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OPEN CALL
01 – 30, MAY 2026

Juanita Escobar

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

Colombia

Orinoco Frontier-Women's Journal

The setting for my story is the Orinoco River in the Colombian department of Vichada, which marks the border between rural Colombia and Venezuela. A vastness of earth that sows deliriums. A vastness of water that allows them to rush forth. Vastness conquered by countless El Dorado dreams. Rivers, jungles, fibers, minerals, alligator skins, heron feathers. The human fever for power and wealth takes more lives than malaria and penetrates the bones of a body—a territory— that continues to resist despite ceaseless efforts to possess it. This is a diary of this frontier, built among images and testimonies of the lives of the different women who tell this story, women that share this territory: the indigenous woman — the Sikuani, Amorúa, Piaroa, Puinave, Curripaco and Saliva — the Venezuelan woman, the plains woman (LLanera). They populate the area around this border, as nomads or sedentary inhabitants and are the ones who guide us through these territories where they are always on the move, allowing us to become part of their memory. The flow is not only of indigenous people who travel as part of their tradition; there are also Venezuelan migrants seeking hope on this rural border of the Orinoco. Women have suffered the impacts of borders most severely. I have therefore decided that it is their legacy, wounds and present conditions that should be recorded in this project. For some, the border is the limit between Colombia and Venezuela. For others, it is an encounter with colonizers and their discrimination. There is an urgent need to recount the shocking tales of the most marginalized, like those that tell of drug addiction and child prostitution, common among Amorúa girls and teenagers in the departmental capital of Puerto Carreño. The landscape becomes darker still when we add to it the humanitarian crisis and breakdown taking place in Venezuela, which has led to a monumental increase in prostitution.

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