Objective/Context:

Starting from the idea that, in the Colombian case, the formation of the national space is marked by a predominant rhetoric that far exceeds the actions undertaken to effectively incorporate the whole space and its inhabitants into the framework of national sovereignty, this article provides some elements for a better understanding of border processes in the Colombian-Venezuelan Orinoco basin.

Methodology:

For this purpose, different views are presented on the concept of border: as a line that separates different national states and defines their sovereignty, an interstice between them, and a key element of the geography of capitalism.

Originality:

This article contributes to better understanding a little-explored subject: the place occupied by the Colombian-Venezuelan Alto Orinoco-Río Negro in world capitalism during the cycle of rubber extractivism in the first half of the twentieth century and its effects on the formation of the national space in both countries.

Conclusions:

The documentation consulted shows that in the interstitial area studied here, both national states were constrained in their fragile relationship with space, only finding its value in a hollow conception of their domain, where multiple sovereignties-although suspended-were entrenched in a scheme in which the public and the private got constantly confused; this helped produce and reinforce the frontier that expanded the geography of capitalism based on an extractive economy that occluded the national space in favor of global capitalism, while, at the same time, perpetuated the unredeemed condition of peripheral zones.

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