How does magical realism work in conjunction with expressing controversial ideology?

In his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez listed a series of ludicrous, preposterous events that occurred
in Latin American history.  He maintained that these nonfictional events were no
stranger than his magic realism.  Magic realism, in fact, is easier to believe than
history.

In One Hundred Years of
Solitude, we see how magic realism is a precursor to the more tragic and more
realistic events in the novel.  For instance, in the early days of Macondo, the citizens
suffer from the Insomnia Plague.  One of the major side effects of this plague is that
no one can remember anything.  They can't even remember the names of the most common
animals or objects.  This comic magical incident has a much more tragic parallel in the
Banana Company's massacre of the striking workers.  In this part of the novel, based on
a true event, thousands of strikers are killed while others disappear in the middle of
the night.  No one, though, seems to remember the incident or have any knowledge of it.
 It is as if it never happened. In this way, Garcia Marquez is criticizing Colombian
politics, the censorship of its history, and the exploitation of Latin American
workers.