When the banana company arrived, however, the local functionaries were replaced by dictatorial foreigners whom Mr. Brown brought to live in the electrified chicken yard so that they could enjoy, as he explained it, the dignity that their status warranted and so that they would not suffer from the heat and the mosquitoes and the countless discomforts and privations of the town. The old policemen were replaced by hired assassins with machetes. During that time a brother of the forgotten Colonel Magnifico Visbal was taking his seven-year-old grandson to get a soft drink at one of the pushcarts on the square and because the child accidentally bumped into a corporal of police and spilled the drink on his uniform, the barbarian cut him to pieces with his machete, and with one stroke he cut off the head of the grandfather as he tried to stop him. The whole town saw the decapitated man pass by as a group of men carried him to his house, with a woman dragging the head along by it's hair, and the bloody sack with the pieces of the child.

This is only the first of several atrocities committed by "the banana company" in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The banana company, I suspect, is a thinly disguised version of United Fruit, which ran Guatemala for many years. But there's no shortage of American-owned companies causing havoc in Latin America over the past hundred years, and Maquez is probably writing about all of them.

America's actions in Latin America, from Woodrow Wilson on, are a blight on our history. We first sent troops to Argentina in 1890. We put down a black workers revolt on Hati in 1891. We sized Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898; we still blockade one and hold the other. Truman University has compiled a history of our interventions, and it's chalk full of words rebellions surprised, elected leaders overthrown, dictators propped up, and civilians massacred. In the last century, the list of years when we did _not_ invade one country or another is shorter than the list of years we did. The was not a single year when we did not have troops engaged in operations somewhere on that continent.

Of course, our first and most effective invasion of a Central American nation was the 1846 Mexican War. President Polk's land grab...

Sorry. History lesson mode _off_. I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on how much our actions do affect other people in the world.

Post a Comment