Exploring the real Macondo: here is the town that inspired 100 Years of Solitude

The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s most popular novel, 100 Years of Solitude, has been translated into dozens of languages and sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Recently, Netflix, the streaming platform with nearly 300 million paid subscribers in over 190 countries, turned the novel into a series. This marks one of the most global audiovisual productions ever to come from Latin America.

The producers of the series proudly announced their “commitment to reality” by filming in Colombia with mostly Colombian actors. Nonetheless, to recreate the “reality” of the novel that kickstarted the “magical realism” literary boom worldwide, millions of dollars were invested in the construction from scratch of Macondo, the northern Colombian town in which the novel takes place. Built hundreds of miles from the original location of the novel in central Colombia, the Netflix Macondo has winding streets lined with elegant two-story European architecture featuring wooden balconies, pedestrian arches and gas streetlamps, a globalized fantasy world that has nothing to do with the architecture of Colombia’s banana region, and much less of the actual town of Macondo.

Although Macondo, the town in 100 Years of Solitude, is as much a fiction as the rest of the novel (Garcia Marquez said it was more of a “state of mind” than a place), it is in fact based on an actual town of the same name about 20 miles north of Gabo’s birthplace, Aracataca. The couple dozen homes in Macondo are built mostly with local, natural construction materials (earth, wood) and designed with open areas, high ceilings, and natural ventilation to protect against the heavy rainfall and offer shelter from the stifling heat of the region. Two little stores, one old abandoned Catholic church, and a primary school are the only non-residential buildings in town. Banana fields surround the town, including the plantation which gave rise to the town’s name, where most of the town’s inhabitants work.

As described in 100 Years of Solitude, Macondo is located right next to Sevilla, one of the first modern towns in Colombia. Built by United Fruit for the American executives who oversaw the operations in the region, Sevilla was built as a “company town,” with large one-story, concrete ranch-style homes, originally protected by an electrical fence that surrounded the whole town (and which the residents in Macondo referred to as a “chicken coop”). With a two-lane highway that connects it directly to the main highway that heads up to the Caribbean coast, and a freight train with a station right in front of the town’s gated entrance, Sevilla was designed to have easy access to the world beyond. 

United Fruit Company, which began doing business in the region in 1870 after first discovering the delicious fruit in the town of Macondo (according to Gabo’s novel), made a fortune through land expropriation and exploited labor, and was responsible for first converting Colombia into a single-crop “banana republic.” As depicted in the novel, to protest inhuman conditions and poor pay, 25,000 banana workers called a strike in 1928, the largest labor protest in Colombia up until that time. At the behest of United Fruit and the US government, the Colombian government sent in 700 soldiers to put down the strike. The workers’ leadership was summoned to the main plaza of a city to the north of Macondo under the pretense of negotiating the end of the strike, but instead were trapped and attacked when 14 machine guns mounted on the roofs opened fire. 
 

After the initial massacre, the American executives working for United Fruit fled back to their fortified homes in Sevilla to seek refuge from the enraged masses. Workers destroyed several United Fruit Company buildings in the town, including the engineer´s quarters, and attacked the homes of the gringos living there. The US Consul in Colombia wrote that “the fact that the American residents (employees of United Fruit) in the Zone came out of it alive is due to the defense they put up for six hours when they held off the mob that was bent upon killing them.” The true function of the American life-style was revealed during this attack, that is, equipped with fortified, defensive cement bunkers with their own source of electricity and communication, and stockades of guns and rifles, essential American household items. Many of the workers that were involved in ransacking United Fruit property in Sevilla were tracked down to their homes in Macondo by death squads and murdered. 

Violence in Colombia serves as a backdrop to 100 Years of Solitude, but due to the globalized popularity of the novel and the new Netflix series, which focuses more on colorful antique clothes and quaint coffee cups, it might seem that this violence belongs somewhere in the distant past. Over time, however, the United Fruit death squads grew into giant paramilitary organizations, providing protection for narcos and multinationals. In its modern existence as Chiquita Bananas (from 1970 on), the company continued to fund violence and human rights abuses in the region. Recently, it came to light how for decades Chiquita financed the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) and later the Clan de Golfo, Colombia’s largest and most violent paramilitary organization, responsible for the death of eight Colombian banana workers, union members, and labor activists. Chiquita also allowed paramilitaries to use their ports and ships to bring weapons into the country and to ship out cocaine inside of crates carrying bananas, often even stuffed inside the bananas themselves (a touch of “magical realism”).

Macondo did not benefit in any real way from the more than one hundred years of United Fruit and Chiquita’s banana industry, nor has it benefited from the large-scale cocaine smuggling industry, and instead has had to suffer the violence and misery these globalized, extractive economies create. Without any Macondo-theme hotels, restaurants or cafes to serve as the backdrop for selfies for tourists to take, and looking nothing like the elegant Europeanized movie set of a town that took the producers of the series millions of dollars to build, the Netflix series will in no way benefit the town, either, and will only highlight the complete disconnect between globalized, exotic content and the local, everyday reality of violence and exploitation in Colombia.