The road to Aracataca in northern Colombia runs alongside the Caribbean Sea, and if you travel there in the spring or the autumn, your car will be followed by thousands of yellow butterflies. These phoebis philea flutter along Route 45: a motorway lined with red flowers which leads to the birthplace of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, whose magnificent Cien años de soledad (1967) remains the most famous literary depiction of this corner of the world. Founded in 1912, Aracataca is a town that seems weighed down by the past. The Zona Bananera in which it sits was long dominated by the United Fruit Company (UFC), which came to the area in the early twentieth century and whose ruined buildings – remnants of a bloody and contested history – are still standing.
When Garcia Márquez was a young boy, he would visit a banana plantation named Yoknapatawpha. The name comes from the Chickasaw word meaning ‘split land’, and was used by William Faulkner for the fictional county in Mississippi where many of his novels are set. Under Faulkner’s influence, Garcia Márquez decided to call his own fictional town Macondo, which is the Bantu word for banana and was the name of another nearby plantation. On my visit to Aracataca on a warm day in July, I can see activity in one place only: the street where Garcia Márquez, or Gabo as he was affectionately known, grew up. Today, the main pride of a city sucked dry by United Fruit is the man who wrote much about its ugliness.
The house where the young Gabo lived with his maternal grandparents was later sold, destroyed, rebuilt, burnt down and then rebuilt again by Garcia Márquez and his wife Mercedes Barcha Pardo, who tried to remake it exactly as it was during his childhood. By that time, Garcia Márquez had already turned the home into a literary artefact: the items in Cien años’s Buendia household – furniture, nicknacks, books – were all based on his early recollections. In the front garden, a group of schoolchildren are getting a tour. A man dressed in white with yellow butterflies pinned to his shirt is doing a dramatic reading from Cien años. He has a powerful voice, at odds with the gentleness of Garcia Márquez’s prose, and his audience are mesmerised.
He is standing under a large banyan tree, and behind him there is a small hut that once housed two servants of the Garcia Márquez family who came from the Wayuu community of the Guajiros peninsula. They slept on a hammock above a dirt floor. If it rained heavily, they would have to rush to the veranda while the hut was flooded. Garcia Márquez was not evasive about their presence in his childhood – a legacy of Spanish colonialism, which subjugated the people of the hemisphere and reduced them to cheap labour for the criollo settler class from which he came. In his 1957 short story ‘Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo’, the Wayuu servants try to save their furniture from the incessant downpour but find themselves ‘defeated and impotent against the disturbance of nature’, experiencing ‘the cruelty of their frustrated rebellion’. In Cien años, the servants are Visitación and Cataure: the characters who first identify the plague of insomnia – a disease that causes the residents to gradually lose their collective memory.
As both a jobbing journalist and a man of the left with a deep understanding of Latin American history, Garcia Márquez did not use phrases like ‘frustrated rebellion’ innocently. On the Caribbean Sea, between the two sides of Simón Bolívar’s Grand Colombia – today’s Colombia and Venezuela – lies the peninsula where the Wayuu people waged their tireless struggle against Spanish colonialism, starting in 1701. The Wayuu Rebellion of 1769 saw almost the entire indigenous population join a fierce armed revolt, which prompted the Spanish to dispatch commander José Antonio de Sierra to bring them to heel. Over the next two hundred years, the Wayuu continued to resist the seizure of their lands and the introduction of Christianity before finally succumbing in the early twentieth century, shortly before Garcia Márquez was born. Christian friars created orphanages on the peripheries of the Wayuu territory, including in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and it is likely that the servants in Garcia Márquez’s house came from one of them. It is also likely that they told the young Gabo stories of their rebellious ancestors.
Garcia Márquez’s grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, or Papalelo, was himself a prominent Liberal, heroized for his role in the Thousand Days’ War of 1899-1902. Two of Garcia Márquez’s novels feature a Colonel who is loosely based on him: in Cien años it is Aureliano Buendia, and in El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961) it is the unnamed veteran of the Thousand Days’ War who is now caught up in La Violencia: the civil war between the Liberals and Conservatives that raged from 1948 to 1958. The year after Garcia Márquez’s birth, the Colombian army massacred scores of United Fruit Company banana workers in a plantation in Ciénaga, fifty kilometres north of Aracataca. It is hard to know how many were killed, but some accounts, including Garcia Márquez’s own, put the number in the thousands. The Colonel, as Gabo remembered him, was determined that the crime should never be forgotten. His grandson did his best to honour that wish.
The account of the killings in Cien años is more arresting than that of any historian. In the central square in Macondo, the military men tell the workers they have five minutes to disperse. ‘Take the extra minute and stick it up your ass’, yells José Arcadio Segundo, the Colonel’s great-nephew, who has been busy organizing the banana workers largely outside the frame of the novel. The troops open fire. Thousands of corpses are dumped into the Caribbean. José Arcadio Segundo escapes and returns to Macondo, where he finds that the rain has washed away the blood and no one wants to talk about what happened. He hides from the police in the family home and studies the manuscripts of the gypsy Melquiades until he dies, as if he is searching for some evidence of the massacre in these esoteric texts – some lost testimony of the workers’ struggle.
The Zona Bananera did not have a native population that could sustain the plantations, so from the 1910s onward many of its workers came from elsewhere in the region, in an influx that was known as the ‘banana fever’ (fiebre del banano). UFC referred to such people as ‘fallen leaves’, perfect candidates for super-exploitation. Yet they soon began to form their own organizations, including the Banana Workers Union of Magdalena and a local chapter of the Revolutionary Socialist Party. The government blamed the Soviets, which was not entirely misplaced. The Communist International had dispatched one of its agents, Silvestre Savitski, to rally support for Marxism and the Soviet Republic, working alongside the El Sol journalist Luis Tejada. Together, they helped the nascent labour movement to organize a Socialist Congress in Bogotá in 1924, diffusing the idea of workers’ power among the unions.
Telegrams from the time document the collusion between the United States government, UFC, the Colombian government of Miguel Abadía Méndez and the Colombian army to combat this rising militancy. One of them, sent from the US embassy in Bogotá to the US Secretary of State on 7 December 1928, describes the situation in Santa Marta city as ‘unquestionably very serious; outside zone is in revolt; military have order “not to spare ammunition” have already killed and wounded about fifty strikers’. At the time, United Fruit was widely known as El Pulpo, ‘the octopus’, because it had spread its tentacles across Central and South America. When Pablo Neruda began to compose Canto General in 1938, El Pulpo was at the forefront of his mind:
The United Fruit Company
reserved for itself the most juicy
piece, the central coast of my world,
the delicate waist of America.
In 1929, the young Liberal Congressman Jorge Eliécer Gaitán travelled to the site of the Ciénaga massacre. What he learned there accelerated his journey towards socialist politics. ‘If I remain here and face more of these horrors’, he said, ‘I’ll go straight to the mental hospital’. Preparing to run in the 1950 election and favoured to win, he was assassinated before the campaign got underway: an event that sparked a general uprising in Bogotá – known as the Bogotazo – followed by La Violencia. In his memoir, Vivir para contarla (2002), Garcia Márquez recalls listening to Gaitán’s speeches in early 1948 and being deeply affected by his death. He participated in the Bogatazo – as did his friend Fidel Castro, who was in town for a student meeting – and left the city for Cartagena when his lodgings and university department were burned in the melee. It was there, and later in Barranquilla, that he first began to write seriously, having been introduced to Faulkner by the grupo de Barranquilla, a reading circle that prompted him to move from journalism to try his hand at fiction. Garcia Márquez soon returned to the house in Aracataca with his mother, and during the trip he met the veteran Colombian communist Eduardo Mahecha, who told him about the labour struggles in the region. The journey inspired him to begin work on a novel titled La Casa, which eventually became the first draft of Cien años in 1952.
UFC was rebranded as Chiquita in the mid-1980s but continued to operate in much the same way. In 2007, the US government bowed to immense popular pressure and agreed to bring charges against the company for illegal payments made to right-wing paramilitary forces, operating under the auspices of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. Found to have bankrolled a host of unspeakable crimes, Chiquita was eventually ordered to pay $38 million to the survivors and their families. One atrocity documented in an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report took place in Turbo, along the Golfo de Urabá in the heart of the Zona Banana. At 1am on 4 March 1988, a group of armed men broke into the Honduras farm and systematically killed seventeen workers, then proceeded to La Negra farm and killed three more – all of them members of the Antioquia Agrarian Labour Union and Sintrainagro, the leading banana workers’ union. At least three thousand trade unionists were assassinated in similar circumstances between 1971 and 2023. Ciénaga was only the beginning.
Though Garcia Márquez’s work is associated with ‘magical realism’, much of it depicts the brutalities of the world as it is: the hierarchies bequeathed by Spanish colonialism, the violence wrought by American imperialism, the grinding experience of poverty. The prose is raw, the hardness of history ineluctable. Perhaps it is because of this uncompromising vision that critics would rather consign Garcia Márquez’s fiction to the realm of fantasy. Yet there is also a sense in which, for him, the normalization of violence in Colombia – the extent to which it had become a fact of life – was itself a ‘magical’ process. The Amerindians’ extermination and subordination had left everyday existence warped and estranged. The sound of gunfire had become as natural as sunrise. ‘I think I made up my mind not to invent or create a new reality’, he wrote in his memoir, ‘but to find the reality with which I identified and which I knew.’
Garcia Márquez was born not far from where Simón Bolívar died in 1830, and the Liberator’s last words – ‘how will I ever get out of this labyrinth?’ – inspired one of his great books, El general en su laberinto (1989). It tells the story of Bolívar’s journey from Bogotá to the area near Santa Marta where he spent his final days, and laments the loss of his Pan-American dream. Months before it was released, the people of Caracas rose up in what became known as the Caracazo, an eruption of rage against the government’s austerity regime, which set in motion the events that would allow Hugo Chávez to gain power ten years later. Garcia Márquez met Chávez in Havana in 1999 and flew with him to Caracas a few days before his inauguration. On the flight, Chávez described his fascination with Bolívar and how he planned to the redeem his project by developing a new model of twenty-first-century socialism. An entranced Garcia Márquez recorded the encounter in ‘The Enigma of Two Chávezs’, where he describes the president as a Janus-faced figure: a man destined to save his country and perhaps his continent, and, at the same time, an ‘illusionist’ who cannot deliver what he promises. One might say that, in the end, it was Chávez who tried to lift Bolívar out of his labyrinth, by using the riches of the continent to benefit its people instead of corporations.
Now, ten years after Chávez’s death, President Gustavo Petro – a former guerrilla in the M-19 movement whose nom de guerre was Aureliano, in reference to Cien años’s protagonist – is attempting something similar in Colombia. For decades, the Colombian state was engaged in a bloody war with the Marxist forces of the FARC-EP, which sought to expand political participation and protect the interests of marginalized peasant communities. The conflict, which left over two hundred thousand dead, tens of thousands missing and five million displaced, was never chosen by the FARC-EP. As one of its partisans explained to me, ‘We didn’t take up weapons because we felt the need to use violence. We took up weapons because we tried to resolve the land question through democratic means, which was violently responded to by the state. Violence was imposed on us’.
In El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985), García Márquez wrote that although the war was happening ‘in the mountains’, this was not the only site of conflict. ‘For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets’. The same year the book was published, the FARC-EP left the hills and entered those cities, morphing into a political party, the Patriotic Union, which performed well in the legislative elections of 1986. Soon after, many of its partisans were wiped out by an extermination campaign led by the Colombian government in concert with various paramilitary death squads. The rebels went underground once again, and didn’t emerge until peace initiatives were launched in the mid-2010s, participating in negotiations in Havana that lasted four years. In 2016, the peace accords were finalised. They promised to silence the guns through a range of historic proposals, such as the validation of land titles and credit to poor farmers, which were ratified by Congress later that year. ‘The war is over’, said the FARC-EP leader Ivan Marquez, with tears in his eyes. ‘Tell Mauricio Babilonia’ – one of the main characters of Cien años, who is followed everywhere he goes by the colourful insects of Aracataca – ‘that he can let loose the yellow butterflies’.
I first went to Colombia in the early 1990s in search of the FARC-EP. The expedition did not go to plan. The Bogotá police found out about my intentions to interview the guerilla leadership and urged me to leave the country as quickly as possible, blocking my journey to the mountains, so I boarded the next flight out to Panama. I didn’t get to meet García Márquez either, but I did carry two of his books in my satchel.
Today, the violence that formed the backdrop to his fiction is subsiding, and the FARC-EP’s political party, Comunes, is part of Petro’s ruling coalition – which came to power on the pledge to secure a ‘total peace’ while driving green, equitable development. This summer I was on Isla Grande, one of the twenty-seven Rosario Islands located off the coast of Cartagena, where pirates used to stash their loot and Africans escaping enslavement fled over five hundred years ago. Since the 1980s, their descendants have successfully resisted the attempts of the Colombian oligarchy to evict them and succeeded in removing the wealthy owner of the island’s best land, where they have built the picturesque town of Orika. In early July, I witnessed local residents holding a people’s assembly to discuss the need for a new sustainable electricity plant. Meanwhile, in the nearby municipality of Sabanalarga, Petro arrived to inaugurate the Colombia Solar Forest, a complex of five solar parks that is set to benefit 400,000 Colombians and cut annual CO2 emissions by 110,212 tonnes. He called on mayors in the Colombian Caribbean, whose coastline is being eroded by the rising waters, to build similar solar farms for each municipality, reduce electricity rates and decarbonize the economy: the most concrete solution for the islands advanced by any Colombian government to date. ‘Amidst the storm and darkness’, said Petro, we are beginning to glimpse a ‘beautiful horizon’. How would Garcia Márquez have narrated this reversal in his nation’s history?
This essay is an edited extract from Vijay Prashad’s forthcoming book, Ten Books That Changed My World.
Read on: Forrest Hylton & Aaron Tauss, ‘Colombia at the Crossroads’, NLR 137.