When the Banana Company arrives in Macondo, the jungle town in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” it brings with it first modernity and then doom. “Endowed with means that had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times,” García Márquez writes, the company “changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests and moved the river from where it had always been.” It imported “dictatorial foreigners” and “hired assassins with machetes” to run the town; it unleashed a “wave of bullets” on striking workers in the plaza. When the Banana Company leaves, Macondo is “in ruins.”