In narrated encounters between transportistas and soldiers, this chapter —the seventh of my book, Crossing the Current (Stanford University Press, 2022*)— describes how armed groups sought to control rural mobility in the Upper Huallaga Valley, when the region’s cocaine economy became entwined with the counter-insurgency conflict. With an emphasis on land and fluvial transit corridors, I give special attention to the territorial implications of army forts in order to show how those frontier outposts of the Peruvian state spread tangible effects beyond their own physical structures. Occupying hilltops and other strategic sites, counter-insurgency 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...

In narrated encounters between transportistas and soldiers, this chapter —the seventh of my book, Crossing the Current (Stanford University Press, 2022*)— describes how armed groups sought to control rural mobility in the Upper Huallaga Valley, when the region’s cocaine economy became entwined with the counter-insurgency conflict. With an emphasis on land and fluvial transit corridors, I give special attention to the territorial implications of army forts in order to show how those frontier outposts of the Peruvian state spread tangible effects beyond their own physical structures. Occupying hilltops and other strategic sites, counter-insurgency 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...