Exilio e imaginación geográfica del liberalismo colombiano: Santiago Pérez Triana escapa por los Llanos orientales

Abstract: This essay examines the geographic imagination of Colombian writer Santiago Pérez Triana (1858–1916) through his travel narrative De Bogotá al Atlántico (1897). A Liberal during the conservative dictatorship of Miguel Antonio Caro, Pérez Triana was forced to flee Bogotá amidst a climate of political persecution: he traveled by river through the scantly populated Llanos of Colombia and Venezuela to evade government detection and escape the country. Pérez Triana lived the rest of his life in exile. This essay argues that Pérez Triana imagines a new plan for economic development and Liberal political resurgence in Colombia, one that depends upon massively developing the rivers to achieve a more complete circulation of people, ideas, and cultural objects throughout the country. Pérez Triana's work recalls earlier Liberal writing about the Magdalena River, which had been imagined as a site of nation-building cultural encounters by Liberal writers of the mid-nineteenth century. In this way, Pérez Triana looks nostalgically on the country he has fled while planning for a return to a Liberal Colombia that could make good use of both its human and natural resources. Pérez Triana's involvement in international politics from exile is also explored, including his later rapprochement with the Colombian government, as well as his influence on British literature.