This essay focuses on the novel La vorágine (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera as a document from a chapter in Latin American history. It looks for connections between the effects that modernity was having over Amazonia one century ago, with those that are currently affecting the largest rainforest on the planet. In my work as a fiction writer, I have often explored the relation between the so-called civilised world and the tropical jungle. Approximately one decade ago, I wrote a stage play (which I later turned into a graphic novel) that occurs in a future where the possession, consumption and traffic of meat products have been declared illegal.