Brazil and Peru recently agreed to accelerate work on three regional transportation infrastructure projects that would link both countries overland through the vast Amazon Basin and the towering Andes mountains. These links form part of a broader regional plan to integrate South America's internal transportation infrastructure into a trans-continental grid of multi-modal networks linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The regional plan, dubbed the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), is not as grandiose as its name implies. A Brazilian initiative proposed by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso several years ago, it seeks merely to complete and expand already existing transcontinental networks for moving goods and people between eastern and western South America.