A CHERISHED dream of South American integrationists has come a step closer after the presidents of Brazil, Bolivia and Peru laid the foundation stone for the last stretch of a highway that will stretch across the heart of the continent, linking its Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

The Inter-Oceanic highway will run from the Atlantic port of Santos, Brazil, the country’s busiest, around the continent’s most populous city of São Paulo, on through the country’s agricultural heartland and into the Amazon basin. There it will cross into Peru and pass by the former Inca capital of Cuzco before dropping down to the southern Pacific ports of Matarani, Ilo and Marcona, more than 2,575km (1,600 miles) from its starting point.

The centrepiece of the route will be the biggest bridge in South America, spanning 719m (2,360ft) over the Madre de Dios river, a tributary of the Amazon. Work on the final stretch is expected to be completed within four years and cost about £500 million. The highway is the first in a series of projects agreed by regional leaders last year to try to overcome their poor infrastructural links.

“Today as we start the physical integration of our countries, our frontiers cease to be lines of division,” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian President, said at the ceremony in Amazonian frontier town of Puerto Maldonado. The leaders of the countries involved have high hopes. Peru asserts that the highway will help to create up to 70,000 jobs in its poor southern region and will add an extra 1.5 per cent to the country’s GDP.

So anxious was he to get the project under way that Alejandro Toledo, the Peruvian President, fast-tracked its approval through the country’s sclerotic bureaucracy. “Integration only has meaning when we move from words to concrete works that will allow us to escape from poverty,” Señor Toledo said at the inauguration ceremony. Brazil has pushed hard for the road as it seeks a shorter trade route to Asia, which is the destination for a fifth of the country’s exports. China has become a significant buyer of Brazilian goods, from iron ore to soya beans and orange juice.

Planners say that the route will cut transport times from the Brazil-Peru border to the Pacific ports from one week to one day. At present much of Brazil’s Asian-bound exports have to be shipped through the Panama Canal or trucked a longer route south to Chilean ports. Poverty-racked Bolivia will connect into the network with the aim of opening up markets for its landlocked and isolated producers.

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