THE VORTEX OF APRIL 9, 1948: J.E. RIVERA, J.A. OSORIO LIZARAZO AND “EL BOGOTAZO”

With the novel La vorágine (1924) J.E Rivera constructs an arsenal of metaphors with which the jungle can be read from the city. Thirty years after Rivera’s novel, his arsenal was reapropriated by J.A. Osorio Lizarazo, who uses it to burn down Bogotá when writing El día del odio (1952), a novel about April 9th 1948, date in which the city was ransacked and largely burnt down by a mob enraged by the assassination of its leader: Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Both texts are aligned in a tradition that stages invasion and violence as responses to an elite national project of exclusion and ethnocentrism.