“Before I had fallen in love with any woman, I gambled my heart at random and was won by Violence.” These are perhaps some of the best-known first lines of Colombian literature; For many, along with “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, by Gabriel García Márquez, and “La María”, by Jorge Isaacs, “La Vorágine”, by José Eustasio Rivera completes the trio of fundamental works of the literature of this country.
The maelstrom
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What begins as a love story becomes an epic adventure in the Amazon jungle and in a social story that denounces the terrible conditions of rubber plantation workers on the triple border between Colombia, Peru and Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century.
José Eustasio Rivera Salas was born in 1988 in a small municipality called San Mateo, which would later be called Rivera in his honor, in the Colombian department of Huila.. A lawyer by profession, he began working as a government ministry official, even before finishing his university degree, and shortly after published a volume of poems about the landscapes and customs of his region, called “Land of Promise” (1921).
The collection of poems was quickly recognized among the literary circles of the time in his country, which included prominent politicians. Contacts that would help the son of a modest rural family to be appointed as legal secretary of the Colombian-Venezuelan Border Commissionwhich was based in Sogamoso, in the department of Boyacá, but which included frequent trips to the remote border regions of the country.
It was in the midst of these comings and goings through inhospitable territories that Rivera began to write this impressive work, which is inspired by the canons of the dominant romanticism of the time to present the story of an impossible love between Alicia, a young woman from a wealthy family promised to a rich old landowner, and Arturo Cova, an impetuous poet without material resources.
However, what seems to be a love story ends up being a detailed tour of the Amazon jungle. in addition to an impressive piece of social denunciation and a manifesto of national identity.
At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, what was known as the rubber fever was experienced in the jungle territories of countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela..
The discovery by Charles Goodyear of the possibility of vulcanizing rubber with sulfur had skyrocketed the demand for this material, which is obtained naturally in the form of latex from a jungle tree that grows especially in the Amazon region, where gigantic plantations that required a large amount of labor began to be created.
The business produced million-dollar resources that stimulated commerce, generated the creation of modern cities in the middle of the jungle and made some millionaires.at the cost of the slave labor of hundreds of people.
First-hand witness of the abuses to which indigenous people, peasants and settlers were subjected by the owners of the rubber plantationsRivera Salas wrote multiple letters of complaint to the authorities and newspapers of the time, but it was not taken into account.
Even in 1923, with all his documented complaints, He arrived at the Colombian consulate in Manaus, Brazil, in order to inform the Colombian Foreign Ministry of the situation.but received no response.
Finally, Rivera unleashed all his frustration in a text that denounces the cruel conditions of exploitation, torture and even murder of dozens of people. by the rubber businessmen, reflecting the inhuman contrast between the progress of a few and the misfortune of many, between the so-called civilization, which was displayed in elegant salons, and the barbarism with which the workers were treated, in a merciless criticism of the development model that marked the region’s economy.
“La Vorágine” was published on November 24, 1924 and in a short time managed to awaken interest in what many considered a genocide.which was taking place in the middle of the jungle
“One hundred years after its publication, La Vorágine by José Eustasio Rivera is one of the great classics of Latin American literature.“, say researchers Erna von der Walde and Margarita Serje, in the commemorative introduction edited by the University of Los Andes and Penguin Random House
“Like a good classic, it is a work that hardly needs reading to know the story. and have an image of what it represents. The novel has gone from the field of literature to that of culture as a reference that almost ignores the text itself and rises a little above it to multiply as a reference in various areas,” the academics conclude.
“La vorágine’ is a novel that is tremendously current, It is impressive how José Eustasio Rivera related what was happening in terms of extraction, violence towards the communities and the territory 100 years ago, and it is something that continues to happen now,” says researcher Ximena Gama.
Already a renowned writer, José Eustasio Rivera began a career as a diplomat, representing Colombia at the International Congress of Immigration and Emigration, in Havana, Cuba, in 1928, after which He decides to travel to the United States with the aim, among other things, of negotiating an English edition of his novel and a possible film version of the work, but he was unable to achieve either of the two things.. Rivera died at the age of 40 at the Polyclinic Hospital in New York on December 1, 1928, victim of a “cerebral hemorrhage of malarial origin,” or at least that is what the medical report said.
However, an autopsy was never performed and Even today the theory is discussed that in reality the writer, who had decided to leave his country and settle in Mexico and the United States for security reasons, was murdered.the product of a plot between politicians and businessmen who managed to stop the publication of “The Black Spot,” a novel that the author had described as a “continuation of La Vorágine” and which, according to one of his relatives, was about “Colombian oil workers and the tremendous influences of Uncle Sam’s children on the great influencers of the old traditional parties’”
In 1949, “La Vorágine” was adapted to film, directed by the Mexican Miguel Zacarías; In 1975, the Colombian production company RTI made a version for television; In 1990 RCN made a new version, written and directed by Lisandro Duque; In 2016 it was published in the form of a graphic novel; Recently, on the occasion of the centenary, it has been presented in the form of plays and a new eight-episode miniseries is currently being filmed that is expected to premiere on Colombian television in 2025, giving new life to this couple of lovers and adventurers, of which nothing was ever heard again, as the consul states in Rivera’s work: “No sign of them. “The jungle devoured them!”
