The stories in No One Writes to the Colonel take place during an era of civil war in Colombia called La Violencia. This time spanned 1948 to 1958 and was marked by extreme violence, "political slaughter" (118), mass abandonment of homes and property, and political turmoil between the liberal and conservative parties. The man who dies at the beginning of No One Writes to the Colonel is the "first death from natural causes" (6) Macondo's seen for many years. Instead, people are more likely to perish by being shot in the back for circulating "clandestine news" (16) like the colonel's son, or "shot in the back in an ambush" (115), as the people of Macondo wish José Montiel would be. As the colonel reads the heavily-censored newspaper, he finds the front page "almost completely covered by paid funeral announcements" (13). Father Anthony Isabel, the ancient priest in Macondo, was present when government agents "shot the workers to death" (133) then shut down the banana plantations.

The colonel in the titular story is a veteran of the Thousand Days' War, an earlier civil war between the liberal and conservative parties that lasted from 1899 to 1902.