By night, the Solimões is a black artery pulsing through three nations. On its banks, the cities of Leticia and Tabatingapretend to be separate, divided by flags that melt in the rain. But the river doesn’t care. It carries whatever pays: diesel, fruit, people, cocaine.

Here, Comando Vermelho controls half the docks. PCC controls the other. Colombian dissidents, Peruvian suppliers, and river pirates fill the spaces in between. The bodies that surface belong to nobody; the currency is fear. The police, under-equipped and outnumbered, play the part of a government that no longer exists.

The Global Initiative report calls it criminal governance: where traffickers provide the only consistent system—security, jobs, punishment, taxes. The math is unbeatable; the state’s offer, invisible.

Tourists still come for the pink dolphins and jungle lodges. They don’t see the body count. They don’t see that every light along the waterfront is powered by someone’s silence.

That’s the now.

What if the same skills used to move drugs or arms could move something else? What if the knowledge of tides and channels and shortcuts could serve a different economy? The Solimões has never cared about morality — it only follows incentives. Maybe the change begins there.

In another version of Leticia, the same kids who ferry drugs through flooded forests become operators of legal freight cooperatives. Their knowledge of the river — reading currents, fixing engines, negotiating with captains — turns into paid expertise. The state does not need to invent miracles, only to pay better for the same work.

Along the docks, old ferries once used for smuggling are turned into floating workshops. They drift between riverside communities, part repair shop, part classroom. Mechanics teach boat maintenance. Solar technicians install panels. Young welders learn how to rebuild hulls instead of stripping them for parts. Soldiers still patrol, but sometimes they stop to help with repairs. Each engine they fix is one fewer boat sold to a faction.

Money, always the quietest current, starts to move differently. In the markets of Tabatinga, new community-run ledgers track transactions in plain sight. The transparency that once terrified local officials becomes protection. Everyone can see who buys fuel, who sells it, who profits. It does not end corruption, but it makes hiding harder.

At night, when the city used to lock its doors against gunfire, life begins to return. Teachers, fishers, and former pirates form small volunteer patrols along the docks. They are not heroes, only tired of funerals. Their presence reclaims the waterline. A group of students builds an open-source app to share sightings and routes. Information becomes common property instead of a weapon.

Over time, the border starts to look less like a wound and more like a junction. Leticia and Tabatinga, long trapped between three bureaucracies, begin to act as one logistics corridor. Customs, policing, and trade are coordinated instead of duplicated. It is not idealism, it is efficiency. The tri-frontier finally becomes what it always was, the hinge of the continent.

None of this looks like a revolution. It looks like people getting paid, electricity that stays on, nights that end quietly. In the tropics, that is what progress should feel like — steady, unremarkable, safe enough to plan tomorrow.

The lesson is not moral, it is mathematical. The factions did not conquer the river by force; they hired it when no one else would. To change the equation, the state must simply offer the river a better job.

At dusk, a boy ties his canoe to the same pier where his brother was killed three years ago. His T-shirt reads Resistir, the letters fading. He is not naïve. He is calculating. “Everyone wants the river,” he says. “I just want it to want us back.”

Upstream, the floating workshop hums under dim light. The sound is ordinary, but in a city used to gunfire, ordinary feels radical. The river keeps flowing — still vast, still indifferent — yet carrying, just maybe, the first hints of a different current.

Postscript

Some of these possibilities already exist, in pieces. In the Peruvian Amazon, Escuelas Flotantes travel between river villages offering education and repair work. In Brazil, the COIAB trains Indigenous youth in radio and digital storytelling, turning isolated communities into networks of information. The Centro de Cooperação Policial Internacional in Manaus has begun coordinating cross-border patrols and data-sharing with Colombia and Peru.

None of it yet reaches Leticia or Tabatinga at the scale the crisis demands. But the experiments are there, waiting — evidence that the river already knows how to carry something other than fear.