The Real Massacre Behind ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

For nearly a century, the number of victims of Colombia’s 1928 Banana Massacre has remained one of the most controversial aspects of the tragedy’s legacy. At first, local newspapers reported that nine plantation workers had been killed after a strike escalated against United Fruit Company on December 6, 1928. Confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, by contrast, mentioned hundreds of victims. Months later, there were reports of more than 1,000 fatalities.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, author Gabriel García Márquez described 3,000 bodies in his fictionalized version of the massacre. This event is not only one of the most famous scenes in Latin American literature. It is also one of the darkest episodes in Colombia’s labor history.

Here’s how a strike for labor rights ended in bloodshed.

In November 1928, workers on the banana plantations had gone on strike against the U.S.-based United Fruit Company, which dominated much of banana production and exports in several countries across the region. The workers had nine demands, including replacing subcontractors with direct employment contracts, better housing conditions, a weekly day of rest, compensation for workplace accidents and medical care.

“The workers were not calling for a revolution,” historian Kevin Coleman says. “They were merely insisting that the company obey the laws of Colombia. But the company and the state interpreted this as a radical demand because it demonstrated an ugly truth: A U.S.-based company had become the de facto sovereign power in this region of Colombia.”

As the conflict escalated, the Colombian government sent troops to the region and placed General Carlos Cortés Vargas in charge of military operations. The company and the authorities began identifying and pursuing union leaders and strikers. Company employees even rode the trains to point out workers for arrest, while the government tightened its measures against the strike and its growing movement.

On December 5, the workers received word that the governor of Magdalena had summoned them to the city of Ciénaga to resolve the dispute. Thousands of workers and their families gathered around the railway station, waiting for news about the negotiations. Shortly before midnight, however, Cortés Vargas received a government telegram with Decree Number 1, declaring a state of siege in the banana zone, an emergency measure that expanded military authority.

The military commander then issued his own decree. It ordered the immediate dissolution of any gathering of more than three people and gave soldiers the authority to fire on the crowd if necessary. “No person can move after the military bugle sounds,” the decree stated.

Many of the demonstrators did not leave. According to Cortés Vargas’ own “self-exculpatory account,” as Coleman describes it, at around 1:30 a.m. on December 6, Vargas ordered his armed troops to march toward the railway station. The decrees were read, and the bugle rang out. Then the shooting began.

“The number of people killed on the night of December 6, 1928, and in the months that followed remains controversial,” Coleman says.

In the days following the massacre, the Colombian press reported that the Army had killed only nine people. Oral testimonies collected later put the death toll much higher.

“Popular memory has it that the military disposed of an untold number of dead bodies. But the next morning, the townspeople found only nine corpses lying in the plaza. Nine bodies, one for each of the nine demands that the striking workers had made,” Coleman says.

He adds: “For me, the most convincing evidence comes from the internal cables from the U.S. ambassador in Bogotá to the Department of State in Washington.” In one of them, the ambassador wrote that the number of victims ranged from “500 and 600.” In another communication from 1929, he wrote that he had “the honor to report” the total number of striking workers killed by the Colombian Army “exceeded one thousand.”

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, García Márquez transported the episode to the fictional town of Macondo. The scene centers on José Arcadio Segundo Buendía, who survives the massacre and preserves the memory of what happened, though no one believes him. One of the chapter’s most memorable passages is the train on which he wakes up surrounded by corpses. When he finally reaches Macondo, he calculates that there must have been about 3,000 dead bodies.

But that figure was not intended as a historical fact. In a 1990 interview with British television, García Márquez explained that he had researched the actual number of victims before writing the novel and had found much lower figures, though he had been unable to establish the number with certainty. He decided on 3,000 because it was a number “that would fit within the magically realistic proportions” of the novel he was writing.

“For many readers of the novel, both in Colombia and elsewhere, García Márquez’s fictionalized account is taken as history,” Coleman says.

The difficulty of reconstructing the massacre does not end with the gap between nine and 3,000. For decades, historians had to work with a documentation void caused, in part, by the United Fruit Company itself. The company never allowed researchers access to its records concerning the events. Among the few materials that remained available was a collection of photographs donated to Harvard Business School. Other related photographs surfaced many years later in a company warehouse in Panama.

Politically, the strike and massacre were subsequently used by various political parties to challenge the government and its relationship to United Fruit Company. For Coleman, moreover, the events of 1928 can be understood as “an early moment in the long Cold War.” The state and the U.S. company branded the strike leaders as communists, while the government suspended civil guarantees to restore order.

In 2026, the second season of Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude brings the Banana Massacre to the screen. The fictional account retains García Márquez’s 3,000 dead figure. History, however, still cannot establish a definitive death toll.