Colombia is doomed by corruption 100 Years of Solitude is a tale for today

That edge-of-jungle backwater boasted amenities several rungs higher than its location and recent history — at the epicentre of a four-way civil conflict — might have led me to expect. During the cocaine boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Escobar and his cartel not only poured the dollars he gained in their billions directly into philanthropic largesse of his own self-interested kind, much of it in Medellín. The almost-incalculable profits of coca cultivation for the cartels drew landless, dispossessed or rack-rented campesinos from around Colombia to out-of-the-way, hard-to-police rural areas. There, a small patch cleared in the forest and planted with the golden bush might yield a reasonable livelihood.

They included Guaviare and neighbouring Caquetá, whose jungles hosted Escobar’s notorious processing complex, Tranquílandia. Wealth from the green leaf that became white powder in Escobar’s hidden labs trickled down, and spread out around long-neglected provinces. It made towns such as the place where I found treatment richer, and better served, than ever before. An alphabet soup of marauding guerrilla forces also fed the cartels with coca: FARC, ELN, AUN. In Guaviare itself, offshoots of the FARC managed the coca supply network (and have still not entirely demobilised). Along with the Colombian army, they plagued villagers beside the broad tree-lined rivers and down the vine-tangled forest tracks. As US-backed social-development funds supplemented the military pushback against drug-trafficking insurgents, such backwaters became frontlines.

The ideological fig-leaves of Left or Right-wing gangs barely masked the mainsprings of a rampant narco-economy. Behind both the pretend-political traffickers and the honest criminal ones lay, and still lies, the search for a living from the nation’s abundant but unfairly-parcelled earth. Colombia’s slow road out of the drug-funded civil strife, that has cost around 250,000 lives over the past half-century, has meant a difficult reckoning with the coca business. In places like Guaviare, the trade offered land, and hope. Eradication, pushed by the Bush-era “Plan Colombia”, utterly failed. Will the controlled tolerance pursued by president Gustavo Petro’s government as part of its push for Paz Total, “total peace”, succeed? Land reforms, especially for indigenous peoples in Guaviare and similar areas, are a key pillar of the Petro platform. Though cartels may go extinct (supplanted by their even more sadistic Mexican counterparts), cocaine cultivation in Colombia continues to boom. It rose in 2023 to 253,000 hectares: two-thirds of the global total, according to the UN drug agency UNODC.

A modest plot of the bush may secure a family’s future. And, as writer-explorer Wade Davis notes in his fine book about the Magdalena river (the waterway that runs through the work, and life, of Gabriel García Márquez): “Land is at the root of all conflict in Colombia.” According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, 10% of the country’s landowners possess 82% of its productive land; Oxfam’s research reckons that 67% of usable land is concentrated into just 0.4% of properties. That makes Colombian earth the most unequally divided on the continent — perhaps on the planet.

Netflix has just launched the first half of its lavish 16-part adaptation of García Márquez’s 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Much of the critical chatter has dwelt on the challenges of bringing the so-called “magic realism” of an epoch-defining saga (which has sold over 50 million copies) to the screen. But Alex Garćia López’s sober and scrupulous — if visually resplendent — series made me think less of the book’s sporadic magic than its consistent realism. José Arcadio Buendía‘s cross-country trek to find free land and build a community launches the saga. Successive threats to his family’s doomed dream of independence on uncontested ground sustain it. García Márquez did not concoct a party box of literary tricks. He sought to give an epic, and mythical, dimension to the class and caste conflict that has bedevilled and imperilled life in Colombia almost since the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, threw off the Spanish colonial shackles of “Nueva Granada” in 1819.

Readers rightly recall the mind-expanding images that punctuate the tale of seven generations of the Buendía family amid the tropical swamps of Macondo: clouds of yellow butterflies; priests who levitate “by means of chocolate”; a Spanish galleon in a jungle clearing, smothered in flowers. Each flash of wonder, however, helps illuminate a dark hinterland of violence and injustice. José Arcadio, of the clan’s second generation, dies at home as a “thread of blood” miraculously snakes across town from his bedroom door to the kitchen where the Buendía matriarch, Úrsula, is making bread. Many fans remember that scene; fewer, perhaps, that the dead man owed his dubious wealth to profit from “usurped lands”. Solid, and tragic, history undergirds each flight into folklore or fantasy.

Macondo — inspired by the author’s home town of Aracataca — suffers in a “solitude” of isolation bred by stalled efforts to break out of a cycle of injustice. Patterns of exploitation wheel around in a “machine of unavoidable repetitions”. Colonel Aureliano Buendía fights “thirty-two civil wars and loses them all”. He does so, with waning enthusiasm, on behalf of the Liberal Party that, for 150 years, swapped control of Colombia with the Conservatives: its deadly rival but also mirror-image. Both the vehicle of fractions within the landowning elite, the Liberals more secular and the Conservatives more clerical, the parties bound landless followers to a bloody treadmill of attack and retribution. It wore down the people but mostly left property within the same few hands.

Much of García Márquez’s novel shows Aureliano, the disenchanted rebel chieftain, locked in “the vicious circle of that eternal war” until he is “fighting only for power”. Liberal estate proprietors, meanwhile, do secret deals with their Conservative antagonists in order “to stop the revision of property titles”. García Márquez drew on the career of his own grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía, a Liberal hero in the “War of the Thousand Days” that raged between 1899 and 1902. It killed 100,000 Colombians but left a frozen social hierarchy largely intact. Indeed, the polarised stasis of the Liberal-Conservative stand-off lasted — with interludes of weary truce and consensus — into the 21st century, when in 2002 Álvaro Uribe ran, and won, the presidential race as an independent.

You may read One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its endlessly recurring names (Arcadio, Aureliano, Remedios) and a fear/lure of incest cascading down the Buendía generations, as an allegory for the circular deadlock of land-based conflict without change that has gripped its author’s homeland. Bids to break out of this tropical ice age (and ice features in the novel’s celebrated opening lines) repeatedly get caught in the dismal rounds of rebellion and reaction. Each turn leaves near-identical “jefes” in charge. In the book’s second half, a short-lived “banana boom” around Macondo briefly promises progress and openness, but culminates in a massacre of 3,000 striking workers. As so often in this book, apparently “magical” hyperbole merely paints Colombian reality in starker hues. In 1928, soldiers and agents of the United Fruit Company did indeed slaughter crowds of protesting pickers and packers, although the numbers are still disputed. In the novel, denial and oblivion swallow up the atrocity — just as happened in reality. “You must have been dreaming,” officers tell the bereaved relatives. “Nothing has happened in Macondo. Nothing has ever happened and nothing will ever happen. This is a happy town.”

In history, as in fiction, efforts to break free from the “solitude” of repetitive injustice may merely spin the wheel one more time. Behind García Márquez’s composition of the book lay grim events outside his century-long plot. In 1948, the assassination in Bogotá of the idealistic reformer Jorge Eliécer Gaitán — Colombia’s JFK, to the many who still revere his memory — triggered the blood-letting known as “La Violencia”. This especially horrific round of revolt and repression racked up another six-figure toll of fatalities over the next decade.

“Liberal” insurgencies against dominant Conservative or military regimes routinely decayed into lawless banditry that shored up the power of local warlords. You could frame Escobar himself (two decades later) as just another Colombian robber prince who enlisted and abused the hunger and anger of the poor. FARC itself, the “revolutionary armed forces of Colombia” that finally made peace with the state in 2016, emerged from the generalised mayhem of La Violencia. Published in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude ranks not just as a florid heightening of bitter history but a chronicle of future deaths foretold.

How to break Colombia’s — and Latin America’s — fatal cycle of conflicts among conjoined elites that ruin and deplete the unpropertied poor? In the novel, the gypsy Melquíades and his travelling fair holds out the hope of liberation through enchanted technology: first magnets, maps and telescopes then, at the dawn of a new age, phonographs, railways and automobiles. Yet such advances may simply open the road to foreign plunder, as the coming of the gringo banana barons shows. For García Márquez himself, faith in the socialist society dreamed of by his chum Fidel Castro for a while appealed — though it’s hard to imagine his literary gifts flourishing for long in Castro’s Cuba. To his fellow-novelist and friend-turned-enemy Mario Vargas Llosa, a classic “English” liberalism allied to free-market economics offered the way out: it almost took him to the presidency of Peru in 1990. Those parallel avenues out of “solitude” continue to tempt. Look at the stark bifurcation today between Lula’s Brazil and Milei’s Argentina for proof of their persistence.

Meanwhile, the land endures; its forests, plains, marshes and mountains are sumptuously captured by Netflix’s cinematography. Its unfair portioning and selective exploitation remain the source of so much disorder around the Southern Cone, from narcotic networks to rural uprisings and military, or paramilitary, atrocities. García Márquez was far from the first or only major Colombian author to transform his nation’s everyday evils into epic tales. Today, writers such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez (The Informers, The Shape of the Ruins) and Evelio Rosero (The Armies, Feast of the Innocents) trace the long shadows of old violence and injustice as they fall on present pains.

As Macondo rises, declines and eventually subsides into the fertile earth as “a bog of rotting roots”, García Márquez portrays no exotic dreamland but a version of the history his people lived. How to escape the corruption and inertia bred by parasitic elites and their “machine of repetition”? That remains a question not just for Colombians, but for every country where politics-as-usual breeds paralysis interrupted by outbursts of messy rage. Splendidly served by the Netflix lens, those steamy swamps, jungle thickets and misty peaks belong not to a fairy-tale realm but a place whose patterns of property and power, of commerce and crime, stand not so very distant from our own. Which is why, perhaps, my hand mangled in a faraway rainforest pool could find such prompt and skilful care.

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Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor, and literary and music critic, and author recently of The 100 Best Novels in Translation.

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