The novel is the history of the founding, development, and death of a human settlement, Macondo, and of the most important family in that town, the Buendias. Macondo changes from a magical and sheltered place to a town later on, connected to the outside world through the notoriety of Colonel Buendí. Macondo's governments change several times during and after the war. At one point, Arcadio, the cruelest of the Buendís, rules dictatorially and is eventually shot by a firing squad. Later, a mayor is appointed, and his reign is peaceful until another civil uprising has him killed. After his death, the civil war ends with the signing of a peace treaty. The forces of modernity are devastating. Imperialist capitalism reaches Macondo as a banana plantation moves in and exploits the land and the workers, and the Americans who own the plantation settle in. Eventually, angry at the way in which they are treated, the banana workers go on strike and thousands of them are massacred by the army, which sides with the plantation owners. When the bodies have been dumped into the sea, five years of ceaseless rain begin, creating a flood that sends Macondo into its final decline. The city, beaten down from years of violence, begins to slip away, and the Buendí family, too, begins its process of final days.Bottom of Form.
Pioneer settlement is the real beginning of the story of Macondo. It is at first "a village of twenty houses of mud and canes talks on the bank of a diaphanous river The world was so new, many things did not have names, and to mention them one had to point with a finger when the real pioneer families made their first crude homes in the forests of the Americas, they found many things-plants, animals, minerals - they had never seen before and for which they had no names."" Typical of such villages, which were established on the banks of rivers in all the Spanish territories, Macondo is governed by its founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia, as a kind of village chief; Ursula, his wife, cultivates land and the men, also hunt for food.