La Amazonía en tiempos de guerra
Subtitle
Ecología y (Re)existencia
The Amazon in Times of War presents both direct and indirect evidence showcasing the deliberate state policies behind the violence and devastation inflicted upon the Brazilian Amazon and its inhabitants. The collection features firsthand accounts detailing not just physical assaults, but also economic and institutional harm. The essays traverse diverse themes while adhering to a chronological sequence, zeroing in on a pivotal period commencing in 2018. In November of that year, following a second electoral round, Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of an already fragmented nation. The world observed in astonishment as a relatively obscure conservative federal deputy, a former army captain with fervent neoliberal inclinations, rose to helm the largest country in South America. That menace became a calculated political agenda aimed at the obliteration of the world’s largest biome and its peoples, which encompasses nine South American nations. His forthright rhetoric strikingly echoed that of his North American counterpart, leading the media to dub him the “Trump of the Tropics.”
Bio
Marcos Colón is the Southwest Borderlands Initiative Assistant Professor of Media and Indigenous Communities at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research focuses on Brazilian literary and cultural studies, with a particular emphasis on the Amazon, Indigenous studies, and representations of natureculture in documentary film and world cinema. In addition to his academic role, he is a journalist whose articles have been featured in the Jornal Público, Folha de São Paulo, Revista Piauí, Le Club de Mediapart, Havard Review of Latin America, Latin America Bureau, El País and other outlets. He has also produced and directed two feature documentary films that represent diverse perspectives on humanity’s complex relations with the natural world: Beyond Fordlândia (2018) and Stepping Softly on the Earth (2022). He is the editor and founder of Amazônia Latitude, a digital environmental magazine. He is also the author of The Amazon in Times of War ( Practical Action Publishing & Latin America Bureau, 2024) La Amazonía en tiempos de guerra (Planeta, 2025) and the organizer of Utopias Amazônicas (Ateliê, 2025).
Praise for this book
Colón has exposed the tragedy of the Amazon’s
destruction at the hands of the most nefarious interests
of logging companies and garimpeiros, associated with
multinational corporations and the blind pursuits of
global capitalism.Enrique Leff National Autonomous University of Mexico
Estos ensayos describen el periodo de Bolsonaro como un terrible desastre, pero que apenas se desvía de la embestida general que está transformando la Amazonía, una especie de alquimia que convierte la vida en mercancías muertas.
Susanna Hetch Universidad de California, Los Ángeles
