The strength of the culture of the triple border between Brazil, Colombia and Peru

We’re going to be located on the triple border of the Amazon, where three countries converge: Brazil, Colombia and Peru, a river that unites in its course ethnic groups, settlements, cities, a river that changes its name or that, by joining with another, becomes one, in the great marine river “the Amazon River”, three countries, two of them with a geography that they share with the Andes Mountains; There, at the top of the Andes, the original peoples of the triple Amazon frontier are immersed, continuing their sacred cosmogonies, oral tradition and customs that make up the unbeatable strength of Amazonian man and his environment in all its splendor.

Native peoples inspire popular festivals and unite countries

The Yavari Valley, in the Brazilian Amazon, is located in the far west of the state of Amazonas, close to the border with Peru. Its name comes from the origin of the Yavari River, a clear-water river that flows through the area. Approximately 3,000 indigenous people live there, some of them already in contact with “civilization”. Among the most recognized are the Marubos, Kanamari, Matis (the last hunters of the forest, the tiger-men), Kulina and Matsés. The Quixito isolates, the Itaguaí isolates (Korubo), the Jandiatuba isolates, the Alto Jutaí isolates, the São José isolates, the Rio Branco isolates, the Médio Javari isolates and the Jaquirana-Amburus isolates. All these isolated peoples add up to more than ten villages identified from the air, and little is known about them or their languages.

We analyze these ethnic groups, their strength, their race and their myths, their legends that have transcended their territory to become allegories, songs, dances and music in the festivities. The isolated ones are called minstrels who announce the entrance of their intervention in each allegory or tribal dance, presenting dances in unison in ancestral movements, jungle rhythms, with the surdo and the charango, two instruments that the interpreters 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 recited and sung. Parintins was the first time in Amazonas that a popular festival took root in 1965 and now belongs to part of the Brazilian Amazon, being celebrated in other places such as Manaus, Benjamin Constant, Tabatinga and other places in the Brazilian Amazon, infecting neighboring Peru and Colombia with the contagious rhythm of the bumba-meu-boi toadas, In the tripartite geography, the term dança da onça preta and da onça pintada is used in relation to the butterfly tiger and the black tiger. It’s worth noting that Bumba-meu-boi is a theatrical folkloric event that first appeared on the Colombian-Brazilian border in 1987, during the June 26-29 festivities in San Juan, or festas juninas. Since then, the popular event has been held on Brazil’s national holidays, from the 4th to the 7th, and after that it finally takes place in October, with no set date. The drums (Zurdo or Treme Terra) have been beating since May in anticipation of a new version of the Folkloric Festival of the tribes of Alto Solimões, which is the definitive name of the popular festival.

As the largest ethnic group, not only in the context of the border, but also in other geographical latitudes, the true owners of the territory, according to some academics today, without ignoring the extinct Omáguas and exalting them in the history of our territory. The Maguta (Ticunas), the men of the water, currently number around 8,000,000 members throughout the territory of the triple border. The Tikunas and other ethnic groups of the triple border do not speak of borders, but of a single territory, the human territory, as the Russian Yevgeny Alieksándrovich Yevtushenko once wrote in a poem, when he helplessly watched a cargo ship being devoured by flames in a fire.

“How important is any news if I’m immersed in your silence Leticia.

If on the other side you see a sinking ship, you see fire rising, rising.

The ship is on fire, my heart is burning, because someone told me: it’s too late to save it. Are you feeling well?

Because someone told me in a cruel and inhuman way:

What’s important is Peruvian territory.

We are carrying a very dangerous load.

We sank like ships in a roaring fire.

What is our life?

A game with fire.

We burn, burn and disappear in that fire

There is no Peruvian territory

Neither Russian nor Colombian.

Our globe is human territory”.

Our Indians say: “The rain and the waters don’t ask for permission, they don’t have passports to run, to follow their coast to the ocean, or to crash, nature has no borders, the Amazonian people have no borders either.”

The Ticunas have organized their own festivities in their respective localities with strong sound roots in the Ticuna language and the musical fusion with cumbia, festivities of the Ticuna people in Umariaçú, Tabatinga, Brazil and San Sebastián, in Leticia, Colombia (Ticuna Water Festival), festivities where all the Ticuna groups from the countries of the triple border meet. The musical and cultural impulse of this ethnic group has its roots in Peruvian cumbia, which has led the Ticuna people to participate in local events on the triple border, infecting other ethnic groups and colonizing peoples who migrate from Colombia to the region.

We can’t ignore the Shipibos, who occupy part of the Peruvian territory of Loreto, as their domains extended along the valleys of the Apurímac River, as well as a small part of the Alto Ucayali region, in addition to other ethnic groups, such as the Kukama Kukamiria, the Shuar tribe, the Yaguas, the latter of whom arrived at the triple border with tourist intentions in the 60s and 70s, brought by a Greek-American consul, from the Yagua ethnic group with little cultural relevance, concentrating on their tribal environment, seen more as a tourist attraction until today 2024, on the other hand, the Kukamas or Cocamas, now resilient, were an ethnic group that worked in agriculture and settled in 1900 on the La Victoria hacienda (the conflict, the war, and the invention of the border) Amazon 1900-1940 Carlos G. Zárate Botía. There were 400 Cocamas working for the Peruvian company Hacienda la Victoria, where the Ronda reserve is today. In the past, when this triple border territory had only 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.

Today, artists with strong Shipillos roots are one of the pictorial influences, such as the city of Pucallpa, “the Amazonian center of Usko-Ayar painting” (spiritual prince, in Quechua), which for decades prevailed on the triple border.

In 2023, they met at a triple border event in their first international exhibition called “Uniendo Fronteras” . In just one year, the coordination of the event brought together around 8 visual artists, the vast majority of them of indigenous Peruvian origin.

Likewise, despite the massacres by the rubber tappers of Julio Arana’s company, who slaughtered more than 60,000 indigenous people, including the Uitotos, Murui and other ethnic groups, leading to the near extermination of a large part of this indigenous group, today their songs and traditions are shared in festivities of great importance on the triple border. The historical space of the Uitotos – Murui, as well as other ethnic groups who were victims of the rubber tapping massacre, 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, the 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 stream in the snow-capped Quehuisha mountains in Arequipa, Peru, 5,170 meters above sea level in the Andes. But in every part of the Amazon, the inhabitants of that place say that it was born there, as in Nauta, its magnitude in the union, its agony in the dryness of hundreds of beaches or its literal change from one name to another.

According to the inhabitants of the area near where the river passes, the Amazon is born there! The culture of water, being at the confluence of the Maranhão 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 the Amazon and later called or transformed into the Solimões River, corresponds in Brazil to the stretch of the Amazon River between the Brazil-Colombia-Peru triple border and the city of Manaus. Its course runs through the state of Amazonas, passing through the Strait of Breves, in the state of Pará, until it reaches the great ocean, penetrating more than 2 kilometers from the coast into the Atlantic Ocean, Brazil.

The Solimões River passes 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.

This multicultural diversity of the peoples of the Amazon River along its course and the culture of the water that bathes the banks of all the countries, cities, ethnic groups along its path, here in the triple border converges this force of water that inspires this mystery. From the jungle to the songs of the artists, from painting to the arts, its biodiversity, the resilience of the people who turn their experiences into a song for culture, a song for life, where many of the artistic expressions of the peoples of the triple border can be found.

The (Catalan) religious in the cultural history of the triple border

In another phase of history, there was the presence of the Catalans from the Catholic Church in 1930, transferring with them the presence of arts with a hagiographic content that infused religious culture with those of the local border context, through music, theater, literature, among others, as well as the sports exchange of the time, which was a strong aspect in the area of coexistence in the cities of the time on the triple border, while in the 1980s another phase of high cultural strengthening began.

The 1980s, the cultural revolution on the Triple Frontier

The theater appears as the protagonist, generating continuous events such as the Amazon Theater Day, so it is the singer who strengthens what once united the three borders, the border sports events, born out of this cultural movement and with it the emergence of the Amazon Fraternity Festival.

“Throughout the Fraternal Carnival. From the time of the Cultural Action to this festival of memories, singers from Peru, poets from Colombia, Lia Sampaio’s dancers from Brazil, Ayahuasca painters, disciples of Pablo Amaringo, shamans from Amazonian cultures, and of course, sisal painters, bloodwood sculptures, representatives of the ancestral sacred theater and also of the profane mestizo sign and many other masters of culture and recipients from the region and across conventional borders from Manaus, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Bogotá, Moscow, Paris. A Babel that, as it parades in its fraternal carnival, reminds us that friendship and fraternity are stronger than the strength of those who still insist on seeing the Amazon as a territory to test out late colonialism. It’s not the reason of force and authority that subjugates a territory opposed to domination, it’s a force of reason and integration. (…) Hugo Niño Barbosa. Casa de las Américas Prize in Havana, Cuba 1976 and 2008. Book of the 25th anniversary of the Confraria Amazônica Festival 2013.

Look at the line-up of other events throughout the Amazon’s cultural history: the festival of popular Amazonian music, this initiative soon 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 have gone down in history as events of great relevance and cultural wealth of the triple border between Brazil, Colombia and Peru, massive events that bring together approximately between 10,000 and 25,000 people in their editions creating a bond of fraternity between the neighboring countries. We can’t say that it’s all flowers, as we see the abandonment by the governments of the triple border of our immeasurable cultural wealth, the Amazon, an intangible heritage of humanity.

Utopias and Quixotes keep dreaming and walking

The processes are contemporary, and a new initiative by some organizations was born when a letter was delivered to the two presidents of Brazil, Lula da Silva, and the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, at a border meeting called “Road to the Summit”, the signatories being 78 local organizations from all the borders, among the 10 that Brazil has, the impetus is born to organize a series of events that will unite the borders with the aim of fraternizing and sharing border experiences, which they call “Between Rivers and Roots, Cross-Border Dialogues”, the transversality of Culture for the development of peoples.