Capitalist Cure ~ De Soto on Unlikely Heroes...

Peruvian economist and founder of ILD Hernando de Soto writes in the WSJournal about The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism...

"Military might alone won’t defeat Islamic State and its ilk. The U.S. needs to promote economic empowerment. [...] Today we hear the same economic and cultural pessimism about the Arab world that we did about Peru in the 1980s. But we know better. Just as Shining Path was beaten in Peru, so can terrorists be defeated by reforms that create an unstoppable constituency for rising living standards in the Middle East and North Africa. To make this agenda a reality, the only requirements are a little imagination, a hefty dose of capital (injected from the bottom up) and government leadership to build, streamline and fortify the laws and structures that let capitalism flourish. As anyone who’s walked the streets of Lima, Tunis and Cairo knows, capital isn’t the problem -- it is the solution. [...] The people of the “Arab street” want to find a place in the modern capitalist economy. But hundreds of millions of them have been unable to do so because of legal constraints to which both local leaders and Western elites are often blind. They have ended up as economic refugees in their own countries. To survive, they have cobbled together hundreds of discrete, anarchic arrangements, often called the “informal economy.” Unfortunately, that sector is viewed with contempt by many Arabs and by Western development experts, who prefer well-intended charity projects [...] All too often, the way that Westerners think about the world’s poor closes their eyes to reality on the ground. In the Middle East and North Africa, it turns out, legions of aspiring entrepreneurs are doing everything they can, against long odds, to claw their way into the middle class. And that is true across all of the world’s regions, peoples and faiths. Economic aspirations trump the overhyped “cultural gaps” so often invoked to rationalize inaction."

Chosen Vessel ~ Amazon River Hospital Ship...

The Guardian spots Peruvian Amazon's floating hospital...

"The Chosen Vessel, run by NGO Project Amazonas, provides medical services to the remote villages of the Peruvian Amazon. There is an on-board doctor and dentist, and free reading glasses are given to those who need them. The boat hospital has treated 200,000 people in the 16 years it has been sailing on the river."

Reminds me of Mercy Ships and the Phelophepa.

Interoceanic Highway ~ Linking Peru and Brazil...

Quite interesting to read Steven Bodzin's piece in the CSMonitor on Peru's new highway to the future...

"After decades of delay, Peru is on the verge of completing the $2.75 billion Interoceanic Highway connecting [...] Brazil to the west coast. [Millions of] Brazilians and Peruvians will see their lives change radically once they live along the continent’s first true transcontinental highway. [...] The last major link in the Interoceanic Highway, a bridge over the Madre de Dios river 143 miles away, is set to open this month. The last rivet in the bridge will be like the golden spike which, in 1869, completed North America’s first transcontinental railroad. There is a road connecting Argentina to Chile, and a roundabout route through Bolivia. But this is the first two-lane, year-round highway across the continent's waist, from the Amazon directly to the Pacific. From Sao Paulo, near the Atlantic, the highway traverses 2,439 miles of Brazil, crossing coastal hills, soy-farming plains, and the cattle pastures where Amazon rain forest once stood. At last [...] it crosses the Acre River into Peru."

This is as big a deal as the Trans-Siberian Railway or the US Interstate Highways. I hope it's followed with railway infrastructure investments too. And by a renewed emphasis on other links, including finishing the Darién Gap in the Pan-American Highway.