The Jungle Like a Sunday at Home: Rafael Uribe Uribe, Miguel Triana, and the Nationalization of the Amazon

This essay analyzes two civilizing elite projects produced in order to incorporate the Putumayo’s population, its history and its territory, to Colombia during the first decade of the 20th century. By proposing a reading of General Rafael Uribe Uribe’s Reducción de Salvajes (1907) and Miguel Triana’s Por el sur de Colombia (1907), Martínez-Pinzón shows how these projects negotiated language and heterogeneity in the southern border province of Putumayo. Alternatively mixing military strategy with an appeal to “science” Uribe Uribe’s “nationalizing strategy” proposed expropriating Putumayo indigenous populations from their language, their land and finally their bodies by way of bringing in white immigrants to dissolve “indigenous blood” through miscegenation. Martínez-Pinzón argues that, in contrast, Triana produces in his travelogue a self-criticizing stance in order to exhibit the ignorant hubris of civilizing creoles that contradictorily saw indigenous cultures as being anti-national at the same time needing their labor for the agro-export economy. Finally, the author contends that Triana’s proposal of constructing an indigenous history of Colombia is a political tactic to legitimize Colombian state control over the Putumayo territory amidst the turn of the century diplomatic tensions and military conflicts over the Amazon.