As Trump continues to ramp up his unchecked violence against the people along South America’s Caribbean coast, as well as an ever-widening segment of the US population, I can’t help but think of the work of one of Colombia’s greatest authors—Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Pivotal to his most prized masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, workers in the fictional town of Macondo struggle against an unnamed US-based banana company. Much like the United Fruit Company on which it was based, the banana company in the novel brutally exploits the archetypal Latin American village of Macondo, which it turns into a highly segregated company town. On one side of the wire, the local workers live in dire poverty and on the other side live the yankee owners and overseers in an imported US suburb.

With the support and guidance of union leaders, such as José Arcadio Segundo of the Buendía family, the workers raise demands for improved working and living conditions, access to medical care, and an end to the exploitative scrip system. Rather than work toward a compromise, the company enlists the legal and military authority of the neocolonial state to delegitimize their demands. Readers are told that:

…the sleight-of-hand lawyers proved that the demands lacked all validity for the simple reason that the banana company did not have, never had had, and never would have any workers in its service because they were all hired on a temporary and occasional basis… and by a decision of the court it was established and set down in solemn decrees that the workers did not exist.^[1]

Through a legal loophole within informal hiring practices the company refused to acknowledge the workers’ demands by denying the very existence of workers—an argument that handles worker dissatisfaction by denying it altogether. The workers respond by going on strike and, in turn, the army is called on to provide scab labor for the company. Confronting the company becomes indistinguishable from confronting the military government on which it relies. Tensions thus continue to rise: “The situation was threatening to lead to a bloody and unequal civil war when authorities called upon the workers to gather in Macondo.”^[2] With thousands gathered in a plaza a lieutenant reads out Decree No. 4 which “declared the strikers to be a ‘bunch of hoodlums’ and he authorized the army to shoot to kill.”^[3] Having already been gathered by the authorities with the stated purpose of settling the dispute, the people refuse the army’s orders to disperse. The order comes to fire on the crowd of men, women, and children, resulting in the mass execution of over 3,000 people. The bodies are then loaded onto a train and dumped in the sea.

The lone survivor, Jose Arcadio is thought to be dead and is thus loaded on the train and carried with the slain away from the town of Macondo. Covered head to toe in dried blood, he throws himself from the train and follows the tracks back to town with the massacre burnt forever into his memory. He returns to find a repressive campaign to cover up the massacre through coercion and the construction of an official narrative.

Throughout the rest of the novel, characters talk as if the massacre was merely a dream or hallucination. The company and its military thus defeated the workers’ union through repression and erasure—official narrative that “nothing happened” and that the previously non-existent workers were now content:

The official version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of communication the government found at hand, was finally accepted: there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the banana company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped. Martial law continued with an eye to the necessity of taking emergency measures for the public disaster of the endless downpour...^[4]

The sudden introduction of martial law for unrest the state cannot acknowledge is illustrative of the often-contradictory nature of the maintenance of capitalist hegemony. Where revising the narrative alone is not enough, the authorities rely on coercion, cracking down on any persisting dissent from their rule:

At night, after taps, they [soldiers] knocked doors down with their rifle butts, hauled suspects out of their beds, and took them off on trips from which there was no return. The search for the extermination of the hoodlums, murderers, arsonists, and rebels of Decree No. 4 was still going on, but the military denied it even to the relatives of the victims who crowded the commandants’ offices in search of news. ‘You must have been dreaming,’ the officers insisted. ‘Nothing ever will happen. This is a happy town.’ In that way they were finally able to wipe out the union members.^[5]

In Macondo and in the unbearably real world it represents, repression is both the incessant persecution and revisionism on a grand scale of the very content of reality. Defying the state’s violent repression of the truth Jose Arcadio Segundo uses his dying words to his nephew, Aureliano, to ensure the passing of the contested memory: “Always remember that they were more than three thousand and that they were thrown into the sea.”^[6]

The Truth of Fiction

From the company’s refusal to acknowledge their own workforce to the strike, massacre, and removal of thousands of bodies, the novel depicts real events that occurred in Colombia’s “banana region” in 1928. While receiving relatively little attention in much of the English language literature on the United Fruit Company, García Márquez’s fictionalization of the massacre has been instrumental in preserving the memory of one of the company’s many atrocities against the people of Latin America.^[7] Now immortalized in one of his most celebrated masterpieces, Garcia Márquez’s retelling of the event passes on a memory which he himself inherited:

I knew the event as if I had lived it, having heard it recounted and repeated a thousand times by my grandfather from the time I had a memory: the soldier reading the decree by which the striking laborers were declared a gang of lawbreakers; the three thousand men, women, and children motionless under the savage sun after the officer gave them five minutes to evacuate the square; the order to fire, the clattering machine guns spitting in white-hot bursts, the crowd trapped by panic as it was cut down, little by little, by the methodical, insatiable scissors of the shrapnel.^[8]

Garcia Márquez and readers are thus links in the same chain of history, each empowered to in turn pass on what they receive.

Through his masterful storytelling, Garcia Márquez immortalizes real events in a fortified collective memory safe from historical revisionism and hegemonic amnesia. In fictionalizing these events through a no less truthful telling, holding a spotlight on the actions of the United Fruit Company in what could have otherwise been another forgotten atrocity in the margins of the global South.

Just as with Garcia Márquez’s masterful fictionalization, the real-life events that inspired his telling of the massacre shed light on the social engineering of official narratives and their function in maintaining hegemony. Additionally, his telling illustrates the contestation of memory, between forgetting and retelling, between covering up and exposing. Somewhat ironically, it is through García Márquez’s fictionalization that a true telling of events is most securely preserved and retold. It is thus an example of artistic imagination preserving truth. As a fragment of the long and bloody struggle against capitalism it can speak to ongoing fights against the official narratives which serve as a wedge between those who provide consent and those who must be controlled through violent coercion. Garcia Márquez holds up a mirror to the mass violence of fascism—capital’s final solution. He shows us a reality which the US has long imposed on Latin America, and which has found its way back to its native soil. Long familiar with this brutal reality, he refused to resign himself to the fatalism of the status quo. In the concluding words his Nobel prize acceptance speech, he adds to his masterpiece a final word of hope:

Face to face with a reality that overwhelms us, one which over man's perceptions of time must have seemed a utopia, tellers of tales who, like me, are capable of believing anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to undertake the creation of a minor utopia: a new and limitless utopia for life, wherein no one can decide for others how they are to die, where love really can be true and happiness possible, where the lineal generations of one hundred years of solitude will have at last and forever a second opportunity on earth.^[9]

His commitment to truth and a sober hope for a better world should inspire readers. Following the lead of Garcia Márquez and Jose Arcadia, we must preserve the truth against tyranny’s revisionism. This truth is that the US government is indiscriminately killing Venezuelan and Colombian citizens whom they label “criminals” without the slightest evidence in an attempt to legitimize their campaign of terror against the people of Latin America.

-Christian Noakes

1. Gabriel Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 301-302.

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2. Ibid, 303.

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3. Ibid, 304.

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4. Ibid, 309-310.

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5. Ibid, 310.

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6. Ibid, 353.

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7. For brief, yet invaluable historical analyses of the real life events readers should seek out Kevin Coleman’s “The Photos That We Don’t Get to See: Sovereignties, Archives, and the 1928 Massacre of Banana Workers in Colombia” in Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism and Catherine C. LeGrand’s “Living in Macondo: Economy and Culture in a United Fruit Company Banana Enclave in Colombia” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Readers already familiar with Garcia Márquez’s telling will no doubt appreciate how much the real events line up.

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8. Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, 16.

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9. Gabriel Garcia Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” December 8, 1982.

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