The Peru-Brazil-Bolivia hub cuts across 7 departments in southern Peru, 2 Amazonian departments in Bolivia, and 4 of the northwestern states in Brazil. It covers an area of 3.5 million km2, out of which 82% is in Brazilian territory. The hub has 12.3 million inhabitants, with an average population density of 3.53 inhabitants per km2. This is relatively low and reflects the percentage of the hub that falls within the Southwestern Amazon region, an area of tremendous cultural and biological diversity. This diversity is mirrored to some extent by the ethnic and ecological variety found in the Peruvian Andes and the Bolivian High Plateau, which also fall within the hub.
While the developmental value of this diversity is acknowledged by IIRSA’s backers, they also put emphasis on the traditional economic isolation of the small or medium-sized populations in the tri-national border region. Consequently, in terms of infrastructure, they favor the improvement of terrestrial and fluvial transport corridors and the exploitation of surplus sources of energy. As a result, local CSOs have expressed anxiety over the growing trend toward overstating the benefits and underreporting the costs of some projects in the hub, notably the Brazil-Peru Transoceanic Highway and the Brazil Rio Madeira Hydroelectric Complex.
The Peru-Brazil-Bolivia hub currently contains 18 IIRSA projects, divided into 3 project clusters. At the time of IIRSA’s creation, the total estimated cost of the projects in the hub was $11.6 billion, with the cost of the Madeira River Hydroelectric Complex accounting for just over half of this amount. However, the budget for that project alone now stands at $10.5 billion.