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No. 93153〜60（2018・5）

The Role of Politics in Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe

Introduction
The purpose of this paper will be to focus on the political aspect of Gabriel García
Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Specifically, the central argument is to assertthat its political element is ultimately an apolitical condemnation of both the abuse of politicalpower and of the dressing of such abuse in the trappings of democracy. This apolitical aspect issignificant in that García Márquez, as a self-identified socialist, might hypothetically havewished to include in his novel an overtly ideological agenda. This is an interesting contrast withother novelists of strongly held political views.1 Moreover, it is shown that the depicted abuse of
power increases as the isolation of the story’s setting, the village (later town) of Macondo
decreases, and the most important person in mitigating such abuse is Úrsula Buendía, perhaps
the most apolitical character of the novel.2

Colonel Aureliano Buendía and the Nature of Political PowerThe main stream of political activity in the novel begins and ends with the actions ofColonel Aureliano Buendía, son of José Arcadio Buendía, founder of the village of Macondo.
Macondo, despite existing in an isolated region of 19th century South America, is caught up in
the political turmoil that has frequently characterized that continent. 3 Colonel Aureliano
Buendía leads the revolution of the Liberal Party against the Conservative Party of his
country’s government. He is ultimately unsuccessful in his endeavors, and after the cessation of
hostilities cannot even succeed in convincing the government to issue pensions to all the veteranson both sides of the war.
The citizens of Macondo, particularly its most important family, the Buendías (whocomprise the main characters of the novel), are generally either actively involved with,sympathetic with, or at least do not oppose the activities of the Liberal Party, which seems
more or less secularist and left-leaning in orientation.4 Political matters disturb the solitude ofMacondo as much as anything, and the hardships caused by the fruit company that sets up abanana plantation (climaxing in a massacre of striking workers) would seem to indicate astrong pro-socialist message.5 This is underscored by the fact that García Márquez himself was
known to have strong socialist leanings, evinced by for example his co-founding of the leftist
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magazine Alternativa in 1974 and his well-known friendship with Cuban socialist dictator Fidel
Castro.6
Such convictions, one may speculate, might well tempt a writer to compose a political tract
in the guise of a novel.7 Yet instead, García Márquez illustrates elements of the nature of power
relationships generally, rather than the promotion or repudiation of political ideologies in andof themselves; this is the primary element of how political power is depicted. The abuse of power
and its negative effects on the people of Macondo increase as Macondo’s isolation from theoutside world is reduced. Márquez shows the reader the potentially malignant nature of largescale authority per se, with both“left-wing”and“right-wing”individuals and organizations
comprising a depictive framework. In connection with this, Gene H. Bell-Villada makes asignificant observation regarding One Hundred Years of Solitude:[The novel’s] appeal is to all ideologies: leftists like its dealing with social struggles and its portrait ofimperialism; conservatives are heartened by the corruption and/or failure of those struggles and withthe sustaining role of the family; nihilists and quietists find their pessimism reconfirmed; andapolitical hedonists find solace in all the sex and swashbuckling. (93)

To expand upon Bell-Villada’s insight: the novel ideologically having“something foreveryone”ultimately means“nothing for anyone”in terms of truly having one’s ideologicalstance confirmed. This makes One Hundred Years of Solitude much more sophisticated andnuanced than it might otherwise have been.
Whatever ideological fervor Aureliano may have possessed at the start of his militaryadventures, he grows cynical and pessimistic as time goes on, as evinced by this exchange withhis comrade Colonel Gerineldo Márquez:“Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?”“What other reason could there be?”Colonel Gerineldo Márquez answered. “For the great Liberalparty.”“You’re lucky because you know why,”he answered.“As far as I’m concerned, I’ve come torealize only just now that I’m fighting because of pride.”“That’s bad,”Colonel Gerineldo Márquez said.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía was amused at his alarm.“Naturally,”he said. “But in any case, it’sbetter than not knowing why you’re fighting.”He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile:“Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn’t have any meaning for anyone.”(139)This does not necessarily mean that Aureliano has become a political nihilist. Rather hesees that whatever potential good there is in human society, this good cannot be achieved byeither the Liberal or Conservative parties, even if Aureliano’s sympathies are with Liberal
ideology. The most telling display of this loss of faith is when Aureliano, in his capacity as
commander of the Liberal forces, comes to an accommodation with the enemy through six
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Liberal Party lawyers who have come to Macondo. The terms they propose result in a Liberal
Party platform that is little different from the Conservative Party’s:
They asked first that he renounce the revision of property titles in order to get back the support of
the Liberal landowners. They asked, secondly, that he renounce the fight against clerical influence inorder to obtain the support of the Catholic masses. They asked, finally, that he renounce the aim ofequal rights for natural and illegitimate children in order to preserve the integrity of the home.
“That means,”Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, smiling when the reading was over, “that all
we’re fighting for is power.”…
Still smiling, he took the documents the delegates gave him and made ready to sign them.
“Since that’s the way it is,”he concluded,“we have no objection to accepting.”(172-173)

Aureliano, seeing the farcical parody of social reform that the Liberal Party has become,signals his contempt for it by not mincing words with the lawyers, even as he gives up on any
chance for a truly beneficent revolution and accedes to their requests. He has come to seepolitical power as ultimately an end in itself. Later, as he leads his troops to suppress resistanceto the armistice among the Liberal forces, his motivation is far removed from politics, or rather
is anti-political:
He was never a greater soldier than at that time. The certainty that he was finally fighting for
his own liberation and not for abstract ideals, for slogans that politicians could twist left and rightaccording to the circumstances, filled him with an ardent enthusiasm. (174-175)

Aureliano’s disillusionment, then, makes him eager to completely detach himself from thepolitical arena, to become in effect an apolitical figure. The corollary to this is that power per seand its abuse, rather than any“ism,”are what primarily infringe on the solitude of Macondo.

The Abuse of Power across the Political Spectrum
The political goals of the Liberal Party are described in scathing terms by the governmentappointed magistrate of Macondo, Don Apolinar Moscote, to the young Aureliano Buendía (wholater leads the rebellion against the landowner-supported Conservative government):
The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil
marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate
ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supreme
authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God,
proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faithof Christ, of the principle of authority… (98)As the book was written in an age when civil marriage and the rights of“illegitimate”
children had come to be taken for granted in much of the world, this passage can easily be seen─ 55 ─

as a criticism of the ideology Moscote promotes. García Márquez seeks to damn the devil withhis own words, as the magistrate’s speech will seem to many modern readers ludicrous andhypocritically immoral. Moscote’s stuffing of the ballot boxes as he supervises an election in
Macondo (99) completes the picture of a corrupt regime that only pays lip service to democracy.
Yet the depiction of Liberal Party characters is far from pristine. When Aureliano, angry
at the injustice of the Conservatives’ election-tampering, speaks with Dr. Noguera, a secretfederalist agitator hiding out in Macondo, he is horrified at the latter’s intention to initiate
mass assassinations of not only all Conservative officials but of their entire families as well,including Moscote, his wife, and six daughters:“You’re no Liberal or anything else,”Aureliano told him without getting excited. “You’re nothing
but a butcher.”(102)When Colonel Aureliano Buendía takes on the mantle of revolutionary leader, he does sowith scruples, guaranteeing the safety of Moscote and his family (not least because of his
marriage to Moscote’s daughter Remedios). But while Aureliano is off to war his nephew
Arcadio assumes authority over Macondo and in the name of the Liberal Party becomes amurderous tinpot dictator. Exercising power arbitrarily to compensate for feelings ofinadequacy, he prohibits religious services, orders the execution of a man who mocks him, andimprisons those who protest his actions (107-108). As his megalomania increases, only theintervention of Aureliano’s mother Úrsula, matriarch of the village, saves Macondo from moreof Arcadio’s ravages.
While Úrsula is the most vocal opponent of such corruption, the character who tries toprevent this process from the beginning is her husband, José Arcadio Buendía, founder andpatriarch of Macondo and father of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. When Don Apolinar Moscotefirst arrives and declares himself to be Macondo’s government-appointed magistrate, his first
official act is to order all residents to paint their houses blue in celebration of the country’s
Independence Day. José Arcadio Buendía calmly confronts the magistrate:
Facing Don Apolinar Moscote, still without raising his voice, he gave a detailed account of how
they had founded the village, of how they had distributed the land, opened the roads, and introduced
the improvements that necessity required without having bothered the government and withoutanyone having bothered them.“We are so peaceful that none of us has died even of a natural death,”
he said.“You can see that we still don’t have any cemetery.”No one was upset that the government
had not helped them. On the contrary, they were happy that up until then it had let them grow inpeace, and he hoped that it would continue leaving them that way, because they had not founded a
town so that the first upstart who came along would tell them what to do… (57-58)

A significant element of this statement is that while it extols the virtues of what essentiallybegins as an idyllic, socialist utopia, the society in question − Macondo − exists on an─ 56 ─

exceedingly small, localized scale. Once Macondo becomes embroiled in national politics (i.e.
“left” versus“right”), events such as the petty and murderous tyranny of Aureliano’s nephew
Arcadio and the massacre of the striking workers eventually arise. José Arcadio Buendía’sassertion that Macondo does not and has never needed anything from the government stands insharp contrast to the common perception of socialism as entailing a slavish dependence on
government handouts.
José Arcadio Buendía grudgingly tolerates Don Apolinar Moscote’s presence, but thelatter’s authority is tentative and conditional upon the alliances he builds with the Buendía
family. This initial confrontation between the two men is a crucial point in the novel, as it is the
beginning of Macondo’s gradual loss of isolation and its corresponding difficulties: thebeginning of the end of Macondo’s utopian peace, an end characterized by political conflict inwhich there are ultimately no ideologically-based“good guys and bad guys.”Úrsula Buendía’s Apolitical Activism
Aureliano’s mother Úrsula, who exhibits little interest in anything political, simply wishes
to have a quiet family life. A devoutly religious woman, she expresses no views remotely
resembling the Conservative insistence on a God-given right to rule the country or the denial of
legal rights to children born out of wedlock. Nor does she take any explicitly pro-Liberal Party
stance, despite her son’s position as leader of the revolution. However, through a deep sense of
moral conviction and sheer force of will, she uncompromisingly intervenes upon seeing extreme
abuses of power.
Only when Úrsula severely whips her grandson Arcadio as he is about to have Moscoteexecuted (for having criticized Arcadio’s despotism) do things in Macondo go back to normal,
with Úrsula in charge. It is thus Úrsula, an apolitical force, who ends the tyrannical hold
Arcadio has had over the village. Similarly, Úrsula plays a significant role in Colonel Aureliano
Buendía’s decision to rescind his order to execute fellow revolutionary Gerineldo Márquez forhigh treason (which in this case meant protesting Aureliano’s coming to an accommodation
with the Conservative regime) (173). She also fruitlessly goes to great lengths to prevent
Aureliano’s execution of Conservative military commander General José Raquel Moncada (who
had spent a period in control of Macondo), pleading that he was a good man who had given
Macondo the best government it had ever had (162).
It is significant that all three of the above interventions are to prevent executions, theplanned and calculated destruction of human life for specifically political rationales. In theabsence of such situations, Úrsula focuses her attention on household duties and on caring forher family. Úrsula, then, represents a benevolent, apolitical power that lies dormant except inextreme situations. She is in this sense the conscience of the Buendía family and of Macondo,
personifying an unimpeachable sense of right and wrong that both eschews and transcends
political considerations.
─ 57 ─Conclusion
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, no political ideology is depicted as ubiquitously keeping
the moral high ground to the exclusion of all other factors. If such were the case, the efforts of
one side or the other would be relatively benevolent and utopian in nature rather than the
mixture of idealism and corruption seen in the novel. The warm personal relationship between
Colonel Aureliano Buendía and Don Apolinar Moscote, and the connection of the two men
through marriage further defy the separation of good and evil in such simplistic and stark
terms.
Positive aspects of both socialism and capitalism are depicted in the story, but on a small,
localized scale. In the early days of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, Úrsula’s husband andpatriarch of the village,“set up the placement of the houses in such a way that from all of them
one could reach the river and draw water with the same effort, and he had lined up the streetswith such good sense that no house got more sun than another during the hot time of day…It
was a truly happy village…”(9). This depiction of benign local collectivism is in contrast toÚrsula’s lucrative private business of candy animals, bread, and pastries undertaken after
Macondo has grown into a busy town (55). It is a decidedly capitalist enterprise, albeit on asmall scale. Rather than either condemnation or praise of socialism or capitalism per se, we cansee that each way of life becomes less benevolent or less tenable as more arbitrary power
becomes involved. This trend increases as Macondo becomes less and less isolated. There is anabsence of any clear-cut delineation between“good” and“bad”systems depicted in certain
dystopian tales such as Jack London’s The Iron Heel (socialist) and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged(capitalist).
This is partly reflected in García Márquez’s stated views on the language of politics in a
New York Times Book Review interview conducted in 1988:
I really detest political-speak. Words like“the people,”for example, have lost their meaning. We
have to fight against fossilized language. Not only in the case of the Marxists, who have petrified thelanguage most, but the liberals too.“Democracy”is another such word. The Soviets say they’re
democratic; the Americans say they’re democratic; El Salvador does, and Mexico too. Everyone who
can organize an election says he’s democratic.“Independence”is another one. These are words thathave come to mean very little. They’re disconnected; they don’t describe the reality they represent.

García Márquez’s point that anyone can claim the title“democratic”calls to mind the ballot
box-stuffing of Don Apolinar Moscote and the tyrannical behavior of Úrsula’s grandson
Arcadio, both done ostensibly in the name of democracy. Such a view is perhaps most directlyreflected in Aureliano’s above-mentioned certainty, as he strives to end the civil war, that he is“finally fighting for his own liberation and not for abstract ideals, for slogans that politicians
could twist left and right according to the circumstances”(174-175).
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The depiction of political action in One Hundred Years of Solitude is but one thread in a richliterary tapestry of the human experience. As for this element of the novel, even the mostisolated community in a modernizing world must eventually deal with national politics, and thispolitical dimension is a key aspect of Macondo’s gradual emergence from the solitude of thetitle. Neither benevolence nor cruelty are depicted as the unique province of any single ideology
or ideologue; this element, rather than acting as a vehicle for political advocacy, depicts politicalaction to illustrate the nature of power relationships and the abuse of power.
Notes
1

To be clear, there is no assertion made herein that One Hundred Years of Solitude is commonly viewed
as a pro-socialist novel. Rather, its subject matter could easily have been used for such a purpose, yet
Márquez chose not to. As comparisons, one might consider examples from dystopian fiction: Jack
London’s The Iron Heel (1908) carries an explicitly pro-socialist message, while Ayn Rand’s Atlas
Shrugged (1957) serves to convey the author’s anti-collectivist / pro-capitalist views. The most iconic ofdystopian novels, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), is more nuanced in that while Orwell was sympathetic tosocialism and served with anti-fascist military forces in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the hyperoppressive totalitarian government of 1984 is an ostensibly socialist body; inferably Orwell wishes not
to debunk socialism per se, but to warn the reader of what he believes socialism can morph into. As
O’Brien, the novel’s villain, freely admits to protagonist Winston Smith,“The Party seeks power
entirely for its own sake…The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in
their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives…Power is not a means; it
is an end”(200). One Hundred Years of Solitude, while vastly different from 1984 in most respects (andcertainly not a political dystopian work), is similar in that its depiction of the abuse of power and thebetrayal of ideals is not asserted as the distinctive province of a particular system or ideology.

2One of the characters who might be considered more disinterested in politics than Úrsula is her greatgranddaughter Remedios the Beauty, who lives as the proverbial child of nature and eventuallydisappears into the heavens during a miraculous levitation, one of a number of supernatural occurencesin the novel (242-243).

3

While the novel’s setting is clearly South America, the name of the country in which the village ofMacondo exists is never mentioned. It seems safe to assume, however, that One Hundred Years ofSolitude takes place in Colombia, García Márquez’s country of birth. This is evinced by certain
historical parallels with events such as the violent conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties(in particular that of their real-life counterparts in the Thousand Days’ War of 1899-1902) and thekilling by soldiers of striking banana plantation workers (309-319), apparently based upon a similar
incident in Ciénaga, Colombia in 1928 (see note number 5). As for Macondo, it is commonly believed tohave been based on García Márquez’s home town of Aractaca, Colombia (which in 2006 had a failedreferendum on changing its name to Macondo). However, Santiago Villaveces-Izquierdo asserts that
Macondo is“a powerful metaphor for what has become of Colombia today” (7). Villaveces-Izquierdo
cites from the novel a mysterious amnesia that temporarily afflicts the entire village (Chapter 3) as aparallel to the real-life state of Colombia which“opts to forget”actions such as the forced displacement
and marginalization of indigenous peoples and other minorities (7).

4

It could be postulated that the lack of any specific ideological terms in One Hundred Years of Solitude(other than the rather wide-ranging categories of“liberal”and“conservative”) support the view that─ 59 ─

while political conflict plays a major role in the novel, the effects of ideological fervor (rather than theideologies themselves) form the major political element of the story.
5

Eduardo Posada-Carbó has argued that the apparent real-life inspiration for the banana plantation
massacre (309-319), a strike against the United Fruit Company in 1928 in Ciénaga, Colombia that ended
with government troops firing on protesters, actually resulted in no more than five deaths (as opposedto the 3,000 dead in the novel). García Márquez, Posada-Carbó asserts, never claimed that the number
killed in the novel reflected historical accuracy (395-396).

6

García’s relationship to Castro is explored in detail by authors Ángel Esteban and Stéphanie Panichelliin their 2009 book Fidel & Gabo. They strongly criticize Márquez’s failure to publicly criticize Castro’s
imprisonment and execution of scores of Cuban dissidents in 2003.

7

This is not to imply that there was actually any such temptation on García Márquez’s part; there is noevidence of such known to this writer.

Works Cited
Bell-Villada, Gene H. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1990.
Esteban, Ángel and Stéphanie Panichelli. Fidel & Gabo: A Portrait of the Legendary Friendship Between
Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez. Trans. Diane Stockwell. New York: Pegasus Books, 2009.
London, Jack. The Iron Heel. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1908.
Márquez, Gabriel García.“Gabriel Marquez on Love, Plagues, and Politics.”Interview by Marlise Simons.
New York Times Book Review 21 Feb. 1988. 13 January 2018.
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/21/books/gabriel-marquez-on-love-plagues-and-politics.html?
pagewanted=print───. One Hundred Years of Solitude. (Cien Años de Soledad) 1967. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. London:
Picador, Penguin Books, 2014.
“Marquez Town Rebuffs Macondo Name.” BBC News, 26 June 2006. 15 Sep. 2011.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5116004.stm
Orwell, George. 1984 . 1949. New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1954.
Posada-Carbó, Eduardo.“Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude.”Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, May 1998. 395-414.
http://www.english110fall2014leroy.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2014/06/158531_146_96_128_36_25_08_
2014_03_06.pdf
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957. New York: Signet, 1996.
Villaveces-Izquierdo, Santiago.“Internal Diaspora and State Imagination: Colombia’s Failure to Envisiona Nation.” Seminar on Social Categories ìn Population Health. Committee on Anthropological
Demography of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, 15-18 Sep. 1999, Cairo,
Egypt. 15 Sep. 2011.
http://archive.iussp.org/members/restricted/publications/Cairo99/cairo-27.pdf


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