Chapter 3

From the side of the road to the borders of the page

Latin America’s Inter-Oceanic Road runs some 5800 kilometers from Peru’s Pacific coast to Brazil’s Atlantic coast. It is Latin America’s newest and longest East-West thoroughfare, a transnational development project involving Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and international sponsors. The road changes the social, political, and economic landscape – cutting through indigenous land in the Peruvian Andes as well as the Peruvian, Brazilian, and Bolivian Amazon. It traverses the analytical and linguistic terrain upon which international governing bodies construct and maintain human rights laws. Among the many people and things traveling along the road are men searching for menial jobs and women destined for the sex-trade. The wording of evolving human rights discourse concerning trafficked persons includes as it excludes, leaving many women who cross borders living in the interstices of society. In these “zones of abandonment” (Biehl 2005) or zones of “non-being” (Fanon 1967) women have no documentation of their existence, may not speak (any of) the (new) country’s language(s), and more often than not, do not know how to read and write. Often, but not always, these men and women are left without a voice, that is to say, without the right words with which to articulate and protect themselves.