On Santa Rosa, a Peruvian islet at the Amazon’s triple border, survival means catching rainwater in barrels, living above floods on stilts, and crossing by skiff to Colombian or Brazilian clinics. Now, a Peru–Colombia dispute has thrust this overlooked community into a sudden spotlight.
An island caught between maps and ministries
Santa Rosa was not supposed to matter. The island rose from Amazonian sediment long after Peru and Colombia fixed their frontier on paper, defining the boundary by the river’s deepest channel. Yet politics is rarely as fluid as water.
Home to roughly 3,000 residents, the islet has become a point of contention. Lima insists Santa Rosa belongs to Peru under century-old treaties. Bogotá counters that it didn’t exist when lines were drawn, making jurisdiction questionable. For decades, the disagreement lingered in the margins of legal theory. Then, this year, it turned combustible.
In July, Peruvian authorities arrested three Colombian survey workers on the island. Colombian President Gustavo Petro blasted the detentions as “kidnapping,” escalating what had been an academic quarrel into a flashpoint, according to the Associated Press. It was the third such incident since Petro publicly rejected Peru’s jurisdiction.
Suddenly, a place with no sewage, no cemetery, and no hospital became the stage for two nations’ rhetoric. For islanders, the irony cut deep. “It’s true that, for too long, our border populations have not received the attention they deserve,” Peruvian President Dina Boluarte admitted on her first visit to Santa Rosa, flanked by soldiers at a riverfront flag ceremony, as quoted by the AP. Her arrival suggested sovereignty; her words raised expectations. For residents, the question was more straightforward: would the attention last once the cameras left?
Everyday life on stilts
Santa Rosa’s main street is one strip of pavement shadowed by wooden houses balanced on stilts. When the Amazon swells, water laps beneath living rooms. Rainwater serves as drinking water, filtered through cloth and boiled over wood-burning stoves. Electricity is sporadic.
There is one health post, ill-equipped for emergencies. For anything serious—childbirth, a broken limb, surgery—families climb into small boats and head across the river to Leticia in Colombia or Tabatinga in Brazil. The trip takes minutes by skiff. From Lima, it takes a plane into the jungle and fifteen hours upriver.
In the absence of services, nightclubs and evangelical churches dominate the landscape. They are sanctuaries of a different kind—one for dancing through the humidity, the other for praying through it. “Our island suffers from many needs,” restaurant and dance-hall owner Marcos Mera told the AP as he wiped sweat from his forehead.
Children often study in Colombian schools; grandparents may live with relatives in Brazil. The dead are buried wherever there is room, which usually means outside Santa Rosa. Yet the island refuses invisibility. On Sundays, residents crowd into a small radio station to broadcast their voices, to say to anyone listening: we exist, and we matter.
Pride, passports, and the price of being peripheral
In Santa Rosa, identity is not a simple allegiance but a daily balancing act. At a local exchange house, Peruvian soles stack beside Colombian pesos, U.S. dollars, and Brazilian reals. Transactions flow as easily as the river that complicates them.
“We are Peruvians, and if necessary, we will defend our island with pride,” José Morales told the AP, standing beneath a hand-painted sign. His pride does not stop him from trading with neighbors across the water. Friendship and commerce, after all, are borderless.
Mera, the restaurant owner, insists politics should not spoil that peace. “We live peacefully, sharing culture, gastronomy, and good ideas,” he said to the AP, though he blames Colombian rhetoric for inflaming tensions. Others see benefit in the turmoil. Nurse Rudy Ahuanari credited Petro’s statements for finally forcing Lima to pay attention. “In all these blessed years, no minister had ever shown interest in us,” she told the AP. “We were truly forgotten—not even God remembered.”
The paradox is sharp: it took a diplomatic quarrel to win radio spots, presidential visits, and a sliver of attention. Mayor Max Ortiz, presiding from a bare office with humming ceiling fans, now fields calls from Lima he never received before. Attention is not yet progress. But for Santa Rosa, it feels like a beginning.
EFE
From flashpoint to commitment?
The needs of Santa Rosa are as clear as the river at flood: clean water, sewage, a reliable clinic, and docks strong enough to handle storms. What locals want is not ceremony but commitment—infrastructure, not slogans.
They also want recognition of what life here already is: a tri-national existence. People cross borders daily for school, medicine, and markets. A trilateral pact formalizing those flows could serve residents better than any speech about sovereignty. “What we need are services, not more politics,” one resident said during the president’s visit, the AP reported.
Boluarte promised to change course, pledging new investment after decades of neglect. Whether those pledges survive the glare of the news cycle is the test. For now, lawyers will file communiqués; ministries will trade memos. Colombia will contest; Peru will affirm. The river, indifferent, will keep redrawing the map.
Meanwhile, life on stilts goes on. Islanders will collect rainwater, measure the price of rice, pass three currencies through their fingers, and hope the stilts hold another season. On Saturday nights, they will dance. On Sundays, they will pray. On Mondays, they will wake to the same question: Will Lima or Bogotá finally remember them when the cameras leave?
Also Read: Colombia And Peru Face a Living, Moving Amazon Border That Won’t Hold
For those who live at the Amazon’s margins, sovereignty is more than a border dispute. It is running water, a functioning clinic, and the dignity of being counted. On Santa Rosa, survival itself has become the sharpest argument for statehood.