Banana Plantation Massacre:

Understanding through McDonaldization and Blind Obedience

Literature and Society
Talandron, Daryl R.
Hoodlums.

Rejected bananas.

Blood.

Murder. Train.

Corpses.

Sea.

Forgotten. Massacre.
Three-thousand four hundred eighty lives were spared at the expense of
the riches of the Banana Plantation Company. Not just murder but an
absolute massacre took place in Macondo. However, the possibility of it being
envisioned

wouldnt

be

possible

if

not

for

two

sociological

construct,

Mcdonaldization and Obedience to Authority.

To us, it may be very obscene to discuss the Banana Plantation Massacre in
Macondo in a context of a famous fast food chain, but the possibility of it being
carried out in a pool of people would be unthinkable if not for McDonaldization.
According to Webers work on The McDonalization of Society, Mcdonaldization is a
contemporary paradigm of formal rationality (Ritzer, 2000) which emphasizes on
four dimensions; (1) efficiency,(2) predictability, (3) an emphasis on quantity over
quality and (4) substitution of non-human for human technology. This form of
rationality brings irrationality in rationality (Ritzer, 2000).
The Banana Plantation Massacre in 100 Years of Solitude had all the four
dimensions

of

McDonalidization.

Emphasizing

on

the

first

dimension

of

McDonalidization; efficiency, machine guns that were systematically arranged

around were pre-determined to be a far more efficient method of killing than of the
rifles with fixed bayonet. The machine guns were also emplaced around the square
station and the wired city of the banana plantation was protected by artillery pieces
(p. 303), in order to execute the people in the most economical way without escape.
Moreover, the massacre was carried out at the station which brings us to the second
dimension of McDonalidization; predictability, an easy transportation of the soldiers
in transferring large stacks of dead bodies in the train. It was calculated in the sense

that the authorities planned the massacre in producing of large quantity of corpses
in the shortest of time possible. As described in the novel:
The people in front had already done so, swept down by the wave of
bullets. The survivors, instead of getting down, tried to go back to the small
square, and the panic became a dragons tail as one compact wave ran
against another which was moving in the opposite direction, toward the other
dragons tail In the street across the way, where the machine guns were also
firing without cease. They were penned in. swirling about in a gigantic
whirlwind that little by little was being reduced to its epicentre as the edges
were systematically being cut off all around like an onion being peeled by the
insatiable and methodical shears of the machine guns (p. 307).
Clearly, there was no attempt in grasping the quality and importance of the 3480
lives of the people, workers, women and children of Macondo, who were spilled out
in the hands of the abusive and heartless commands of the Banana Company. This
is the third dimension of McDonalidization; an emphasis on quantity over quality.
Not even a slight clemency was shared to these people. Women, Man, Children,
Workers were just a bunch of hoodlums ready to be thrown in the sea. Not a single
cry was understood in the ears of the killers. As the novel described,
Suddenly, on one side-of the station, a cry of death tore open the
enchantment: Aaaagh, Mother. A seismic voice, a volcanic breath, the roar
of a cataclysm broke out in the center of the crowd with a great potential of
expansion. Jos Arcadio Segundo barely had time to pick up the child while
the mother with the other one was swallowed up by the crowd that swirled
about in panic.
The reluctance to bloodbath the people who attempted to strike against the
Banana Company brought no hesitation to the authorities of General Carlos Cortes
Vargas and his secretary, Major Enrique Garcia Isaza, as well as the soldiers present
during the massacre in wiping out the individuals in the crowd. The absence of
moral consideration during massacre is a factor in the success of the Banana
Plantation Massacre. Whether, it was right or wrong to exterminate the lives of
these people, it was a non-issue for the Banana Company and the soldiers who

designed the mass execution through the proclamation of Decree No.4- the
authority to shoot to kill on the strikers whom they considered bunch of hoodlums.
This brings us to the question, where is the primacy of individual conscience
of those who executed the massacre? Clearly, the massacre wouldnt be imagined
in the presence of General Carlos Cortes Vargas and his secretary, Major Enrique
Garcia Isaza, alone. Is it right to deduce that all the soldiers who carried out the
massacre were all sadist?
Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist attempted to understand such
dilemma of the absence of moral conduct. His study was based on the history of the
Holocaust- mass killing of the Jews in World War II. In years 1933 to 1945, almost 12
million innocent people were systematically slaughtered in the command of German
Nazis yearning for power. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded,
nonsense injurious experiments were organized and numerous genocides were
carried out to produce a significant number of quota corpses per day. After the
Holocaust years, the authorities and soldiers who were accused of these terrible
acts were subjected at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their
defence were often, obedience- they were simply complying with the orders of their
authorities. In the sentiment of Adolf Heichmann, his authority in killing millions of
Jews was just obedience to the issued commands by his superiors in the Nazi
Regime (Aronson,2007).
Not sadism but obedience. The erosion of morality of those involved in the
Banana Plantation Massacre is due to obedience- compliance to authority. In trying
to explain the Banana Plantation Massacre using Milgrams perspective on blind
obedience, let us first explore his preliminary experiment on obedience.
In Milgrams experiment, there are three man groups: (1) the participant who
answered to Milgrams advertisement to join the experiment who will be assigned
as the teacher to read series of paired words, (2) the experimenter who is assigned
to issue orders with poised and crisply, without ever questioning his actions and
lastly, (3) the confederate in his late 40s who will take the role of the learner. The
participants were told that the study will be about the effectivity of punishment in
learning when in fact it was about the obedience of the participant towards the
experimenters prods.

The participant was always assigned as the teacher who will check the
learners ability to recall the pairs of word. Every time the learner fails to do, an
increasing electric shock is administered to the learner, from 15 volts (Slight Shock)
to 450 volts (Danger: Severe Shock), who was in the separate room and did not
actually receive shocks. The participant (teacher) hears the pounding of the wall
and shouts of the learner in separate room. When, the participant (teacher)
attempts to stop administering shocks, the experimenter interferes and tells the
participant (teacher) to continue delivering shocks. Series of prods such as You
have no other choice; you must go on were used to goad them into action. Milgram
hypothesized that the participants (teacher) will stop administering the shocks at
350 volts even in the interference of the experimenter to go on, however out of 40
individuals who served as the teachers, 65% or 26 participants administered the full
450 volts to the presumably helpless learner who continually pounds, cries and
shouts to stop administering the shock. Many studies attempted to replicate
Milgrams study on obedience and found consistent results as of Milgram.
Milgrams

findings

became

very

controversial

and

famous

social

psychological research on obedience (Burger, 2009). The studys results are

provocative and somewhat dismaying in their implications: an astonishingly large
proportion of the population will cause pain to others in obedience to authority
(Aronson, 2007).
The studys propositions have many counterparts in the Banana Plantation
Massacre that happened in Macondo especially the soldiers who were involved in
the massacre under the mandate of the captain.

As the novel described the

entrance of the soldiers;

There were three regiments, whose march in time to a galley drum
made the earth trembles. Their snorting of a many-headed dragon filled the
glow of noon with a pestilential vapour. They were short, stocky, and brute
like. They perspired with the sweat of a horse and had a smell of suntanned
hide and the taciturn and impenetrable perseverance of men from the
uplands. Although it took them over an hour to pass by, one might have
thought that they were only a few squads marching in a circle, because they
were all identical, sons of the same bitch, and with the same stolidity they all
bore the weight of their packs and canteens, the shame of their rifles with

fixed bayonets, and the chancre of blind obedience and a sense of honour (p.
302).
The novel emphasized the importance of the role of the soldiers in successfully
executing the massacre. Going back to the novel, they were the ones, who
assembled themselves around the area with the machine guns; this is an exemplar
of the fourth dimension of McDonaldization : the use of non-humane technology,
such as the utilization of the soldiers in controlling the machine guns in order to
multiply the number deaths.
He (Jose Arcadio Segundo) did not feel well and a salty paste was
beginning to collect on his palate when he noticed that the army had set up
machine-gun emplacements around the small square and that the wired city
of the banana company was protected by artillery pieces (p.303)
And around twelve oclock, the people were waiting in the square by which the
soldiers had already been closed off with rows of machine guns (p. 304). The
soldiers were just waiting, for the captain to declare Decree No. 4- the authority to
shoot to kill. And in a swift of time, 3480 lives were spilled out as the captain gave
the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered all at once (p.305).
But the obedience of the soldiers does not stop from emplacing and
controlling the machine guns, they were also tasked to pile the corpses in the train
like bunches of bananas in the train and again they followed their authorities.
Several hours must have passed since the massacre because the
corpses had the same temperature as a plaster in autumn and the same
consistency of petrified foam that it had, and those who had put them in the
car had had time to pile them up in the same way in which they transported
bunches of bananas. Trying to flee from the nightmare, Jos Arcadio Segundo
dragged himself from one car to another in the direction in which the train
was heading, and in the flashes of light that broke through the wooden slats
as they went through sleeping towns he saw the man corpses, woman
corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected
bananas (p.306-307).
The

obedience

of

the

soldiers

brought

3480

corpses

in

the

train.

Nevertheless, obedience comes with authority. What type of power does the

captain, General Carlos Cortes Vargas and his secretary, Major Enrique Garcia Isaza,
hold among the soldiers? Using Milgrams stand point, these authorities are holding
a legitimate power which refers to the people with the socially sanctioned right to
ask others to obey their orders and the right to command others and the other
others (the soldiers in the context of the Banana Plantation Massacre) are obligated
to obey (Forsyth, 2009).
Moreover, in this context, Milgram argued that the subordinate in the
hierarchical system- the soldiers does not assume personal responsibility to his or
her actions, but allocates the responsibility on the role of the superior, this is the
agentic state (Hewstone, et al, 2012). According to Hamilton and Sanders, the
subordinates or the soldiers in the context of the Banana Plantation Massacre no
longer feel they are in control of their own actions, and so they become willing cogs
in the group machine, carrying out authorities order- to shoot to kill without
considering their implications or questioning their effect.
Obviously, the Banana Plantation Massacre took in Macondo, is the
irrationality of rationality. What was thought to be a rational decision of the Banana
Company in annihilating the lives of the 3480 people to spare their companys
name from the shame of being an abusive company, is a very irrational decision, in
the sense that innocent people, workers, women and children are the expense of
the their wealth. According to Bauman, this is similar to the idea that in
McDonalized world. As quoted:
In ordinary genocide, the murderers and the murdered are separated
from one another. The murderers are planning to do something to their
victims, with the result that the resistance of the potential victims is likely.
However, such resistance is far less likely when the victims are an integral
part of the system (McDonalization) created by perpetrators (Ritzer, 1948,
p.577)
Similarly to the 3480 forfeited lives in Macondo during the Banana Plantation
Massacre, their existence was an integral element of the capitalist system.

system in which, no men, women, children or any people can escape. A beautiful
cage became the horror of those who died, forgotten as they were drowned by train

into the depths of the sea while the perpetrators on the other hand exist as if the
massacre did not took place.

REFERENCES
Aronson, E. (2007). The Social Animal (10th ed.). Macmillan Higher Education.
Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today? 64(1), 11th
ser.
Forsythe, D. (2009). Group Dynamics (5th ed). Wadsworth Cengage Learning
Milgram, S. (2003). The Perils of Obedience. Harper's Magazine Foundation.
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May

29,

2016,

from

https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2012/PSY268/um/35745578/Milgram__perils_of_obediance.pdf
Ritzer, G. (2000). Sociological Theory (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill international editions:
Sociology series.
Hewstone, M, Stroebe, W., & Jonas, K. (2012). An Introduction to Social Psychology
(5th ed.). British Psychological Association and Jon Wiley and Sons.