100 Anos de Solidad 3

Ok so I know the blog says two things but I have a ton of stuff to say about the Banana Massacres and the time in which Garcia Márquez was writing. I think that with this piece in particular we should lo the situation of Garcia Márquez in two parts. First the environment of its childhood and the times in which wrote and second, the life that lived and as grew. Six months later its birth there was a crisis that to it we have given the name the Banana Massacres in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta The workers in the plantations were on strike and the government, after a month sent military forces to end the strike. The ending of the strike in real life was horrific and gruesome. It was essentially a government ordered mass murder. Now the question becomes why does such a horrific event become so easily forgotten. Well I'm sure there are several reasons, but I would argue that it was the nature of the time in Latin America. Essentially, if the government could order such mass murders then imagine what it could do to the people if they rebelled or spoke out against them. It was a way of keeping everyone in line and masking their horrific acts by putting everyone else in fear of the consequences of speaking out or rebelling.

Another important time for Márquez are the years when wrote. It wrote above all in the 1960s and 1970s, during the time of the "Latin-American boom" the events that occurred had a great impact in the literature of the "boom" and at the same time to Garcia Márquez. We have to take into account that the 60s were times of revolution and political oppression. Consider the Cuban Revolution and its leader Fidel Castro, which affected all of Latin America. The world, in the first place the United States andU.S.S.R. are in the Cold War and the world was in a state of confusion and terror. Latin America in these years had many authoritarian governments. Therefore Latin America was more or less completely ruled by dictators. The best-known were in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru. In the case of Chile, Latin America remained more or less angry with the United States because the U.S. they helped Pinochet. Pinochet is known for its violations of the human rights, like the torture. It is certain that the United States did not want to have Chile under a communist government, like that of Allende, but with all its efforts to eliminate Allende, Chile became a country under a dictator. Also there is the fall of another dictator, the General Perón and the liberation of Argentina.

The book is a combination of these two scenes. It speaks of both the massacres themselves and the political situation Garcia Márquez experienced his whole life. People really did fear the government and their power. They could kill thousands without any repercussions and would kill thousands more to silence any rebellion. (Take the Dirty War in Argentina as another example of this). It makes sense that the horror of the Banana Massacres was instantly “forgotten.”