At one point in One Hundred Years, Garcia Marquez described the event in Colombian history in which hundreds of striking United Fruit workers were massacred in the town of Cienega in 1928. As Garcia Marquez told the story, one banana worker survived. The man returned to Cienega to find no traces of what had happened. He must have been dreaming. Aqui, no pasa nada.
Nothing happens here.
Macondo is a happy town. The Macondo Garcia Marquez describes is a spiraling history of his native Colombia. Macondo reveals an official Colombian history, surrounded by a whirlwind of myth. It erases the government repression in Colombia from history, just as Bogota daily newspapers misname those who are at fault for daily homicides, disappearances, and the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Colombia. Today Colombia suffers from the worst human rights record in the hemisphere.