Magical-realist Elements in José Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex

Summary

José Eustasio Rivera published his only novel, The Vortex, four years before his untimely death in 1928. It is now considered the greatest novel of the jungle and one of the most influential books in the development of Spanish American narrative during the first half of the century. It describes the cruelties and injustice endured by rubber workers at a time when the growing demand for rubber from Europe and North America had made it a profitable enterprise in a region which, up to then, had been virtually ignored by the Colombian civil authorities. I refer to the forests of the Amazon, shared between Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Colombia.

In 1922, Rivera was appointed secretary of the Boundary Commission which eventually settled the line of demarcation between Venezuela and Colombia during the conservative administration of Pedro Nel Ospina. This gave Rivera the opportunity to travel to the wilds of Casanare, where he learned about its geography and the mentality of its inhabitants. There he heard about the atrocities and enslavement suffered by the rubber tappers at the hands of unscrupulous landowners, who had gradually come to dominate the exploitation of vast rubber tree plantations in the south of the country. Indeed the issue at stake was humanitarian as well as political, since the advances of Peruvian settlers inside Colombian territory constituted a serious threat to national sovereignty in the region. This is exemplified by Casa Arana (formerly the Peruvian Amazon Company), whose abuses were denounced by the English media during the late 1900s. Rivera was already acquainted with the socio-political situation in the region and it became for him a matter of exalted patriotism to raise an outcry not only against the arbitrariness of the Peruvians but also against the Colombian government. He felt that the former were encouraging the activities of Casa Arana in breach of international law, and that the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was turning a blind eye to the problem. Rivera's accusations must have created great embarrassment to a conservative government that was supposed to profess the defense of national values and the creation of a national sentiment both in the political and cultural sphere.

When The Vortex was published in 1924 it was acclaimed as a literary masterpiece throughout Spanish America.