Read Around The World: Colombia

jakeronk
Mar 2, 2024
14 min read

A few years ago, I challenged myself to read at least one book by an author from every country. I am a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain and loved how he highlighted so many cultures and ways of life through food. I was drawn to him as a writer more than a chef and if you pay attention, Tony references a lot of books when discussing countries he’s visited. I noticed that most of his books were by American authors but obviously these countries have authors of their own. How much is a writer affected by their country? How does a country’s past affect the way they tell stories?

This series will be different from my usual blog posts. I will give an overview and my opinion on the book, some background on the author, and a brief history of the country. The format for these will probably change as I figure out what works but for now I’ll have the different sections labeled so readers can easily navigate the information.

Colombia: “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garciá Márquez

Gabriel Garciá Márquez was driving his family to Acapulco when inspiration smacked him. He turned the car around and raced home. When he got home, he wrote one of the greatest opening lines to a book:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendia family in the fictional village of Macondo over seven generations. It is heavily inspired by Garciá Márquez’s childhood growing up in his grandparent’s home and the stories they would tell.

It took me some time to understand this book. It hops around in time very frequently and many characters share the same name which can make it hard to follow the family’s story. However, once I realized the story wasn’t about the family, but the European colonization of South America, it made the book much easier to understand. Every character who has the same name has the same personality. You almost have to view every Aureliano as the same character, just brought back every generation.

To understand the book, it’s really important to understand Colombia’s history. Macondo essentially begins as an Aztec village with very little contact with the outside world. Then, an official from this other city arrives and tells the village he is their new governor, but do not worry, nothing will change. After a rigged election, Aureliano Buendia leaves Macondo to fight in a civil war. He becomes a hero of the Liberal party but is tired of war and decides to sign a peace treaty, ending the fighting. A railroad is then built connecting Mancado to the rest of the world. The new railroad brings a Banana Factory to the town. After a brief period of prosperity, the locals revolt, leading to the Colombian army massacring thousands of the town's locals. Jose Arcadio Segundo (part of the Buendia family) is the sole survivor and is horrified that everyone around him denies the Banana Massacre was awful or even refuses to believe it even happened. By the end of the book Mancado is decrepit and falling apart with almost no population, a shell of its former self.

One Hundred Years of Solitude uses magical realism to highlight the ‘magical’ and uncanniness of the rotational world. Ghosts come and go, one character only eats mud and chips of white paint, and the whole book feels like a dream or fairytale. An actual fairy tale, not a Disney-esque fairytale, but I do feel it is important to mention that although it is not an adaptation of the book, Disney’s Encanto is heavily inspired by it.

The book is heavy with symbolism. I could pick up on some of it but there were times while I was reading where I would think “this is definitely symbolism for something, but I have no clue what.” Now that I have learned some more about Colombian history, I need to give the book a second read through to pick up on what I missed.

I wouldn’t say this book is for everyone because it can be dense and confusing at times, however, I really enjoyed it. It didn’t feel like any other book I’ve read. It had a very unique story structure and time felt more cyclical than always moving forward. Garciá Márquez has a way to zoom out of a moment to show you where it fits in the bigger picture. I felt like what I imagine God, or some other omnipotent observer, watching a civilization from beginning to end feels. You’re forced to watch seven generations of people make the same mistakes, knowing they will end up doomed, but it is out of your control.

About the Author: Gabriel Garciá Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6th, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán. Luisa Santiago Márquez’s parents did not approve of Eligia García. He was a Conservative and had a reputation of being a womanizer but he was persistent, writing Luisa letters and love poems, as well as serenading her with the violin. Eventually, Luisa’s parents allowed Eligio García to marry their daughter.

Not long after he was born, his father became a pharmacist and he and Gabriel’s mother moved to the nearby city leaving Gabriel in Aracataca to be raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. The Colonel fought in the Thousand Days War for the Liberals and was considered a hero and refused to be silent about the Banana Massacre. Gabriel Garciá Márquez’s grandfather was an incredible storyteller which would be a huge inspiration to the young writer. He described his grandfather as his “umbilical cord with history and reality”. His grandmother would also serve as not only an inspiration for Ursula in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but her deadpan humor and way to treat the extraordinary as perfectly normal would inspire the tone of his famous book. He graduated from high school in 1947, where he gained the reputation of being a timid kid, but who could write funny poems and comic strips, and enrolled in Universidad Nacional de Colombia to study law. His first short story was published in El Espectador around this time and was titled "La tercera resignación".

Even though writing was his passion, he continued to study law to please his father. In April of 1948, Liberal congressman and Presidential hopeful, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated, beginning the period known as La Violencia. His university would close its doors indefinitely as a result. He transferred to Universidad de Cartagena and started working as a reporter for El Universal. In 1950 he decided to leave college and become a full time journalist. He moved to Cartagena where he joined an informal group of writers, journalists, and thinkers known as the Barranquilla Group. This group included Gabriel García Márquez, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Germán Vargas, and Alfonso Fuenmayor, all of whom also comprise the fictionalized Barranquilla Group referred to as the "four friends" of Macondo in Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Around this time he was introduced to writers like Virginia Woolf and Faulkner. He hopped around Colombia, and spent two years in Europe as a foreign correspondent.

He returned to marry his childhood sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha, in 1958 and they had their first child, Rodrigo Garcia, the following year. In 1961, the family of three explored the southern United States by Greyhound, and ultimately settled down in Mexico City. Three years later Mercedes gave birth to their second son, Gonzalo Garcia.

Gabriel García’s first book, In Evil Hour was published in 1962. It won some awards in Colombia but he would use some characters and situations from his first book in his next one.

In 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude was published. To this day, it is considered Gabriel García’s magnum opus. It received universal recognition, awards in France, Italy, Venezuela, and the United States and is considered to be one of the most important novels in Hispanic literature.

After the success of his second book, Gabriel García moved his family to Barcelona, Spain. His ability to articulate the experience of Latin Americans led him to start to act as a facilitator for negotiations between the Colombian government and several guerilla groups. He was also becoming friends with many world leaders including Fidel Castro, but the author noted their friendship was mainly intellectual and they discussed literature.

Gabriel García began work on his second novel, Autumn of the Patriarch, in 1968. It was published in Spain in 1975. It follows the life of a dictator and is told through a series of anecdotes out of order. He has described the novel as a “poem on the solitude of power”. Although nothing would reach the height of his previous book, Autumn of the Patriarch was one of the best selling books in Spain that year.

After the publication of his third book, Gabriel García and his family moved from Barcelona back to Mexico City. He promised to not write another book until the Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet was removed from office. However, in 1981 he would publish a novella titled, Chronicle of a Death Foretold because he “could not remain silent in the face of injustice and repression.”

In 1982, Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts”. He was the 4th Latin American and 1st Colombian to win the award.

Love in the Time of Cholera was published in 1985 to much critical acclaim. The New York Times said “Instead of using myths and dreams to illuminate the imaginative life of a people as he's done so often in the past, Mr. Garcia Marquez has revealed how the extraordinary is contained in the ordinary ... The result is a rich, commodious novel, a novel whose narrative power is matched only by its generosity of vision”. He used the courtship of his parents as the inspiration for this book as well as a news story of two people killed in a boat. The two people had secretly been having an affair with each other and their love was revealed in their death.

The General in his Labyrinth was released 4 years later in 1989. It told the story of Simón Bolívar who liberated Colombia from Spain and was the first president of Gran Colombia. The book was not well received in America and caused outrage in Latin American countries with some politicians calling his depiction of Bolívar as “profane”. Bolívar was depicted to be more human than saintly, as Bolívar had been remembered. The best way I could describe people’s outrage at the book would be to compare it to the American founding fathers and the image we have of them. We see George Washingotn as a great leader, a liberator, and a saint, but if someone wrote a book that focused on him being a slave owner with the same amount of detail as his military career or Presidency, there would be similar outrage to that seen after the release of The General in his Labyrinth.

Because Gabriel García was very outspoken against U.S. imperialism, the U.S. government labeled him as a “subversive” and for many years he was banned from traveling to America. It was not until President Bill Clinton that the travel ban was lifted because One Hundred Years of Solitude was one of his favorite books.

In 1999 Gabriel García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. After undergoing chemotherapy in Los Angeles, the cancer went into remission. The health scare inspired him to start writing his memoir which he would publish in 2002. In 2008 it was reported that the old author was working on a new book but later that year his literary agent said it was unlikely he would release another book.

In 2012, Gabriel García’s brother announced that the beloved author was suffering from dementia. Two years later, he was hospitalized in Mexico for an infection in his lungs and urinary tract. Things started to look optimistic when he started responding well to antibiotics but on April 17th, 2018 Gabriel García Márquez died from pneumonia at the age of 87. The President of Colombia at the time mentioned “One Hundred Years of Solitude and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time” and the former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez said “Master García Márquez, thanks forever, millions of people in the planet fell in love with our nation fascinated with your lines.” In 2023, Gabriel García Márquez surpassed Miguel de Cervantes, author of the classic Don Quixote as the most translated Spanish writer. It was recently announced that a lost book written by the Nobel Prize winning author will be published in May of 2024 titled Until August.

Colombian History

Colonialism

1499: First European expedition to arrive. Led by Alonso de Ojeda. The spanish would attempt to build settlements
1525: Santa Marta is the first permanent settlement built by the Spanish
June 1st, 1533: The city of Cartagena was founded by Spanish Commander Pedro de Heredia in what was formerly the indigenous Caribbean Calamari village. The city begins to prosper with gold stolen from the Sinu culture’s tombs. The demand for gold grew, causing the Spanish to invade and conquer the Chibcha Nations. This would be the start of Spanish colonization in the America’s.
1538: Jimenéz de Quesáda established the city of Santa Fe de Bogotá in what used to be the Musica village of Bacatá.
1549: Spain declares Bogotá the capital of New Granada, which encompassed most of what is present day Colombia.

Colombian Independence

1808: France invades Spain, weakening Spanish influence in New Granada.
July 20th, 1810: Uprising in Bogotá where the people of New Granada threw out Spanish officials. This would become Colombia’s Independence Day.
1814-1816: A series of Civil Wars are fought, mainly in Venezuela, as Spain tries to take back their territory.
1819: A constitutional convention is held in what is now Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela. In that same year, Simón Bolívar invaded Colombia and defeated the Spanish. The Republic of Colombia was established. It would commonly be called Gran Colombia because it included Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador. On February 16th, Bolívar was elected president but would leave to continue fighting.
1826: Tensions between civilians and the military over government control reached a breaking point leading to a rebellion in Venezuela led by General José Antonio Páez. Bolívar, who had been in Peru, returned to Gran Colombia to restore peace
1828-1830: Bolívar becomes a brief dictator
1830: Bolívar organized the Convention of 1830. New Granada, which included modern day Colombia and parts of Panama was established. During this convention, Bolívar would resign his post and leave for the northeast coast. He would die near Santa Marta on December 17th, 1830.
1835: Gran Colombia has a population of 1.5 million.
1840: Civil War begins and fighting will continue until 1904. This is considered the beginning of Colombia’s modern political history. The struggle for power would be between the Liberal and Conservative political parties.

The Thousand Days’ War

October 17th, 1899: Liberal rebels attacked the city of Socorro, Santander
October 24th, 1899: The Battle of Magdalena River is fought and is the first major battle of the war. The Liberals suffered between 200 and 500 losses but the Conservatives only suffered a few wounded but they had split into two factions, the Historical and the National.
December 15th & 16th, 1899: The Battle of Peralonso was fought, ending in an important victory for the Liberals.
May 11-26, 1900: The Battle of Palonegro was fought. 15 days of intense fighting on 26km of trenches. 2,500 people were killed, 1,500 Liberal and 1,000 Conservative. After this battle the war began to escalate. The Liberals would split into to factions, the Pacifists and the Warmongers
October 25th, 1902: The first peace treaty was signed. The Treaty of Neerlandia put an end to the fighting
November 21st, 1902: The definitive peace treaty, the Treaty of Wisconsin, is signed ending the Thousand Days’ War.

The Banana Massacre

November 12th, 1928: Workers for United Fruit Company, an American company which would later become Chiquita, went on strike until the company met their demands.
- Workers demands: Stop hiring through subcontractors, mandatory collective insurance, compensation for workplace accidents, clean dormitories, 6 day work week as opposed to 7, increase pay for workers earning less than 100 pesos a month, weekly wages, end the practice of getting paid through coupons which were only good at the company’s stores, and instead start getting paid actual money, and better hospital services.
December 5th, 1928: Details about the Banana Massacre are hazy. What is known is that U.S. officials portrayed the striking workers as communists with a “subversive tendency”. The Colombian government felt compelled to back the American company, because they could end the trade of Colombian bananas to America and Europe, which were their most successful markets. 1,400 workers and their families were summoned to Ciénaga, the capital of Magdalena, to settle the strike with the governor when they were met by 300 soldiers under the command of General Cortés Vargas. Just before midnight, General Vargas received Decree Number 1 which ordered the siege of Magdalena.
December 6th, 1928: At 1:30am, the crowd was ordered to disperse. Five minutes later, the Colombian army opened fire. No one knows how many people were killed. General Vargas claimed that only 47 people were killed, but others claimed the number was closer to 2,000. Liberal Congressman Jorge Eliécer Gaitán claimed that the army acted on orders from the United Fruit Company itself, but General Vargas would later argue that he had only issued the order because he had information that American boats were planning on landing and deploying troops to defend Americans and protect the interests of the United Fruit Company. He claimed he issued the order to prevent Americans from harming Colombian citizens. There was an American ship sent to the area, but the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia insisted it was not a military move. Congressman Gaitán also claimed the army dumped the bodies in the sea, with other sources claiming they were buried in mass graves.

La Violencia

1948: Liberal Party presidential candidate and expected winner of the 1949 election, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán is assassinated. The people of Bogotá rioted in the streets for 10 hours causing 5,000 casualties and destroyed most of the city. This was the beginning of La Violencia, a 10 year civil war. Police in rural towns and Conservative party leaders encouraged their supporters to take farmland from Liberal supporters. The Colombian military and the National Police of Colombia along with Conservative paramilitary groups fought against paramilitary and guerilla groups fighting for the Liberal Party. The media failed to accurately cover events because they feared retaliation.
November 9th, 1949: Congress, with a Liberal majority, began impeachment proceedings against the Conservative President, Ospina Pérez, in order to try and end La Violencia. To prevent them from doing so, President Pérez dissolved Congress and created a Conservative Dictatorship.
1950: Laureano Gómez is “elected” president in a rigged election, becoming Colombia’s next Conservative dictator. Colombia entered the Korean War as an ally of America and is the only Latin American Country to provide direct military aid.
1953: General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla staged a military coup, overthrowing President Gómez, installing himself as the new Conservative Dictator and established martial law. He declared amnesty for all paramilitary and guerilla groups. Some groups refused to surrender to the government and reorganized to become criminal organizations.

The National Front

May 10th, 1957: President Pinilla is forced to step down. Civilian rule was restored and moderate Conservatives and Liberals came together to form the National Front. They agreed to alternate between Liberal and Conservative presidents.
1958: Alberto Lleras Camargo (Liberal) is elected as first President of the National Front.
March 14th, 1961: John F. Kennedy initiated the Alliance for Progress to establish economic cooperation between the U.S. and Latin America.

Modern Day Colombia

Colombia has been plagued by violence for most of its history and that is true for most of it’s modern history. Guerilla and paramilitary groups, drug cartels, and government corruption make it easy to write Colombia off as a “bad” country but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Most Colombians are embarrassed of their country’s unsavory image. People who travel to the country explain that it is considered taboo to talk about Pablo Escobar and although you can take guided tours about the infamous drug lord, locals will give you dirty looks because it is a chapter of their history they are ready to move past.

Colombia also produces 11.5 million bags of coffee beans a year, making it responsible for a lot of the coffee you drink. The coffee trade also makes up a large portion of the country’s tourism. In 2011, the coffee region of Valle del Cauca was named as an UNESCO World Heritage. They have started offering excursions where tourists can trek the land where coffee is gown, and have even built an amusement park called Parque del Café which along with typical amusement park rides, houses a museum about the history of coffee cultivation. A gondola ride over the beautiful landscape takes tourists between the two sides of the park.

Wrap up

Colombia has had a violent history but that doesn’t tell the entire story. Gabriel García Márquez depicts life in the quieter cities. There are serious problems in Colombia but it is important to remember places like Macondo because they too are victims of war and drugs. Today, Colombia still has unsafe areas, but for the most part it has gotten a lot better. Colombians are not proud of their drug cartel past and want to move on. Colombia is a beautiful country with a rich landscape and buildings that are painted in bright vibrant colors. A country is so much more than just the headlines we read. One Hundred Years of Solitude reminds you that a few corrupt people in power are not representative of the entire country.

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