 Literary critic Roberto González Echevarría argues that the dictator novel is “ the most clearly indigenous thematic tradition in Latin American literature ”, and traces the development of this theme from “ as far back as Bernal Díaz del Castillo ’ s and Francisco López de Gómara ’ s accounts of Cortés ’ s conquest of Mexico. ” The nineteenth century saw significant literary reflections on political power, though on the whole the dictator novel is associated with the Latin American Boom, a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. For critic Gerald Martin, the dictator novel marks the end of the Boom and even (as he says of Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme) “ the end of an entire era in Latin American history, the era which had stretched from Sarmiento's Facundo in 1845. " In the 1970s, many dictator novels focused on the figure “ of the aging dictator, prey to the boredom of a limitless power he is on the verge of losing. ”
