‘MORTAL FEAST’: Cannibal Capitalism Meets Covid-19 in the Urban Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

This article presents a surrealist urban political ecology of cannibal capitalism in the zoonotic city. It does so through an account of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, which was the worst-hit city in the world during this initial wave. Iquitos embodies multiple dimensions of zoonotic urbanization identified in the literature on this theme, including integration into planetary urban networks; expansion into extractive frontiers; and overcrowded housing in informal settlements in a context of crumbling infrastructures and deficient services. Drawing on extensive field research, I argue that the severity of the pandemic in the city nonetheless suggests the need for further conceptual and methodological contributions to this literature. In conceptual terms, the emergence of a clandestine market in oxygen, the shortage of which was responsible for the majority of the excess deaths in Iquitos, illustrates the constitutive role of cannibal capitalism in processes of zoonotic urbanization, as a necropolitical form of capital accumulation that devours the socioecological foundations of its own reproduction. In methodological terms, an ethnographic surrealism is required in order to adequately convey the bewildering chaos, grotesque absurdity and gothic horror of the collision between cannibal capitalism and Covid-19 in the zoonotic city.