Caminos de frontera: espacio y poder en la historia del piedemonte amazónico colombiano

TL;DR

The article argues that the colonial and postcolonial vision of the Colombian Andean-Amazonian piedemonte as a physical and symbolic frontier between "civilization" and "savagery" legitimized road-building projects and, through them, the control and appropriation of the Amazon. It traces this discourse from the colonial period through nineteenth-century criollo geography to the Capuchin mission road of 1909–1912, and finds it persisting in present-day infrastructure agendas such as IIRSA.

Key findings

• The piedemonte (approx. 15,000 km²) was configured as a frontier of colonial power: of 28 mission towns established between 1693 and 1750, only seven were still mentioned at the end of that period, and the Franciscans abandoned the piedemonte definitively in the 1780s.
• Indigenous groups did not treat the piedemonte as a barrier but as an articulation zone; four main indigenous routes connected the Andes with the Caquetá and Putumayo river basins, and groups such as the ingas of the Sibundoy valley acted as intermediaries, exchanging Andean products for forest goods throughout the colonial period.
• Nineteenth-century geographers (Caldas, Codazzi, Reyes, Triana) naturalized the piedemonte as a frontier of civilization, portraying the Amazon as "malsano," "desierto" and "salvaje" while simultaneously rich in resources — a rhetoric that legitimized roads, steam navigation and immigration as civilizing forces.
• The Capuchin road (Pasto–Sibundoy–Mocoa, 120 km, built October 1909–March 1912) was funded by a $40,000 government resolution with Fidel de Montclar as "inspector superior"; the final section, with a three-meter-wide bench, reportedly required the permanent labor of nearly 1,500 workers and more than three tons of dynamite. By 1930 the mission claimed 19,700 "colonos civilizados," 6,600 Indians being "reduced to civilized life," 39 towns, 32 churches, 62 schools, two orphanages, a hospital and five dispensaries.
• The road enabled the dispossession of Kamentsá and Ingano lands in the Sibundoy valley (e.g., the 1916 founding of the Sucre/Colón colony), and indigenous labor — including women and children as cargueros carrying 12–30 kg over journeys of up to seven days from Pasto — was used, sometimes under a mission "castigo" regime exempted from a 1909 prohibition on unpaid work.
• The vision persists: IIRSA's Amazon axis reports 24 completed and 46 active projects, and the new Sibundoy–Mocoa "variante San Francisco–Mocoa" largely follows the Capuchin road's route.

Methods

• Historical analysis based on the contrast of primary sources: travel accounts (Triana, Codazzi, Reyes, Santa Gertrudis, López Ruiz), cartographic representations, and missionary and government archives (Archivo General de la Nación, Archivo Provincial Capuchino de Cataluña, Archivo de la Diócesis de Sibundoy).
• The argument is framed through Braudel's *longue durée*, treating the piedemonte-as-frontier vision as a persistent structure rather than a period-specific discourse.
• The text is organized in four parts: colonial representations versus indigenous articulation; nineteenth-century criollo geographic discourse; Capuchin road-building in the early twentieth century; and contemporary infrastructure as evidence of continuity.

Limitations

• Stated: a complete description of the conflicts surrounding the road is "más allá del alcance de este artículo"; and missionary progress reports do not disaggregate indigenous and peasant labor, making it difficult to establish the proportion of each group or what percentage of indigenous workers were paid.
• Evident from the text: the account of the road's social effects relies heavily on missionary, state and elite sources, with indigenous perspectives appearing only through occasional letters and telegrams of complaint; the contemporary IIRSA discussion is brief and based on institutional project reports rather than fieldwork.