monstrously swollen by the hookworm disease…Footnote 51

Belén was never ‘marginal’, but because of its connection to water and rural life and its miserable living conditions, it was stigmatized as such. This community at the watery edge of the Amazon’s modern centre presented a challenge to Peruvian authorities. It occupied space in ways deemed unacceptable in the modern city. As applied to Belén, this discrimination had long genealogies in urban history and the history of the colonization of tropical regions, where it stood at the intersection of historical discourses about science, race, civilization and citizenship. In the intellectual climate of the Latin American Cold War, Peruvian authorities led projects of policy-oriented knowledge creation about Belén. Both the Fernando Belaunde regime (1962–68) and the military regime (1968–80) that toppled it commissioned reports about the waterlogged neighbourhood. These reports emphatically argued that the neighbourhood needed to be removed.Footnote 52

The management of precariousness

Only after almost two years of clamour for more attention to the Amazon did Juan Velasco’s military dictatorship (the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces) organize an official visit to ‘inspect’ the Peruvian rainforest. During the first week of March 1971, General Armando Artola led a delegation of five ministers to the Amazonian department of Loreto. A hardliner, Artola was Minister of Interior between 1968 and 1971. His job increasingly demanded attention be given to shantytowns. Artola theatrically toured several pueblos jóvenes and eventually reached Lower Belén. There, in a gesture that captured the social-justice-oriented authoritarianism of Peru’s military regime, he reportedly asked a group of inhabitants if they owned their own homes; to those who did not, he asked if they paid rent; and to those who did, he asked for receipts. Most did not have them. He immediately ordered an investigation.Footnote 53

This investigation revealed a thick historical plot. Private citizens had been charging rent despite not legally owning the land. By law, since it was located within 500 metres of a major river, Lower Belén belonged to the Peruvian Navy. More dramatically, the illegal landlords were no less than the remaining heirs of the infamous Julio César Arana del Águila. The government accused Arana’s heirs of ‘usurpation and fraud’ against the Peruvian state and the people of Lower Belén, from whom they had been illegally taking rent for at least 27 years. The military regime then sold the land to the residents for a symbolic sum.Footnote 54

In the following decades, a priority for the regime was to delimit the pueblos jóvenes and integrate them into the legal system. On the ground, this meant mapping them and, in some cases, producing detailed cadastral maps of each house and its material conditions. Between 1968 and 1974, Peru’s military regime granted 15,000 titles nationwide, almost three times as many as those given during the previous seven years.Footnote 55 Iquitos was an integral part of this policy. While Belén, as one of the oldest, most prominent and most heavily populated ‘slums’, was recognized in 1961, at least nine more pueblos jovenes were legalized between 1972 and 1976 in Iquitos, and 15 more were recognized in the following 14 years.Footnote 56

Other than that, the ‘revolutionary’ military regime had a limited impact on the Amazonian city. When it came to implementing material improvements to the shantytowns of Iquitos, continuity was as common as innovation. There, more than in other cities, pueblos jóvenes appeared difficult to discern: material precariousness, including a permanent sense of crisis in the realm of sanitation, was city-wide.Footnote 57 These continuities were the product of institutional factors too. The military regime simply absorbed the Public Works Board (JOP) and rebranded it as part of revolutionary institutions such as the Sistema Nacional de Movilización Social (SINAMOS), whose acronym phonetically means ‘Without Masters’. It then continued the same work as before, often with the same staff.Footnote 58

On a practical level, it made sense to continue infrastructural projects where they already existed. Authorities paved the streets already under construction, and undertook the same process with regard to flowing water, sewage and drainage. In all these spheres, the precariousness of the built environment in Iquitos made continuity all the more important, given the urgent need for such improvements in excluded spaces.Footnote 59

More generally, during the regime’s most radical years, under the government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–75), there was little innovation in public policy in Iquitos. Official discourse emphasized the government’s readiness to incentivize voluntary collective work, fitting with the military regime’s agenda of social mobilization. Problematically, this also normalized the government’s failure to provide basic services. There was little change in that sense. Collective work parties based on voluntary participation and self-building had long been leading modes of public improvement in shantytowns. In Iquitos, they still dealt primarily with drainage, the city’s most critical issue. The pro-government press celebrated these projects as triumphs for the regime.Footnote 60

And yet, the pueblos jóvenes remained in precarious condition, especially with regard to sanitation. Above all, they were vulnerable to flooding. Whenever heavy rain hit (a very common occurrence), it flooded and muddied the streets and inundated dozens of homes. Every year, especially between March and April, desperate shantytown inhabitants ‘went out with shovels and other instruments to try to divert the flow of water’.Footnote 61 Just as seriously, there was a complete lack of running water in most barriadas. In 1975, for example, after more than eight months without the service, Robertina Reátegui Laos, who lived with her family in Lower Belén, complained that authorities were ‘mocking them’, as not a drop fell from the taps even though they were paying for the service. As a result, her family drew buckets of water from the Itaya.Footnote 62 The problem was city-wide.Footnote 63

The greatest environmental issue remained the riverfront collapses, perpetually considered ‘emergency works’.Footnote 64 In 1965, the military dictatorship’s predecessors announced their intention to end the landslides for good. Following the recommendations of an American engineering firm, they contracted the construction of massive concrete retaining walls along two kilometres of Iquitos’ riverbank.Footnote 65 National newspapers gave the story front-page headlines. One of them read: ‘Defense Works Will End Half a Century of Landslides’.Footnote 66 They did not – and collapses would remain a problem in the years to come.

The military regime continued policies based on containing river-borne erosion in wealthy, central riverfront areas. Where the retaining walls were not completed, they implemented sheet pile walls instead.Footnote 67 However, in September 1971, just when authorities were ready to announce the conclusion of the first stage of the project, heavy rains and floods, combined with increased density in poor neighbourhoods without good drainage, caused new failures at different points in the river. By late September, the Navy had evacuated several neighbourhoods. On 24 September, the brand-new riverbank walls collapsed, and much of the filling material that had won ground against the Amazon was lost.Footnote 68

This disaster led to a renewed sense of urgency. In early October, President Velasco himself visited the Peruvian Amazon and stayed in Iquitos, where he promised to solve the riverfront problem.Footnote 69 From then on, public projects became more aligned with decades of empirical research. They included a special sewage system, for example, and the paving of contiguous streets.Footnote 70 Still, given the scope of the problem, a long-term solution would have required extensive improvements to the whole drainage network, so the system remained vulnerable and new failures were reported in early March 1972.Footnote 71 Although SINAMOS led important sanitation improvements in shantytowns in the following years, collapses continued. In a particularly tragic case, on 4 April 1973, an unidentified child was trapped by rubble and drowned when a cliff fell into the river in downtown Iquitos.Footnote 72

During the second half of the 1970s, as in every preceding decade of the twentieth century, the Iquitos riverfront was afflicted by erosion. In early 1975, new plans were set in motion under the direction of the Ministry of Housing, ‘continuing with the experimental project launched in previous years’. They would be focused on the streets between the city centre and Belén, which had featured prominently in the dramatic accounts of collapses since the early twentieth century.Footnote 73 Five years later, in 1980, the issue remained widespread, including (as usual) in the valuable central parts of the riverfront.Footnote 74

This time, however, it was not long before a major ecological event altered the situation. The Amazon drastically changed course again in the 1980s. The great river washed away swathes of the large island opposite the city, and then thinned and gradually retreated from most of the Iquitos riverfront. By the end of the 1980s, the shore had been extended as sediment added to the alluvial plain and reduced the cliffs. The city was now gaining ground. By the 1990s, only a small strip of water remained in front of central Iquitos, where the Itaya met a seasonally flooded area. The plain was initially used for seasonal agriculture, but the city soon took over. Lower Belén expanded further downward towards the water. These changes responded to long-term, large-scale hydrological patterns. The phenomenon of fugitive landscapes is regionally known as ‘the river that goes away’.Footnote 75 Limnologists have called the Amazon ‘one of the most unstable rivers in the entire world’ and – in specific reference to the Amazon’s relationship with Iquitos – have remarked on how it ‘Seems to make a fool of many simple intuitive interpretations of its future behaviour’.Footnote 76 The new scenario in 1990s Iquitos was shaped by broad regional changes, such as the increase in sedimentation caused by deforestation in faraway catchment basins.Footnote 77

Geographic change and human adaptations such as the expansion of Belén had immediate impacts. The first was to render useless the extraordinary resources that had been invested in riverside protection. Walls that no longer protect the city from the river are still visible from the riverfront promenade, which is itself no longer on the riverfront. And yet, in other parts of the city, erosion could still cause trouble. In April 1994, for example, the largest branch of the Amazon cut through and damaged riverfront industrial plants in the northwest of the city.Footnote 78

With the retrenchment of the state at the end of the century came an intensification of urban precariousness, which had already worsened during the socio-economic crises that hit Peru in the time of civil war (which largely spared Iquitos) and hyper stagflation during the 1980s. When the Alberto Fujimori regime (1990–2000) requested a diagnosis of Iquitos’ urban development in 1996, the results were predictable, although they were presented in new technocratic vocabulary. The city showed a ‘high deficit’ in basic infrastructure such as running water, which was accessible to less than 50 per cent of the population; sewage, which still went mostly to the Itaya and Amazon; and garbage collection, 52 per cent of which went to open dumps. The report argued that the city was ‘physically vulnerable’ because of poor soil quality, lack of preparation for rainfall and floods during high river levels. The Amazon’s change of course, moreover, had isolated the city’s main port and several minor piers. The waters of smaller rivers such as the Itaya and Nanay were polluted. Several neighbourhoods were described as ‘precarious occupations’ of floodable and polluted riverine areas. Belén, chief among them, was a ‘commercial-intensive conflictive zone’ characterized by ‘informality, pollution, overcrowding, criminality, and prostitution’.Footnote 79

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, these issues remained. The former governor of Loreto, Yvan Vasquez, faces up to 30 years in prison for embezzling massive sums for a sewage network that was never completed.Footnote 80 In 2012, the city suffered its worst floods in more than half a century, causing enormous damage.Footnote 81 In 2015, the government announced plans to evict residents from part of Lower Belén and relocate them to a distant part of the city. It encountered widespread resistance. During the clashes, when municipal guards attempted to evict a group of women who sold produce in the market, the shopkeepers resorted to the weapons of the riverine poor: they threw fish at them.Footnote 82

Conclusion

European-style urbanization represented an extraordinary rupture in the history of Amazonia. For centuries, humans and other species had co-evolved in patterns that differed from those in other parts of the world. In the Amazon, paleoanthropologists argue, concepts such as familiarization make more sense than domestication, and the chronology and logics of long-term patterns in socio-environmental history need to be studied on their own terms.Footnote 83 The establishment of Western-style cities was therefore a radical premise. As urban scholars have recently argued, moreover, the impacts of urbanization reach far beyond city limits.Footnote 84

As a consequence, the transformation of Iquitos into a major port and its subsequent expansion represent a crucial threshold in the socio-environmental history of the Amazon, and therefore of the planet. The project of a modern port city was vehemently and explicitly pursued as a decisive break. At its core was the displacement of local environments and the peoples and ways of life associated with them. The explosion of capital accumulation and the intense spurt of connectivity to global markets during the Rubber Boom made this seem possible, as reflected in the notion of an urban ‘Belle Époque’ in Amazonia.Footnote 85

At the same time, the rainforest environment and the limits of urbanization in the form of an extractive enclave – in tension with the constant drive to displace resilient peoples whose lifestyles were both traditional and adaptable – meant that this pattern of urban growth reached only a fraction of the city. The history of water management in Iquitos shows that the vast majority of Iquitos was characterized by socio-environmental vulnerability. Pervasive and turbulent interactions around waterways revealed a porous relationship between rainforest and city. The modernizing push of the rubber era inaugurated an unequal regime that would outlast it and thereafter shape the history of the city. Throughout the rubber bust, the explosion of informal urbanization, the advent of a revolutionary military regime and the rise of neoliberalism, Iquitos remained a precarious city. This continuity had both ideological and practical explanations, but it ultimately came down to the city’s origin and function as a port city. This initial connection to global forces spawned a riverine society.

Competing interests

The author declares none.

References

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2 S. Topik, C. Marichal and Z. Frank (eds.), From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham, NC, 2006).

3 See a broad overview of this ideology in B. Fischer, ‘A century in the present tense: crisis, politics, and the intellectual history of Brazil’s informal cities’, in B. Fischer, B. McCann and J. Auyero (eds.), Cities from Scratch. Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America (Durham and London, 2014), 9–67.

4 The literature on ‘the social question’ in Latin America is vast and more generally focused on the largest metropolitan centres, where export booms often coincided with incipient industrialization, which was marginal in Iquitos. For a foundational study and sources on this set of preoccupations, see S. Grez Toso, La cuestión social en Chile: ideas y debates precursores: (1804–1902). Recopilación y estudio crítico de Sergio Grez Toso. Fuentes para la Historia de la República, Vol. VII (Santiago, 1997). For a sample of studies on Peruvian cities, see C. Aguirre, The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850–1935 (Durham, 2005); P. Drinot, The Allure of Labor. Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State (Durham, 2011); J. Savala, Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World (Oakland, 2022).

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6 On cities as eco-technical processes, see A. Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, 2014).

7 A. Villarejo, ‘Los Orígenes’, in A. Villarejo et. al., Iquitos. Una ciudad y un río. Primera reimpresión (Iquitos, 2011), 7–42.

8 M. Reátegui Bartra, ‘Sobre fundaciones y opiniones encontradas’, in R. Varón Gabai and C. Maza (eds.), Iquitos (Lima, 2014), 30–7.

9 P.A. Martin, ‘The influence of the United States on the opening of the Amazon to the world’s commerce’, Hispanic American Historical Review, I (1928), 146–62.

10 F. Santos-Granero and F. Barclay, Tamed Frontiers. Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (Boulder, 2000), 12–20.

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12 See the excellent overview of the rise of this merchant class in Santos-Granero and Barclay, Tamed Frontiers, 56–89, 146. For the sample of imports, see J. San Román, Perfiles históricos de la Amazonía peruana (Iquitos, 1994 [1975]). For broader perspectives on the rubber explosion, see B. Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford, 1983), 192–210; R. Santos, História Económica da Amazônia (São Paulo, 1980), 122–54, 176–207; S. Nugent, The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Rubber Industry (New York, 2018); Santos-Granero and Barclay, Tamed Frontiers, 56–89; B.L. Barham and O. Cooms, Prosperity’s Promise: The Amazon Rubber Boom and Distorted Economic Development (Boulder, 1997); M.E. Stanfield, Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees. Violence, Slavery, and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850–1933 (Albuquerque, 1998); Z. Frank and A. Musacchio, ‘Brazil in the international rubber trade, 1870–1930’, in Topik, Marichal and Frank (eds.), From Silver to Cocaine, 271–99.

13 E. Eiselen, ‘Impressions of Belém, Manaus, and Iquitos, Amazonia’s largest cities’, Journal of Geography, 56 (1957), 51–6; B. Barham and T. Coomes, ‘Reinterpreting the Amazon rubber boom: investment, the state, and Dutch disease’, Latin American Research Review, 29 (1994), 73–109.

14 J. Ortiz Sotelo, ‘Iquitos, del caserío misional a la ciudad: el largo siglo XIX’, Revista del Archivo General de la Nación, 33 (2018), 35–50.

15 L. Tocantins, O rio comanda a vida: uma interpretação da Amazônia (Rio de Janeiro, 1968).

16 A. Carse, ‘Nature as infrastructure: making and managing the Panama Canal watershed’, Social Studies of Science, 42 (2012), 539–63; A.M. Simone, ‘People as infrastructure: intersecting fragments in Johannesburg’, Public Culture, 16 (2004), 407–29.

17 Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 213–46.

18 M. Rodríguez Achung, Crecimiento urbano de Iquitos: condicionamientos estructurales en la década del ’70 y sus perspectivas (Iquitos, 1994), 19–21.

19 M.J. Uriarte, Diario de un misionero de Mainas. Transcripción, introducción y notas de Constantino Bayle (Madrid, 1952 [1750–67]), vol. 1, 155.

20 ‘Establecimiento de una escuela náutica i una factoría en el departamento marítimo militar de Loreto. Decreto supremo’ [1861], in C. Larrabure i Correa (ed.), Colección de leyes, decretos, resoluciones i otros documentos oficiales referentes al departamento de Loreto (Lima, 1905), Tomo I, 23–4, 250.

21 ‘Construcción de un muelle i almacén fiscal en Iquitos’ [1901], in Larrabure i Correa (ed.), Colección de leyes, decretos, resoluciones i otros documentos oficiales referentes al departamento de Loreto, Tomo VI, 71–86.

22 ‘Se nombra una comisión encargada de examinar el muelle i almacenes fiscales de lquitos construidos por Booth i Cía’ [1899], in Larrabure i Correa (ed.), Colección de leyes, decretos, resoluciones i otros documentos oficiales referentes al departamento de Loreto, Tomo VI, 107–13; Archivo del Ministerio de Vivienda (AMV), File LOR 16.08, Hydrotechnic Corporation, ‘Defensa de la Ribera del Río Amazonas en Iquitos’, Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Económico, Anteproyecto (New York and Lima, 1962), II–3.

23 R.G. Capitanelli, ‘Morfología y dinámica fluvial amazónica: problemas de Iquitos’, Boletín de Estudios Geográficos, 48 (1965), 160.

24 H. Vogt, ‘Observations sur les écoulements de berge à Iquitos (Oriente péruvien)’, Revue géographique des Pyrénées et du Sud-Ouest, 35 (1964), 402.

25 AMV, File LOR 16.08, Hydrotechnic Corporation, ‘Defensa de la Ribera del Río Amazonas en Iquitos’, II–3.

26 Capitanelli, ‘Morfología y dinámica fluvial amazónica’, 157.

27 See, among many examples, Archivo del Ministerio de Transportes y Comunicaciones (AMTC), Ministerio de Fomento y Obras Públicas, Serie Saneamiento, Box 164, Expediente 678, Dirección de Salubridad Pública, ‘Saneamiento de Iquitos, 1925–1927’, Mayor Strassberger to Senator Arana, Iquitos, 16 Jul. 1925, 10.

28 Capitanelli, ‘Morfología y dinámica fluvial amazónica’, 157; H. Kelly and D. Kelly, Dancing Diplomats (Albuquerque, 1950), 233–40.

29 E. Young Bazo and M. Tenorio, Informe sobre el Muelle y Defensa de Iquitos (Lima, 1948).

30 Bazo and Tenorio, Informe sobre el Muelle y Defensa de Iquitos.

31 In all these ways, they turned nature into a form of infrastructure. See Carse, ‘Nature as infrastructure’.

32 E. Candela Jiménez, F. Contreras Zanabria and J. Lossio Chávez, ‘Populismo y Salud Pública durante el ochenio de Odría (1948–1956)’, Acta Herediana, 60 (2017), 43.

33 AMV, File LOR 16.08, Hydrotechnic Corporation, ‘Defensa de la Ribera del Río Amazonas en Iquitos’, II–4; Archivo Regional de Loreto (ARL), Juntas de Obras Públicas de Loreto, Box 12, Varios 1959–1971, Cuerpo Técnico de Tasaciones del Perú, ‘Plano Catastral de la Ciudad de Iquitos’, 1954. See also McCreary-Koretsky Engineers, Iquitos Riverbank Protection. Second Part of Phase II of Studies for Riverbank Protection along the Amazon River at Iquitos, Peru (San Francisco and Lima, 1965), 33–6.

34 Vogt, ‘Observations’, 403; AMV, File LOR 16.08, Hydrotechnic Corporation, ‘Defensa de la Ribera del Río Amazonas en Iquitos’, II–4, II–5.

35 AMV, File LOR 16.08, Hydrotechnic Corporation, ‘Defensa de la Ribera del Río Amazonas en Iquitos’; Vogt, ‘Observations’, 35; McCreary-Koretsky Engineers, Iquitos Riverbank; Capitanelli, ‘Morfología y dinámica fluvial amazónica’; Misión de Hidrogeología de la Unesco en el Perú, Los derrumbes de terrenos en Iquitos. Estudios de reconocimiento hidrológico e ictiológico (Lima: 1962); A. Martínez Vargas, Estudio de los Sedimentos de Iquitos y sus Consideraciones en los Derrumbes de la Ribera del Amazonas. Laboratorio de Geología Aplicada, Publicación no. 27 (Lima, 1967).

36 See, among numerous examples, ARL, Junta de Obras Públicas de Loreto, Box 12, Acuerdos Recibidos Concejo Superior FNDE, 1963–1966, ‘Acta de la sesión del Consejo Superior del día 3 de marzo de 1963’, 5; and ARL, Junta de Obras Públicas de Loreto, Box 12, Acuerdos Recibidos Concejo Superior FNDE, 1963–1966, ‘Acta de la sesión del Consejo Superior del día viernes 13 de setiembre de 1963’.

37 See an early remark in AMTC, Ministerio de Fomento y Obras Públicas, Serie Saneamiento, Box 164, Ramiro Ferradas, ‘Informe para agua y desagüe para Iquitos’ (Lima, 1906), 8–14, 43–4.

38 AMTC, Ministerio de Fomento y Obras Públicas, Serie Saneamiento, Box 164, ‘Expediente relativo a la canalización de Iquitos’ (Lima, 1918), 8–9.

39 See, among others, AMTC, Ministerio de Fomento y Obras Públicas, Serie Saneamiento, Box 164, H. J. Bingham Powell, ‘Informe sobre los estudios del Ingeniero Guevara para el Saneamiento de Iquitos’ (Lima, 1911), 7.

40 Misión de Hidrogeología de la Unesco en el Perú, ‘Los derrumbes de terrenos en Iquitos. Estudios de reconocimiento hidrológico e ictiológico’, 4, Memo dated 12 Sep. 1962, Ministerio de Fomento y Obras Públicas. Available in the online repository of Autoridad Nacional del Agua, Peru’s Water Agency: http://repositorio.ana.gob.pe/bitstream/handle/ANA/1702/ANA0000683.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y accessed 22 Feb. 2021.

41 Fischer, ‘A century in the present tense’.

42 M. Reátegui Bartra, ‘Belén, la rebelde magia de un pueblo’, in Varón Gabai and Maza (eds.), Iquitos, 163.

43 E. Grajeda Chalco, Estudio Socioeconómico de la barriada de Belén (Lima: 2018; originally published by the Universidad Nacional de la Amazonía Peruana de Iquitos in 1966).

44 See the many files in AMTC, Ministerio de Fomento y Obras Públicas, Serie Saneamiento, Box 164.

45 J. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1979) and D. Collier, Squatters and Oligarchs: Authoritarian Rule and Policy Change in Peru (Baltimore, 1976).

46 AMV, Corporación Nacional de la Vivienda, Depto de Planeamiento y Financiación, Información Básica sobre Barrios Marginales en la República del Perú (Lima, 1962), 212.

47 CISEPA, Estudio social sobre Belén, Iquitos para un proyecto de vivienda (Lima, 1967), iv, 44.

48 See, for example, J.E. Maguiña, 1961 Guide to Peru: Lima, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Arequipa, Puno, Iquitos and Callejon de Huaylas: A Comprehensive Collection of Essential Information for Residents and Tourists Alike (Lima, 1961), 216

49 CISEPA, Estudio social sobre Belén, 10.

50 M. Dobkin de Ríos, Visionary Vine. Hallucinogenic Healing in the Peruvian Amazon (Prospect Heights, 1972), 55; F. Izquierdo Ríos, Belén (Lima, 1971), 15–16.

51 Izquierdo Ríos, Belén, 27.

52 CISEPA, Estudio social sobre Belén; Centro de Investigaciones Sociales por Muestreo (CISM), Estudio de la ciudad de Iquitos. Movilidad ocupacional. Educación. Migración (Lima, 1968); J. Ballantyne, Estudios para el Plan Regulador de Iquitos. Aspectos Económicos, 1966–69 (Lima, 1969).

53 El Oriente (Iquitos), 3 Mar. 1971, 1.

54 Impreso (Iquitos), 10 Mar. 1971, 1; Réategui Bartra, ‘Belén. La rebelde magia de un pueblo’, 164.

55 H. Gyger, Improvised Cities. Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru (Pittsburgh, 2019), 302, 304.

56 ARL, SINAMOS, Box 11, ‘Estudios de Proyectos, Concurso Arquitectónico’, File Documentos de Estudio-Restitución de Viviendas, ‘Resolución no. 918-73-Orams-V, 5 Jan. 1973’.

57 Rodríguez Achung, Crecimiento urbano de Iquitos, 39.

58 ARL, SINAMOS, Box 11, ‘Estudios de Proyectos, Concurso Arquitectónico’, File Documentos de Estudio-Restitución de Viviendas, ‘Resolución no. 918-73-Orams-V, 5 Jan. 1973’; ARL, Junta de Obras Públicas de Loreto, Box 4, ‘Acta de la Sesión Ordinaria de Delegados Celebrada el 12 de Marzo de 1968’, 45–46.

59 El Oriente (Iquitos), 20 Feb. 1971, 2.

60 See the following examples: ‘Mingas en P.P.J.J.: una lección a los escépticos’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 15 Apr. 1974, 1; ‘Mingas: Pueblos Jóvenes’, Impreso (Iquitos), 21 Apr. 1974, 1; ‘Hubo mingas en pueblos jóvenes’, Impreso (Iquitos), 28 Aug. 1972, 3; ‘Minga gigante harán en Pueblo Joven Bartra Díaz’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 6 Apr. 1973, 1; ‘P. Joven hace puente’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 16 Feb. 1976, 1.

61 For examples from different years, see ‘Lluvia: causó inundaciones en varios pueblos jóvenes de Iquitos’, Impreso (Iquitos), 7 Mar. 1973, 3; ‘Pueblos jóvenes sufren por copiosa lluvia’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 10 Mar. 1975, 1; ‘Inundaciones en pueblos jóvenes’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 3 Apr. 1976, 1.

62 ‘Zona de Belén pide atención de autoridades!’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 24 Mar. 1974, 1.

63 See, for example, ‘El pueblo pide agua’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 24 Feb. 1976, 2.

64 ARL, Junta de Obras Públicas de Loreto, Box 12, File ‘Acuerdos Recibidos, Consejo Superior F.N.D.E., 1963-64-65-66’; for one among numerous examples, see ‘Acta de la sesión del Consejo Superior del día lunes 14 de setiembre de 1964’, 78–9.

65 McCreary-Koretsky Engineers, Iquitos Riverbank Protection; ARL, Junta de Obras Públicas de Loreto, Box 12, File ‘Acuerdos Recibidos, Consejo Superior F.N.D.E., 1963-64-65-66, ‘Acta de la sesión del Consejo Superior del día jueves 13 de agosto de 1964’, 1-2 and ‘Acta de la sesión del Consejo Superior del día lunes 14 de setiembre de 1964’.

66 La Prensa (Lima), 17 Nov. 1965, 1.

67 ‘Obras en la ribera’, Impreso (Iquitos), 15 Sep. 1971, 1.

68 ‘Cedió sección del muro tablaestacas en la ribera’, Impreso (Iquitos), 24 Sep. 1971, 1.

69 It should be noted that the local press in Iquitos reported that the Cabinet of Ministers in Lima had approved the works in early January 1972, but there is no evidence in the Cabinet minutes that they even discussed the works. Cf. Actas del Consejo de Ministros, Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, Juan Francisco Velasco Alvarado, Tomo X, ‘8 de diciembre de 1971 al 7 de marzo de 1972’, in http://sisbib.unmsm.edu.pe/Repositorio_ACM/assets/docs/ACM_JUAN%20VELASCO%20ALVARADO_TOMO%2010.pdf accessed 3 Jun. 2025, and ‘Interés por Iquitos’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 5 Jan. 1972, 1.

70 ‘Malecón: Primera etapa de las obras de defensa’, Impreso (Iquitos), 1 Jan. 1972, 1.

71 ‘Deslizamiento se produce en el malecón frente a ex-plazuela Prado’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 1 Mar. 1972, 1.

72 ‘Derrumbe en la ribera originó una víctima’, Impreso (Iquitos), 4 Apr. 1973, 1.

73 ‘Vivienda: Obras en ribera para defensa contra erosiones’, Impreso (Iquitos), 5 Feb. 1975, 1.

74 ‘Continuarán trabajos del Malecón Maldonado?’, El Oriente (Iquitos), 12 Feb. 1980, 1.

75 J. García Sanchez and N. Bernex de Fallen, El río que se aleja. Cambio de curso del Amazonas. Estudio histórico técnico (Lima, 2010; 3rd edn [1987]).

76 R. Kalliola, P. Jokinen and E. Tuukki, ‘Fluvial dynamics and sustainable development in Upper Rio Amazonas, Peru’, Advances in Economic Botany, 13 (1999), 271–82; the quotes are from 278–9. See also E. Tuukki, P. Jokinen and R. Kalliola, ‘Migraciones en el Rio Amazonas en las ultimas decadas, sector confluencia Rios Ucayali y Marañon – Isla de Iquitos’, Folia Amazonica, 8 (1996), 111–30.

77 N. Bernex de Fallen with J. Ramírez, ‘El río que se aleja’, in García Sanchez and Bernex de Fallen, El río que se aleja, 84.

78 Kalliola, Jokinen and Tuukki, ‘Fluvial dynamics and sustainable development’, 279.

79 AMV, Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo Urbano/Municipalidad Provincial de Maynas, Plano Director de la Ciudad de Iquitos, Vol. 1 ‘Resumen Ejecutivo’ (Iquitos, 1996), 5–6.

80 ‘Fiscal pide 12 y 19 años de cárcel para Yván Vásquez Valera’, El Comercio (Lima), 15 Nov. 2015, https://elcomercio.pe/peru/loreto/fiscal-pide-12-19-anos-carcel-yvan-vasquez-valera-243842-noticia/ accessed 15 Jan. 2021.

81 National Geographic, 19 Apr. 2012, ‘Red Alert. Flooding in the Peruvian Amazon’, in https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/intelligent-travel/2012/04/19/red-alert-flooding-in-the-peruvian-amazon/ accessed 3 Jun. 2025.

82 See the report in the television show Buenos Días Perú, ‘Iquitos: Comerciantes usan pescados para atacar a serenos’, 16 Jun. 2016, in https://panamericana.pe/buenosdiasperu/nacionales/208235-iquitos-comerciantes-pescados-atacar-serenos accessed 3 Jun. 2025.

83 C. Fausto and E.G. Neves, ‘Was there ever a Neolithic in the Neotropics? Plant familiarisation and biodiversity in the Amazon’, Antiquity, 92 (2018), 1604–18.

84 See a recent exploration of these ideas and of expanded or planetary urbanization in Amazonia in Adrián Lerner Patrón, ‘The ruins of a steel mill: planetary urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon’, Journal of Urban History, 50 (2023), 563–82.

85 A.M. Daou, A belle époque amazónica (Rio de Janeiro, 2000).