No One Writes To The Colonel

Opening withits titular novella, No One Writes to the Colonel is a collection of short stories by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1961. The novella and the other eight stories all take place in small Colombian villages, and Macondo, a Colombian town invented by Márquez. The stories take place during La Violencia, a time of political instability, extreme violence, and civil war between the Conservative and Liberal Parties in Colombia, which spanned from 1948 to 1958.

"No One Writes to the Colonel" tells the story of a nameless veteran in his late-70s who was a colonel in the Thousand Days' War, a Colombian civil war at the turn of the 20th century. The colonel and his wife live in an impoverished village, stricken by repressive political violence and corrupt officials and aristocrats. Though the colonel played a crucial role in the Thousand Days' War decades ago, delivering "the funds for the civil war in two trunks roped to the back of a mule" (26), the colonel has never received his pension checks.

Despite the hopeless situation, each Friday the colonel walks to the post office at the harbor and waits for the checks. The postmaster has a cynical attitude towards the colonel's hopefulness, telling him that, "[n]o one writes to the colonel" (21).