The strength of the culture of the triple border between Brazil, Colombia and Peru
To situate ourselves in the triple Amazonian border where three countries converge: Brazil, Colombia and Peru, a river that unites in its course ethnic groups, towns, cities, a river that changes its name or when it joins another it becomes one, in the great sea river “the Amazon River”, three countries, two of them with a geography that they share with the Andes Mountains; There, in the high Andes, the original peoples of the triple Amazonian frontier are immersed, giving continuity to their sacred cosmogonies, to the oral tradition and to the customs that compose the unbatable strength of the Amazonian man and his environment in all its splendor. .
Indigenous peoples inspire popular festivals and unite countries
Vale Yavari, in the Brazilian Amazon, is located in the extreme west of the state of Amazonas, near the border with Peru. Its name comes from the origin of the Yavari River, a clear water river that flows in that area. Approximately 3,000 thousand indigenous people live there, some of them already in contact with “civilization”, among the most recognized are the Marubos, Kanamarí, the Matis (the last hunters of the forest, the homens-tigres), the Kulina and the Matsés. The isolates of Quixito, the isolates of Itaquaí (Korubo), the isolates of Jandiatuba, the isolates of the upper Jutai, the isolates of São José, the isolates of Rio Branco, the isolates of the middle Javarí and the isolates of Jaquirana-Amburus. All these isolated peoples are about ten villages identified in the area, and little is known about them or their languages.
We review these ethnic groups, their strength, their race and their myths, their legends that transcended their territory to become allegories, songs, dances and music in the festivities of the letter. The isolates are called menestrels that announce the entrance of their intervention in each allegory or tribal dance, they present dances in unison in ancestral movements, jungle rhythms, with the surdo and the charango, two instruments that the performers share in the interpretations of the music of the Andean highlands and the Brazilian Amazon in one of the largest and most exalted popular festivals in the world, where their names, their customs and their myths are mentioned and sung; In Parintins manifested for the first time the Amazonas in 1965, a popular festival that was creating roots and belonged to part of the Brazilian Amazonian territory, being celebrated in other localities, such as Manaus, Benjamin Constant, Tabatinga among other localities of the Brazilian Amazon geography, infecting the other neighboring countries Peru and Colombia in the contagious rhythm of the bumba-meu-boi toadas, already in the tripartite geography the term dance of the black and white onca is used in relation to the tiger borboleta and the black tiger, it is worth mentioning that the Bumba-meu-boi is a folkloric theatrical manifestation that appears for the first time in the border between Colombia and Brazil in 1987 in the festivities of 26 to 29 of June in San Juan or juninhas festivities, since then the popular manifestation has been carried out on Brazil’s national holidays from 4 to 7, after finally taking place in October without a defined date. The drums (Zurdo or Treme Terra) have been beating since May in anticipation of a new version of the Folkloric Festival of the Alto Solimões tribes, this being the definitive name of the popular festival.
As the largest ethnic group, not only in the frontier context, but in other geographical latitudes, the true gifts of the territory according to some academics today, without ignoring the extinct Omaguas and exalting them in the history of our territory. The Magüta (Ticunas), the men
is water, there are currently about 8,000,000 associates throughout the territory of the triple border. The Tikunas and other ethnic groups of the triple frontier do not speak of frontier, but of a unique territory, human territory, as the Russian Yevgeny Aleksándrovich Yevtushenko once wrote in a poem when he saw, powerless, a cargo ship being devoured by flames in a fire.
“Quão importante é qualquer notícia, se estou mergulhado no seu silêncio Letícia.
If on the other side I see a ship sinking, I see fire rising, rising.
The ship burns on fire, my heart burns, because someone told me: it is too late to save it,
Because someone told me in a cruel and inhuman way:
How important it is, it is Peruvian territory.
We are carrying a very dangerous load.
We sink like ships in a ruinous fire.
What is our life?
Um jogo com fogo.
We burn, burn and disappear in this fire.
There is no Peruvian territory
Not Russian, not Colombian.
Our globe is human territory.”
Our indigenous Indians say: “The chuva and the waters do not ask for a license, they do not have a passport to run, to follow their coast to the ocean, or to crash, nature has no borders, the Amazonian men also have no borders”.
The Ticunas organized their own festivities in their respective localities with strong sound roots in the Ticuna language and in the musical fusion with cumbia, festivities of the Ticuna people in Umariaçú Tabatinga Brazil and San Sebastián in Leticia Colombia (Festa da Água do povo Ticuna), festivities where all the Ticuna groups of the countries of the triple border meet. The cultural musical impulse occurred in this ethnic group has its roots in Peruvian cumbia, giving the Ticuna people to participate in local events of the triple border, infecting other ethnic groups and settler peoples that migrate from the Colombian geography to the region.
We cannot ignore the Shipibos, who occupy part of the Peruvian territory of Loreto, because their dominions extended along the Apurimac river valleys, as well as a small portion of the Alto Ucayali region, in the region of Ucayali, in addition to other ethnic groups such as the Kukama Kukamiria, the Shuar tribe, the Yaguas, the latter arrived at the triple border with tourist intentions in the 60’s and 70’s, brought by a Greek-American consul, of the Yagua ethnic group with little cultural relevance, concentrating on. seu ambiente tribal, visto mais como uma atração turística até hoje 2024, por outro lado, os Kukamas ou Cocamas, hoje resilientes, eram um grupo étnico que trabalhava na agricultura e que se estabeleceu em 1900 na fazenda La Victoria (o conflito, a guerra, e a invenção da Fronteira) Amazônia 1900-1940 Carlos G. Zárate Botía. There were 400 Cocamas working for the Peruvian company Hacienda la Victoria, today is the Ronda reserve. In the past, when this triplicate border territory only had the presence, production and settlement of the Peruvian authority, the cultural legacy received from this ethnic group was small. Today, organized groups are trying to rebuild their culture and language.
Currently, plastic artists with strong Shipillo roots and one of the pictorial influences such as the city of Pucallpa, “the Amazonian center of Usko-Ayar painting” (spiritual prince, in Quichua) that for decades prevailed in the triple border.
In 2023 they met in a triple border event in their first international exhibition called “Uniting Borders” in just one year and the coordination of the event brought together about 8 visual artists, the vast majority of Peruvian indigenous roots.
In the same way, in spite of the massacres of the seringueiros of Julio Arana’s company where more than 60 thousand Indians were massacred among Uitotos, Murui and other ethnic groups that led a great percentage of this indigenous group to almost extermination, today their songs and traditions are shared in festivities of great relevance in the triple border. The historical space of the Uitotos – Murui, as well as other ethnic groups victims of the massacre of the drunkard, are the protagonists of this 2024, the Colombian government celebrates the 100th anniversary of the literary work “La Vorágine” by the Colombian writer José Eustasio Rivera, events to be held throughout the Colombian geography, including the Colombian Amazon, epicenter of the literary narrative.
A river that becomes the great Amazon
What caused the birth of the Amazon River is controversial. Some academics and geographers say that it originates in the Apacheta ravine, in the snow-covered Quehuisha Mountains, in Arequipa, Peru, at 5,170 meters above sea level, in the Andes Mountains. But in every place in the Amazon, the inhabitants of that place say that its birth is there, as it is in Nauta, its majesty in union, its agony in the dryness of hundreds of beaches or its literal transformation from one name to another.
According to the inhabitants of the territory near the place where the river flows, the Amazon is born there! The water culture, being at the confluence of the Marañón and Ucayali rivers, in front of Nauta and the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve, navigable in its entirety, when passing through the triple border the river is called Amazon and later called or transformed into the Solimões River, corresponds in Brazil to the stretch of the Amazon River between the triple border Brazil-Colombia-Peru and the city of Manaus. Its course runs through the state of Amazonas, passing through the Breves Strait in the state of Pará until it reaches the great ocean, penetrating more than 2 kilometers offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, Brazil.
The Solimões River flows through the cities of Tabatinga, São Paulo de Olivença, Amaturá, Santo Antônio do Içá, Tonantins, Jutaí, Fonte Boa, Tefé, Coarí, Codajás, Anamã, Anori, Manacapurú, totaling approximately 1,700 km until it reaches Manaus, where it meets the Negro River and is renamed the Amazon River.
That multicultural diversity of the peoples of the Amazon River in its course and the culture of water in which it bathes the margins of all countries, cities, ethnic groups in its path, here in the triple frontier converges that force of water that inspires this mystery. From the jungle to the artists’ songs, from painting to the arts, its biodiversity, the resilience of the people who make of their experiences a song for culture, a song for life, where many of the artistic expressions of the people of the triple border are found.
The religious (catalan) in the cultural history of the triple frontier
In another phase of the history there is the presence of the Catalans of the Catholic Church in 1930, transferring with them the presence of the arts of hagiographic content that infused the religious culture to those of the local border context, through music, theater, literature among others, as well as the sports exchange of the time, being this a strong aspect in the area of coexistence in the cities of the time in the triple border, already in the decade of the eighties another phase of high strengthening of the culture began.
1980s, the cultural revolution on the triple frontier
The theater appears as a protagonist, generating continuous events such as the Amazon Theater Day, then, it is the singer that comes to strengthen what used to unite the three borders, the border sports events, born in this cultural movement and with it the emergence of the Amazonian Fraternity Festival.
“Durante todo o Carnaval Fraterno. From the time of the Cultural Action to this festival of remembrance, singers from Peru, poets from Colombia, the dancers of Lia Sampaio from Brazil, the Ayawasca painters, disciples of Pablo Amaringo, Xamãs of the Amazonian cultures, of course, painters of yanchamas, bloodwood sculptures, representatives of the ancestral sacred theater and also of the profane of mestizo sign and many other cultists and recipients from the region and from the other side of its conventional frontiers coming from Manaus, Rio de Janeiro, Lima; Bogota, Moscow, Paris. A Babel that when parading in its fraternal carnival recalls that friendship and fraternity are stronger than the force of those who still insist in seeing the Amazon as a territory to test late saints. It is not the reason of force and authority that subdues a territory adverse to subjugation, it is a force of reason and integration. (…) Hugo Niño Barbosa. Casa de las Americas Award of Havana, Cuba 1976 and 2008. Livro 25 anos Festival da Confraria Amazônica 2013.
Later, after other events throughout the cultural history of the Amazon: the festival of popular Amazonian music, this initiative gave rise to the Pirarucú de Oro International Music Festival, in those years the first cultural institution “Junta Regional del Amazonas” 1984-1993, without forgetting others that became part of the history as other events of great relevance for what today is felt as something of the great cultural wealth of the triple border between Brazil, Colombia and Peru, massive events that gather approximately between 10 thousand and 25 thousand people in their conquests creating a bond of fraternity between the neighboring countries Brazil, Colombia and Peru. A bad glimpse and abandonment by the governments of the triple frontier of our immeasurable cultural richness
Amazônia, patrimônio imaterial da humanidade.
The utopias and the quixotes continue to sound and walk
The processes are temporary, a new initiative of some organizations is born, when a letter is delivered to the two presidents of Brazil Lula da Silva and the president of Colombia Gustavo Petro in a border meeting “Road to the Dome” the signatories 78 organizations in all the borders among the 10 that Brazil has, was born the impulse to organize a series of events that will unite borders with the purpose of fraternizing and sharing border experiences, which they called “Between Rivers and Roots Cross-Border Dialogues” the transversality of Culture for the development of people.
