Pan-American Highway

American  

noun

1. a road system proposed in the 1920s linking nations of the Western Hemisphere, extending from Alaska to Santiago, Chile, with some gaps remaining in Panama and Colombia. The section between Nuevo Laredo, Mexico and Panama City is known as the Inter-American Highway Total length about 16,000 miles (25,744 km).

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Example Sentences

Videos shared from the scene showed damaged vehicles and debris strewn across the Pan-American Highway in the southern Cauca region.

From BBC • Apr. 26, 2026

The incident happened in the early hours of Wednesday morning on a "rugged" stretch of the Pan-American Highway that connects Peru with Chile in the country's southern region of Arequipa.

From BBC • Nov. 12, 2025

The closures, including of the Pan-American Highway, have forced the national electric company to ration electricity in Darien province, which borders Colombia.

From Seattle Times • Jul. 20, 2022

Parts are so inaccessible that when engineers built the Pan-American Highway in the 1930s, linking Alaska to Argentina, only one section was left unfinished.

From New York Times • Oct. 2, 2021

Here the Pan-American Highway had, as it turned out, sliced through some of the oldest public architecture anywhere on earth.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann