100 Years of Solitude, day 3

In ch. 12 (pages 235-236), while folding sheets with the other women in the garden, Remedios The Beauty simply rose to heaven. She is portrayed as simple, uninterested and uncultured by conventional expectations. She wore simple clothing, shaved her head, all the while becoming more beautiful. Because she is a character who retained perfect innocence while other themes in the book (such as modernization, infidelity, incest and war) drag the main characters into states of despair, violence and hate, it seems that there could be no other way to save her character from the cruel world. Rising to the heavens, while still pure and innocent, Remedios escapes the fate of the other inhabitants of Macando, where Utopia is crumbling.

The episode in ch. 15 is very disturbing to me. After striking, the banana factory workers are invited to the center of town, where they are brutally slaughtered, along with innocent bystanders, by machine guns set up around the square. This episode seems like the culmination of how far Macando had come from its previous peaceful utopian state. Modernization and capitalistic greed caused the slaughter of thousands, in stark contrast to the community portrayed in the early chapters of the novel, where no one had died.

Especially disturbing was the complete denial of the murders, not only by the authorities but also by the townspeople of Macando. The theme of memory loss and amnesia is again evident. I drew a connection to the Holocaust in Europe during WWII. Was it memory loss or desire not to know the truth, like what happened in Europe during WWII? This event in Macando and the inhuman pulling of bodies from the train and dumping them into the ocean are both very reminiscent of the Holocaust in Europe and other genocides throughout history (Armenia, Darfur, Yugoslavia, etc), and also of modern political abuse of power on behalf of the United States in Latin America and worldwide (Vietnam, Panama, Chile, Iraq, etc.).