Savage capital: Cannibal urbanization in the Peruvian Amazon

This paper develops the concept of cannibal urbanization to capture the distinctive urban process at work within the hidden abodes of planetary urbanization. It does so through an exploration of the relationship between extractivism and urbanization in the case of the city of Iquitos and its surrounding resource frontiers in the Peruvian Amazon. The largest city in the world unreachable by road, Iquitos is a money laundering centre for narcotrafficking; a logistical node for illegal logging and gold mining; and a spatial mechanism of systemic corruption through which the mafias that control these industries access oil rents via the construction of public works. The original wealth of this settler colonial city was based on the enslavement and extermination of the Indigenous peoples of the region during the Peruvian rubber boom, and the city and its constitutive frontiers continue to be marked by multiple forms of direct violence, in addition to the slow violence inflicted through urban ruination and ecological breakdown. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2023, I interpret Iquitos as embodying the urban dimension of cannibal capitalism, understood as the regime of accumulation characteristic of the hidden abodes of planetary urbanization. I argue that cannibal urbanization is based on both the anthropophagous exploitation of racialized human beings and an autophagous world ecology that progressively cannibalizes the underlying socioecological conditions of its expanded reproduction. Surrealist methods are deployed that disrupt the normalizing tendencies of academic sensemaking with raw portrayals of violence and narrative disjuncture, in order to better convey the catastrophic dynamics of cannibal urbanization.