Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- A note on translations
- Introduction: Colombia's forgotten frontier
- 1 Geographies of violence: war reporting, 1990–2012
- 2 Green mansions to green hell: travel writing, 1874–1907
- 3 No-man's land: testimonial literature of the rubber boom
- 4 ‘Exotic strangers’: the native body in text and image, 1911 and 1969
- 5 Frontier fictions: La novela de la selva, 1924 and 1933
- 6 The front line: war writing, 1933
- 7 ‘Fragments of things’: the aesthetics of yagé
- 8 Oil and blood: pulp fiction of the twenty-first century
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Geographies of violence: war reporting, 1990–2012
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- A note on translations
- Introduction: Colombia's forgotten frontier
- 1 Geographies of violence: war reporting, 1990–2012
- 2 Green mansions to green hell: travel writing, 1874–1907
- 3 No-man's land: testimonial literature of the rubber boom
- 4 ‘Exotic strangers’: the native body in text and image, 1911 and 1969
- 5 Frontier fictions: La novela de la selva, 1924 and 1933
- 6 The front line: war writing, 1933
- 7 ‘Fragments of things’: the aesthetics of yagé
- 8 Oil and blood: pulp fiction of the twenty-first century
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
No wonder that the vegetation is so luxuriant here, for the soil has been deluged with the blood of so many innocent victims of the bestial greed and rapacity of these vile monsters that it should be the richest on earth!
W. E. Hardenburg, The Putumayo: The Devil's Paradise (1912)Tras unos pocos años de luna de miel entre guerrilla y narcotraficantes, se desató una guerra que sembró de muertos el Putumayo.
Pilar Lozano, El Pais (2000)Introduction
In a 2010 article, ‘Colombia's Violence: The Mythical Curse of Geography’, Pablo Rojas Mejía contested the widespread view of geography as one of the principal causes of unrest in Colombia:
Mountains, hills and rivers divide the country into many regions with distinct identities and some historians argue that this fragmentation has stood in the way of efforts to integrate the country. In the long run, the argument goes, geography has also contributed to Colombia's turbulent and violent history. This is indeed a tempting argument. Colombia is topographically complex, has one of the world's highest homicide rates and its ongoing armed conflict is one of the oldest on the planet. However, the link between geographic fragmentation and violence in Colombia is a wildly exaggerated myth.
Rojas Mejía's dismissal of the connection between violence and geography as a ‘wildly exaggerated myth’ fails to recognize that such myths are an important organizing principle through which people, local and foreign, inhabitants and visitors, have come to understand regions such as the Putumayo over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Serje for one has shown the power exercised by the ‘process of mystification’ over the public perception of Colombia's border regions and conflict zones, many of which continue to be styled in the media as uncivil no–man's lands. The view of geography as playing a central role in the country's armed conflict or posing an obstacle for progress and peace is an entrenched one. Juanita León's recent characterization of the government's struggle to maintain order in Colombia as ‘a complex war, a perpetual battle against geography that is not unlike the conquest of the Far West’ echoes commentators on the Putumayo from at least the mid–nineteenth century on:…
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- Colombia's Forgotten FrontierA Literary Geography of the Putumayo, pp. 19 - 45Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013