In contrast to her husband, Ursula is tenacious and practical. She lives very long that she loses count of her age, and spends her life looking after the family line. Female members of the family aren’t like her; Amaranta, her daughter, is bitter and never marries, whereas her great granddaughter, Remedios the Beauty is lost in a world of her own, and thus doesn’t abide by basic civil rules and beliefs. She is not a creature of this world, and is eventually taken up to the sky. And finally, her great great-granddaughters, Renata Remedios (Meme) and Amaranta Ursula, have her energy, but not her common sense. This very failure in possessing the strength of their ancestors’ causes the village to die, as modernity storms Macondo.
After being seduced by Pilar Ternara, Jose Arcadio gets her pregnant but goes with the gypsies after he falls in love with one of their girls. He marries Rebeca when he goes back to Macondo and dies mysteriously shortly after. His son by Pilar, Arcadio, becomes a ruthless dictator and rules Macondo after Colonel Aureliano goes to war. He marries Santa Sofia de la Piedad and has Remedios the Beauty, Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo, who are twins. He gets killed. Colonel Aureliano Buendia marries a girl who had just reached puberty; Remedios Mascote, and she dies. He has a boy by Pilar Ternara, Aureliano Jose. During the war women go to him (Colonel Aureliano) so he can impregnate them, hence their boys can inherit his genes. He has 17 Aurelianos by 17 different women. Aureliano Jose has an intimate relationship with his Aunt, Amaranta, but then goes with the rebels and is shot dead.
After the war, white capitalists; the Americans, settle in Macondo and set up a banana plantation that exploits the people of the village. They seem to have god-like powers to change seasons and the water flow. The workers of the banana plantation organize a strike and so they are massacred by the government, who takes sides with the capitalists. Everyone in Macondo denies the massacre thereafter. Jose Arcadio Segundo is a major organizer and could not face the world afterwards. He is timid at first, and is very much interested in being in solitude, as he is also interested in Cock Fights.
Aureliano Segundo indulges in an extravagant lifestyle, and keeps giving enormous parties. He marries Fernanda del Carpio, who happens to be of a Royal family in a decaying town and becomes a very strict mother. He has an extended affair with his dedicated mistress, Petra Cotes. Aureliano Segundo and Fernanda have three children; Renata Remedios (Meme), Jose Arcadio II and Amaranta Ursula. Renata Remedios, who is friends with her father, falls in love with a Mechanic, and gets pregnant to go to a convent and spend the rest of her life out of Macondo without speaking. Her son is sent to Fernanda, but she has a hard time accepting him, and he is christened Aureliano. The mechanic; Muricio Bibliona is shot when he tries to visit Renata Remedios in her bathroom one last time. Jose Arcadio, son of Aureliano Segundo, is sent away to become Pope. Amaranta Ursula is sent to Brussels to finish her studies. She goes back to Macondo with her older husband, Gaston.
The massacre brings devastation, rain for almost 5 years, wiping out the banana plantation and leaving Macondo in desperation (cleansing of the village). Then the town begins to regress. Both, the twin brothers, die at the same time and are buried but put in one another’s grave by mistake.
Concerning the Buendias, the rain signifies the speed of their spiral downfall. The town is abandoned now, and the last two members of the family get involved in an incestuous relationship (aunt: Amaranta Ursula and nephew: Aureliano Babilonia). They bring a child that has a pig tail whom they name Aureliano. (There’s a reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s sons; Rodrigo and Gonzalo. Amaranta Ursula ponders naming her future sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo).
At the end of the story, it is revealed that the history of the Buendias is already written (by Melquiades, the mysterious gypsy leader, in Sanskrit, who could also be the narrator of the story), and revealed by Aureliano Babilonia. As he is deciphering the text, the storm takes away the roof of the house. It then is revealed to him that Macondo will be wiped out as soon as he finishes reading, that Macondo’s existence is predestined, and that they will never have a second chance.