4           the trench

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From the motorcycle injury of a man who crashed into a furrow dug across the region’s lone highway, Chapter 4 weighs some legal implications and temporizing effects of Shining Path’s sabotage of rural transit infrastructure. While elaborating upon events from the late 1980s, I relate the history of this frontier road and reflect too on the inscriptive powers of hinterland highway construction. As a manifestation of sedentary nomos, Peru’s Carretera Marginal became the originary line of an emerging property regime in the Huallaga Valley—a legal/territorial assemblage of agrarian reform that Maoist insurgents later interrupted: dynamiting bridges, excavating asphalted portions of the road. In conversation with Shego—ten years after his accident—I examine how struggles for political sovereignty jolted everyday mobility no less than experiences of time, leaving wounds to linger and express what memories could not.