José Eustasio Rivera Salas (February 19, 1888 – December 1, 1928) was a Colombian lawyer and author primarily known for his national epic The Vortex.

[3] After a failed attempt to be elected to the senate, he was appointed Legal Secretary of the Colombo-Venezuelan Border Commission to determine the limits with Venezuela, there he had the opportunity to travel through the Colombian jungles, rivers, and mountains, giving him a first hand experience of the subjects he would later write.

In this venture he became familiar with life in the Colombian plains and with problems related to the extraction of rubber in the Amazon jungle, a matter that would be central in his major work, La vorágine (1924) (translated as The Vortex), now considered one of the most important novels in Latin American literary history.

Rivera had arrived in New York the last week of April 1928 in the hopes of translating his novel into English, publishing it in the United States, and turning it into a motion picture film with the goal of exporting Colombian culture abroad.

His venture, although riddled with difficulties, was moving along when on November 27 he suffered an attack of seizures and was taken to the Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital where he remained for four days in a comatose state until his death on December 1, 1928.