The Initiative for the Regional Integration of South America (IIRSA)

A Logistics Perspective

Abstract

In the analysis of the geopolitical alternatives that in recent decades have been developed in Latin America, it has been given close attention to the differences in political and economic models between neoliberal model of regional integration and the “post-neoliberal” and “counter-hegemonic” one, driven by the so-called “progressive governments”. Only recently have been emerging a few criticisms focused on neoextractivism which pointed out the continuity between these models. However, this criticism has been belittling the importance of logistics infrastructure as a key factor of regional capitalist development. An example is represented by IIRSA (Regional integration in South America initiative) plan, which includes 10 riders and nearly 600 communication and road projects. Raised in 2000 by the then President of Brasil Henrique Cardoso, IIRSA has been linked to all the countries of South America and has remained during the different cycles hegemony in the region, becoming rather an increasingly more central plan. By reviewing a recent academic literature grown around logistics, his genealogy, his discourses and their devices at the level of the government and of governance, this article tries to highlight the arisings of IIRSA in the box of a general growth of huge infrastructural plans around the world; the last was due to the requirement of the capital to recover, through the acceleration of the cycle of circulation of commodities, the tendency to maximize the gain in the normal cycle of accumulation. All this makes logistics as one of the main articulation axes of globalization, beyond the political differences that may arise at the helm of the nation States, and entails consequences as the gestation of new forms of govern, prone to the production of new spaces strategic, such as corridors and special economic zones.