- Discussions around the construction of a railway line linking the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in South America have raised concerns about the potential social and environmental impacts.
- Experts warn about the consequences within and around the proposed routes of the Bioceanic Railway between Peru and Brazil, potentially harming Indigenous communities as well as the native Amazonian ecosystem.
- While authorities told Mongabay that there’s no “definitive route” to date, all the potential routes would cross through environmentally sensitive areas of the Peruvian regions of Ucayali and Madre de Dios.
- Critics also warn that opening new routes inside the Amazon could boost criminal activity, paving the way for illegal mining and drug trafficking.
The idea of a railway line stretching across the width of South America — from Peru on the Pacific coast to Brazil on the Atlantic — has gained steam since the inauguration of the megaport of Chancay in Peru. To complete its route, this “Bioceanic Railway,” as it’s known, would have to cross the Andes mountain range in Peru and also the Amazon Rainforest in both countries.
In July 2025, Brazil and China signed a cooperation deal to conduct feasibility studies on the railway corridor.
While the Peruvian government wasn’t present at that signing, in May that year the country’s then-economy minister, Raúl Pérez Reyes, and transport minister, César Sandoval Pozo, met with senior Chinese officials, including Fei Dongbin, president of China’s National Railway Administration, and Song Yang, the Chinese ambassador to Peru, to discuss the development of railway infrastructure in Peru.
Several months later, in January 2026, the Chancay-Sierra Central section of the railway line was announced. The project was reportedly awarded to a Chinese company. The route that would continue after this section into Brazil has not yet been confirmed, but there are two proposals for crossing the Andes and the Peruvian Amazon to reach Brazilian territory.
The mega construction project has prompted widespread concern due to the potential socioenvironmental impacts, especially for the section that crosses the Amazon. Compounding worries are the economic and geopolitical jousting between China and the U.S. over the Chinese-built port of Chancay.
The possible routes across the Amazon
“It strikes me that this train project is presented with a railway line connecting the famous Chancay megaport with the mining zone of central Peru, which is not the most important nor the most significant in terms of mineral production,” José De Echave, a researcher and mining and environmental issues expert at the Peruvian organization CooperAcción, told Mongabay. “The main production of copper, and potentially lithium, is in the southern Andes.”
According to De Echave, there are differences over what the route should be. Some, for instance, say it should run through the region of Ucayali. However, the China-Brazil agreement in 2025 proposed a railway line passing not through Ucayali in central Peru, but through the southern Amazonian region of Madre de Dios instead.
During discussions in 2024, the route presented by China and Brazil had the Bioceanic Railway starting in Assis Brasil, a municipality in Brazil’s Acre state on the Brazil-Peru-Bolivia tri-border. That would mean the railway crossing the Peruvian Amazon through Madre de Dios, then continuing north, cutting through the Andes in the Peruvian regions of Cusco, Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Junín and Pasco. Once in Sierra Central, it would connect to Chancay.
An analysis of the route by CooperAcción and GRAIN, an international nonprofit supporting community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, showed that several protected and communal territories would be affected by the railway cutting directly through them or by associated construction work.
The research identified 15 potentially impacted protected natural areas, including Manu National Park, Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, Tambopata National Reserve and Bahuaja Sonene National Park. Also potentially at risk: nine regional conservation areas, 69 private conservation areas, 1,793 campesino communities, and 19 Indigenous communities.
The project would also affect Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve, home to Indigenous peoples living in isolation and initial contact.
The other route would cross the Peruvian Amazon farther north from Madre de Dios, in the region of Ucayali, connecting with the Brazilian Amazon. This specific section was proposed in 2014, during the administration of then-Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, when the idea of a railway linking the two neighboring countries was presented. This route would see trains leaving Chancay and traversing the central Andes range to reach Pucallpa, the Ucayali capital, then continuing on to Brazil.
“What worries us is the impact the work will have on the Amazon,” De Echave said. “We are talking about two important, significant Amazonian countries, an Amazon biome that is being pressured by different [types of] extractivism, legally and illegally. In many cases, we have seen that these infrastructure megaprojects end up benefiting illegal operators, as was the case with the Interoceanic South Highway,” he added.
Pedro Tipula is a geographer who coordinates SICCAM, an information system for Peru’s campesino communities, at the Institute for the Common Good (Instituto del Bien Común). He said he’s very much aware of the route the train could take as it passes through Ucayali.
When the construction of a highway connecting Peru’s Pucallpa with the Brazilian city of Cruzeiro do Sul, in Acre state, was announced, Tipula analyzed three potential routes. According to him, in “any of these cases, it would affect protected areas, territories of native communities, and lands of Indigenous peoples in isolation and initial contact.”
The highway has not been built. Now, the possibility of the new rail line taking one of the proposed land routes is once again setting off alarms about the environmental and social risks of a mega infrastructure project carving through the Peruvian Amazon.
Tipula told Mongabay that when infrastructure runs through an undeveloped area, its impact extends beyond its physical footprint, radiating outward in what’s known as its area of influence.
“We know the impact a road has had in other areas of the Amazon,” Tipula said. “If we look on a map at the communities and areas it will affect, there is, for example, the Isconagua Indigenous Reserve, Sierra del Divisor National Park, and the Abujao hydrological network.”
The Interoceanic South Highway, in Madre de Dios, illustrates different impacts of building a trans-Amazonian road. As many experts have noted, this route’s construction paved the way for what today is La Pampa, an area plagued by illegal mining and organized crime.
Raquel Neyra, a researcher in socioenvironmental conflicts, violence and coloniality at the Peruvian Institute of Nature, Earth and Energy (INTE-PUCP), also warned that building a railway line through the middle of the Amazon “will mean colossal environmental damage.”
“It will not only be the railway track’s layout, but there will also be a parallel development of cities, settlements, commerce and routes to move the [extracted] mineral from different mines,” she said.
Neyra noted that Peru already has a railway network running hundreds of kilometers across wide-open areas of the Andes. What, she asked, would that look like in the Amazon?
“Infrastructure like this will definitely have an impact; it can bring even more change to the lives of Indigenous populations; some [native] peoples may even disappear, as this train will cross socially complex areas where Indigenous peoples live in isolation and initial contact,” Neyra said.
David Salisbury, from the Department of Geography, Environment, & Sustainability at University of Richmond, U.S., echoed similar concerns for the region’s protected areas. He noted that the Sierra del Divisor area in Ucayali, part of the proposed route, is home to “two national parks, one on the Peruvian side [of the border] and another, with almost the same name, on the Brazilian side.”
“The truth is that there are numerous challenges and impacts for this initiative. In Sierra del Divisor, we are talking about major impacts,” he said.
Salisbury noted that Sierra del Divisor National Park “is an area with an impressive wealth of ecological diversity, with species that only exist in that area and with the presence of [Indigenous] peoples in initial contact and voluntary isolation.” Along the proposed route, he said, “there are Indigenous communities that have suffered significant impacts from the forest roads that have led, on the Peruvian side, to the presence of drug traffickers and illegal coca leaf crops.”
Salisbury questioned how deforestation would be kept in check. “Will soldiers be put in place so that the coca growers do not enter to take advantage of that area?” He warned of informal gold miners, coca growers, illegal loggers and drug traffickers following in the wake of the railway line, who “will be able to move supplies from one side to the other. And that is already happening; it will only become more dynamic and increase the impact.”
He added, “A train requires a linear connection that presents many effects, even in human terms; will it be controlled so that there are no invasions in the areas? At the very moment a land connection is rumored, there are invasions by land speculators who want to take advantage of possible connecting routes.”
Salisbury said that should the Bioceanic Railway come into being, it should ideally follow the route of the existing Interoceanic South Highway to better monitor environmental and cultural impacts. Even then, he added, planners should first analyze whether an additional connection to the existing highway is really required.
The Ucayali regional government told Mongabay that it currently “promotes the Amazonian integration agenda and the improvement of connectivity with Brazil.” It also said that the Bioceanic Railway project “is in a preliminary stage. There is no approved definitive layout, validated detailed engineering, Environmental Impact Study, or a structured financial model.”
In its statement to Mongabay, the Ucayali government said: “In June 2025, it was publicly reported that the process is in the stage of preparing terms of reference and pre-investment studies, with a multi-year horizon. The technical definition corresponds to the Ministry of Transport and Communications, and its development will depend on the technical, environmental, social, and fiscal viability determined by the corresponding studies.”
It also said that, in August 2025, an interregional meeting was held seeking to strengthen the Amazonian axis, and that a month later, “the creation of the Peru–Brazil Integration Center Committee was officialized in [Brazil’s capital] Brasília, which incorporates Ucayali and Acre as strategic actors within the Central Corridor.”
The Ucayali government confirmed that, to date, “there is no approved definitive route” and that “referentially, the Chancay-Ucayali-Acre axis has been proposed, with Pucallpa as a logistics node within the Central Corridor.”
Peru’s Ministry of Transport and Communications did not respond to questions from Mongabay by the time this story was first published.
The Bioceanic Railway from a political perspective
Roberto Espinoza, an Indigenous issues expert, said the Bioceanic Railway project is part of a program called the “Southern Connection,” which proposes building several corridors linking South American nations.
“This has been studied before with the IIRSA [Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America], 15 years ago. At that time, IIRSA was linked to [Brazilian construction firm] Odebrecht, which ended in corruption [investigations],” Espinoza said.
“It would be the height of absurdity if, after the environmental and social impacts generated by IIRSA 1, now with IIRSA 2, we fall into the same thing again,” he added about the construction of the Interoceanic South Highway, which was part of the first wave of South American connection plans.
This road was built by Odebrecht (now known as Novonor), which was involved in a major international corruption case implicating several former Peruvian presidents. Espinoza said he’s also concerned about an increase in criminal activity, including drug trafficking and gold mining, in Amazonian areas crossed by the rail line.
Alberto Zamora, from Sustainable Latin America (LAS), pointed to the growing dispute between China and the U.S. for control of Latin American territory. “Chinese companies have not stopped increasing the number of projects they are in charge of” across Latin America, he said.
“Its emphasis continues to be on infrastructure of all kinds: ports, highways, railways, bridges. There are also conventional renewable energy sources like hydroenergy, but also nonconventional ones, such as solar and wind, and the construction of ultra-high-voltage energy transmission networks in Brazil and Chile,” Zamora said.
Marco Antonio Gandarillas, also from LAS, said “there are many incentives so that China continues to invest and gain ground in projects of this magnitude.” He added that “China is interested in investing in Latin America for extracting key minerals like copper and lithium; therefore, China is securing the supply of these minerals.”
De Echave from CooperAcción said that “in the geopolitical stage, China has more and more investments in Peru, in general in South America, [and] it is an ally of Brazil and all the members of the BRICS trade bloc — which include Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. But the U.S. has now entered to reclaim ‘its space.’”
With that in mind, according to De Echave, faced with Washington’s interests, Peru is set to become a center of debate.
Banner image: The Amazon rainforest in Peru. Image by Sebastián Castañeda/Mongabay Latam.
This story was first published here in Spanish on Feb. 23, 2026.
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