Introduction

Colombian anxieties about national sovereignty in the Putumayo – one of the driving concerns of both La vorágine and Toá – came to a head in 1932, the year in which Uribe Piedrahita's novel was written. In September 1932 Peruvian rebels occupied Leticia, a small Colombian port ceded by Peru just two years earlier under the terms of the Lozano–Salomón Treaty. The invasion led to a war which, during the first five months of 1933, was fought along the Putumayo River, then, as now, the border between Peru and Colombia. The war reignited tensions that had simmered between the two countries since the boundary disputes of the rubber era. Affronted by the loss of a strategic Amazonian territory, Colombia was gripped by patriotic fever. Rich bogotanas queued up to donate jewellery to support the war effort and children as young as six marched through the streets of the capital calling for the death of Peru's prime minister: ‘Sánchez Cerro morirá y Colombia vencerá’ [Sánchez Cerro will die and Colombia will be victorious]. Both of these demands were partially realized; Cerro was assassinated in Lima in April 1933 (although not by a Colombian but by a disaffected Peruvian), and Colombia regained Leticia and the Amazonian Trapeze after signing an armistice with Peru in May 1933.

Despite being relatively short–lived, the war had considerable political and, moreover, literary impact in both countries, with an outpouring of anti–war sentiment erupting when news of horrendous conditions on the front line began to emerge. In the wealth of testimonial literature which emerged after May 1933, soldiers complained not only of the customary hardships of war, but of malnutrition, inadequate medical care, and the indifference of national politicians in narratives which engaged existing tropes of the Putumayo as a wild and neglected borderland. Having been largely off the mental map of both countries since the rubber boom, the 1933 war provided stimulus for Peruvians and Colombians to physically and imaginatively revisit the Putumayo, generating a large body of texts which included testimony, novels, poetry, and a satirical play, Historia de la guerra entre Candorra y Tontul: o una comedia del género bufo (1933) by Roberto Restrepo.