How Many Will Die When Netflix Shoots One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Novelists can be inspired by the past but can also create a past of their own to influence others, painting vast injustices with magical words and stories.

In the news recently: “‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Is Coming to Netflix” (New York Times link). Published in 1967, the book is “considered a masterpiece of Latin American literature… Since its publication, the book has sold an estimated 50 million copies and has been translated into 46 languages.”

Netflix will be presenting to millions this “story of one hundred years that ‘shaped us as a continent,’ Ramos said, ‘through  dictatorships, through births of new countries, through colonialism’.”

The Netflix production will face the challenge of whether to stay true to the novel or to actual history, especially with the final “massacre” of banana workers at the behest of United Fruit. A Google search brings up first this quote from a 2014 article in The Nation:

The climax of One Hundred Years of Solitude is famously based on a true historical event that took place shortly after García Márquez’s birth: in 1928, in the Magdalena banana zone on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, not far from where the author was born, the Colombian military opened fire on striking United Fruit Company plantation workers, killing an unknown number.

The Nation claims this novel presaged a future of repression across Latin American by corporations and right-wing dictators: “García Márquez so uncannily anticipates in One Hundred Years. ‘There must have been three thousand of them,’ says the novel’s lone survivor of the banana massacre, referring to the murdered strikers. ‘There haven’t been any dead here,’ he’s told.”

So for future Netflix viewers as with past One Hundred Years of Solitude readers, is there a less magical past for banana workers in Central and South America? Was banana production a world of exploitation and repression for Latin Americans? Or was the banana business more a world of entrepreneurship and opportunity providing livelihoods for millions?

The view of this past matters for the present. When young people are taught that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was successful in creating jobs and helping the U.S. out of the Great Depression, they are more likely to have positive views of proposed new New Deals, green or otherwise.

When young people are taught that poverty and suffering today in Honduras and Guatemala were caused in part by banana industry exploitation and repression of workers, past and present, they are more likely to support socialist foreign aid and diplomatic policies toward Latin American leaders.

Gabriel García Márquez was friends with Fidel Castro and “he never gave in to demands to denounce Castro’s  authoritarianism.” According to The Nation, it was good for Gabriel García Márquez to refuse to perform “credentialing rituals…”

In the magical world of Latin American novels and history there is a curious mystery: how many strikers were actually murdered in the military attack that the novel’s massacre was based on? The novelist can summon their own world with their own systems of good and evil, exploitation and redemption. Readers and viewers can be influenced by historical fiction, whether magical or realist.

One Hundred Years of Remembrance, (Harvard Political Review, June 16, 2015) tells the massacre story in its second paragraph:

The train arrives as promised, but no general steps out. Instead, an official reads from a decree that narrowly defines the existence of the crowd: “a bunch of hoodlums.” He gives the crowd five minutes to disperse. No one moves. When the time has expired, a volley of gunfire erupts from all corners of the square, and all but one of the three thousand men, women, and children are gunned down. In the eerie silence that follows the massacre, their bodies are piled onto trains and dumped into the sea. Any trace of their existence is wiped clean.

For the historical event, there were protests and a general did arrive to declare the protesting workers “cuadrilla de malhechores,” however “we do not know how many of those workers died; the numbers range from nine, as official José Gregorio Guerrero reported, to as many as two thousand, as liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán reported.”

In Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel Garcia  Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Journal of Latin American Studies, May, 1998), a 1990 television interview with Gabriel García Márquez is discussed. A Colombian journalist asks about the “masacre de las bananeras” and Gabriel García Márquez replies that only a handful of people died during the strike. Nothing like the 3,000 in his novel.

So maybe the Netflix screenwriters will show a massacre in as readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude experienced it, and then the scene will dissolve to the television interview with Gabriel García Márquez explaining that though few protesting workers were actually killed, his novel needed a much bigger massacre to be forgotten, in order to show the evils of foreign capital and the banana industry.

It’s sad that a story of the massacre that didn’t happen is imprinted fifty million times in copies of A Hundred Year of Solitude creating a false memory in the minds of millions, with a lesson on the evils of foreign corporations and capitalism. Yet in China today, the Communist Party has erased their true history of ten of millions who perished when their visionary communist leader, Chairman Mao, forced socialist agricultural reforms across China. (See China’s Socialist God)

There are many books listed on Amazon, critical of banana capitalism in Central and South American. Less negative is Bananas and Business (NYU Press, 2005). In a review of Bananas and Business (Independent Review, Winter, 2006), the story of the United Fruit company attack is discussed:

The massacre of UFCO laborers is important because this infamous event forms part of the company’s “terrible reputation” (p. 3): Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez tells the story in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, referring to three thousand deaths, a deliberate inflation of the number of victims to make the story more spectacular: he later admitted that this number cannot be taken seriously. “In his [García Márquez’s] words, ‘the legend has been taken as history'” (p. 3). In fact, as Bucheli explains exhaustively, there was no revolutionary movement in Magdalena in 1928, and the number of victims was most likely no more than fourteen. The fact that García Márquez’s imaginative work has had so much influence on scholars is, I think, in part the reason for the intellectual bias against UFCO that prevails in Latin America.