Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fantastical masterpiece of magic realism, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967),
chronicles the long, colorful, violent, repetitive and ultimately tragic history of the Buendia family of the mythical town of Macondo, an imaginary locale apparently based on Garcia Marquez's own small home town of Aracataca, Colombia. This paper suggests ways in which
violence and suppression of memory within the story serve to create
future cycles of violence (and future loss of memory), thereby symbolically illustrating the maxim that those (like the Buendias) who forget history shall be doomed to repeat it. The paper also suggests that the novel in many ways parallels the history of the Latin American nation of Colombia itself, and, in a broader sense, of all Latin American nations, especially in the sense of the modern domination of them by outside forces.