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7           between twilights

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In narrated encounters between transportistas and soldiers, Chapter 7 describes how armed groups sought to control rural mobility, when the region’s cocaine economy became entwined with the counterinsurgency conflict. Emphasizing land and fluvial transit corridors, I give special attention to the territorial implications of army forts: how those frontier outposts of the Peruvian state—most of which are now no longer visible—spread tangible effects beyond their own physical structures. Occupying hilltops and other strategic sites, counterinsurgency bases formed an archipelago that facilitated “seizures” of movement and time through checkpoints, curfews, and the confiscation of vehicles. This chapter traces how those seizures reoriented perceptions of valley geography—in ways that brought daytime and night into heightened opposition. With vivid stories transportistas later told of run-ins with the military, I examine the images, routine anticipations, and genres of encounter the fort system introduced and, for many years, sustained.

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