Brazil-Colombia: Imagined Borders, Unfinished Narratives

Abstract

Drawing on José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine (1924), the text revisits the Amazon rubber boom as a system of servitude, violence, and deprivation imposed on rubber workers and Indigenous communities, enabled by local elites and foreign corporate interests. The novel is also framed as an early environmental denunciation, depicting deforestation, illegal hunting, and river pollution. The article then shifts to the present, arguing that the Amazon has become a global geopolitical pivot amid the climate crisis. The Brazil–Colombia border is portrayed as “imagined” and porous, shaped by binational cultural flows yet increasingly affected by organized crime and drug-trafficking routes. Against successive extractive “rushes” (gold, cattle ranching, agribusiness, illegal logging), the piece highlights emerging regional cooperation and the pledge to reach zero deforestation by 2030, casting Amazon protection as a prerequisite for human survival.