Classic dictator novels El Señor Presidente is a 1946 novel by Guatemalan Nobel Prize-winning writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias. Although the novel does not explicitly identify its setting as early twentieth-century Guatemala, Asturias was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera for his title character. This novel explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society, and is an overtly political novel in which Asturias denounces Latin American dictators. By keeping time and place ambiguous, Asturias's novel represents a break from former narratives, which until this point had been judged on how adequately they reflected reality. Asturias's distinctive use of dream imagery, onomatopoeia, simile, and repetition, combined with a discontinuous structure consisting of abrupt changes of style and viewpoint, sprang from surrealist and ultraist influences. Furthermore, it made early use of a literary technique that would come to be known as magic realism. The President went on to influence a generation of Latin American authors, becoming an early example of the "new novel" and a precursor to the Latin American literary boom. Jorge Zalamea, El gran Burundún Burundá ha Muerto ("The Great Burundún Burundá is Dead", 1951). For Keefe Ugalde, "El gran Burundún Burundá ... occupies an important midway point in the evolution of the dictator novel" and Peter Neissa emphasizes "its cultural and political importance and subsequent influence on dictator narratives." More broadly, Martin describes this "remarkable Colombian novelette" as seeming to contain "the seeds of García Márquez's mature style." The book describes the (fictional) dictator "Burundún's rise to power, selected events during his regime, and a description of his funeral." It is at this funeral that it is revealed that the body of the dictator is absent, and has somehow been replaced by or transformed into "a great big parrot, a voluminous parrot, an enormous parrot, all swollen, inflated and wrapped in documents, gazettes, mail from abroad, newspapers, reports, annals, broadsheets, almanacs, official bulletins." Enrique Lafourcade's King Ahab's Feast (La Fiesta del rey Acab, 1959) portrays the fictional dictator César Alejandro Carrillo Acab, and opens with what Claude Hulet describes as an "amusingly ironic, tongue-in-cheek note in preface" which declares that "This is a mere work of fiction. ... Indeed, no one is unaware that neither the United Nations, nor the Organization of American States, permits the continued existence of regimes like the one that serves as pretext to this novel." As Hulet observes, Lafourcade's "powerful and razor sharp satire" is directed "presumably against the Trujillo regime and others like it."Hulet, p. 67 Alejo Carpentier's, Reasons of State (El recurso del método, 1974), is a synthesis of several historical figures from Latin American, most prominently Gerardo Machado, dictator of Cuba. This fictional character, in his bid to be refined, spends half of his life in Europe, perhaps reminiscent of Sarmiento's dichotomy of civilization and barbarism. This novel is tragicomic in nature, the only novel by Carpentier to combine elements of both tragedy and comedy. Augusto Roa Bastos' s I, the Supreme (Yo, el Supremo, 1974) is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. However, it is also a historical account, making use of real documents and accounts of people who knew Francia. Roa's portrayal of a despot in Latin American fiction is distinguished "not only by the quantity of detail lavished on him, but by his remarkable capacity to seem at one moment a person, at another an embodiment of contradictory elements not usually associated with a single person, let alone a powerful tyrant". Its title was derived from the fact that Francia referred to himself as "El Supremo" or "the Supreme". Making use of non-traditional writing techniques, the novel is composed of separate discourses with their own distinctive styles, and the demarcation between them is often blurred. Gerald Martin claims that Roa Bastos's novel "was more immediately and unanimously acclaimed than any novel since One Hundred Years of Solitude, and critics seemed to suspect that its strictly historical importance might be even greater than that of García Márquez's fabulously successful creation." Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca, 1975) details the life of an eternal dictator, " el macho ", a fictional character who lives to be over 200 years old. The book is divided into six sections, each retelling the same story of the infinite power held by the archetypal Caribbean tyrant. Márquez based his fictional dictator on a variety of real-life autocrats, including Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of his Colombian homeland, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain (the novel was written in Barcelona), and Venezuela's Juan Vicente Gómez. One of the key characters of the novel is the Indian General Saturno Santos, who devotes himself to "inscrutable service to the patriarch." In this novel, García Márquez proposes an interesting contradiction: "that Latin America's patriarchs owe their most intimate support to their victims of longest standing; and that America's revolution is inconceivable without the Indian". Illustrating the importance of the Indian in Latin America is all the more prudent given that García Márquez's home country, Colombia, is distinguished as literarily not recognizing the Indian populations which are very much alive today. Luisa Valenzuela's The Lizard's Tail (Cola de lagartija, 1983) is set in the period after Juan Perón's return to Argentina in 1973, when the Argentine president was heavily influenced by the sinister éminence grise José López Rega. The novel deals specifically with themes surrounding the nature of male-female relationships during this regime of military oppression. The novel's title is a reference to an instrument of torture that was invented in the Southern Cone. Tomás Eloy Martínez's The Perón Novel (La novela de Perón, 1985) uses a mixture of historical facts, fiction, and documents to retell the life story of Juan Domingo Perón, "dramatizing the rivalries within the ranks of Peronism". This allowed the author to construct an intimate portrait of Perón rather than an historically accurate one. This method of analyzing Perón, that delves into his early history and family upbringing to theorize the motivation for his actions later in life, can be linked to Sarmiento's similar analyses of Facundo, and through him, Rosas. Gabriel García Márquez's The General in His Labyrinth (El general en su laberinto, 1989) is a fictionalized account of the last days in the life of Simón Bolívar. Bolívar, also known as the Great Liberator, freed from Spanish rule the territory that would subsequently become Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. However the character of the General is not portrayed as the glorious hero that traditional history has presented; instead García Márquez develops a pathetic protagonist, a prematurely aged man who is physically ill and mentally exhausted. Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo, 2000) recounts with "gruesome detail and dramatic intensity" the last days of the tyrant and dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, as he becomes infuriated that, despite being a long-standing ally of the United States because of his anti-communist stance, he is no longer in favour with the U.S. administration who have withdrawn their backing on discovering his extensive human rights violations. Following several interwoven storylines—those of Trujillo, his assassins, and the daughter of a man who once served in Trujillo's inner circle of advisers, Urania Cabral—this novel reveals both the political and social environment in the Dominican Republic, past and present. The story opens and closes with Urania's story, effectively framing the narrative in terms of remembering and understanding the past and its legacy for the present.
Classic dictator novels El Señor Presidente is a 1946 novel by Guatemalan Nobel Prize-winning writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias. Although the novel does not explicitly identify its setting as early twentieth-century Guatemala, Asturias was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera for his title character. This novel explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society, and is an overtly political novel in which Asturias denounces Latin American dictators. By keeping time and place ambiguous, Asturias's novel represents a break from former narratives, which until this point had been judged on how adequately they reflected reality. Asturias's distinctive use of dream imagery, onomatopoeia, simile, and repetition, combined with a discontinuous structure consisting of abrupt changes of style and viewpoint, sprang from surrealist and ultraist influences. Furthermore, it made early use of a literary technique that would come to be known as magic realism. The President went on to influence a generation of Latin American authors, becoming an early example of the "new novel" and a precursor to the Latin American literary boom. Jorge Zalamea, El gran Burundún Burundá ha Muerto ("The Great Burundún Burundá is Dead", 1951). For Keefe Ugalde, "El gran Burundún Burundá ... occupies an important midway point in the evolution of the dictator novel" and Peter Neissa emphasizes "its cultural and political importance and subsequent influence on dictator narratives." More broadly, Martin describes this "remarkable Colombian novelette" as seeming to contain "the seeds of García Márquez's mature style." The book describes the (fictional) dictator "Burundún's rise to power, selected events during his regime, and a description of his funeral." It is at this funeral that it is revealed that the body of the dictator is absent, and has somehow been replaced by or transformed into "a great big parrot, a voluminous parrot, an enormous parrot, all swollen, inflated and wrapped in documents, gazettes, mail from abroad, newspapers, reports, annals, broadsheets, almanacs, official bulletins." Enrique Lafourcade's King Ahab's Feast (La Fiesta del rey Acab, 1959) portrays the fictional dictator César Alejandro Carrillo Acab, and opens with what Claude Hulet describes as an "amusingly ironic, tongue-in-cheek note in preface" which declares that "This is a mere work of fiction. ... Indeed, no one is unaware that neither the United Nations, nor the Organization of American States, permits the continued existence of regimes like the one that serves as pretext to this novel." As Hulet observes, Lafourcade's "powerful and razor sharp satire" is directed "presumably against the Trujillo regime and others like it."Hulet, p. 67 Alejo Carpentier's, Reasons of State (El recurso del método, 1974), is a synthesis of several historical figures from Latin American, most prominently Gerardo Machado, dictator of Cuba. This fictional character, in his bid to be refined, spends half of his life in Europe, perhaps reminiscent of Sarmiento's dichotomy of civilization and barbarism. This novel is tragicomic in nature, the only novel by Carpentier to combine elements of both tragedy and comedy. Augusto Roa Bastos' I, the Supreme (Yo, el Supremo, 1974) is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. However, it 's also a historical account, making use of real documents and accounts of people who knew Francia. Roa's portrayal of a despot in Latin American fiction is distinguished "not only by the quantity of detail lavished on him, but by his remarkable capacity to seem at one moment a person, at another an embodiment of contradictory elements not usually associated with a single person, let alone a powerful tyrant". Its title was derived from the fact that Francia referred to himself as "El Supremo" or "the Supreme". Making use of non-traditional writing techniques, the novel is composed of separate discourses with their own distinctive styles, and the demarcation between them is often blurred. Gerald Martin claims that Roa Bastos's novel "was more immediately and unanimously acclaimed than any novel since One Hundred Years of Solitude, and critics seemed to suspect that its strictly historical importance might be even greater than that of García Márquez's fabulously successful creation." Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca, 1975) details the life of an eternal dictator, " El Macho ", a fictional character who lives to be over 200 years old. The book is divided into six sections, each retelling the same story of the infinite power held by the archetypal Caribbean tyrant. Márquez based his fictional dictator on a variety of real-life autocrats, including Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of his Colombian homeland, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain (the novel was written in Barcelona), and Venezuela's Juan Vicente Gómez. One of the key characters of the novel is the Indian General Saturno Santos, who devotes himself to "inscrutable service to the patriarch." In this novel, García Márquez proposes an interesting contradiction: "that Latin America's patriarchs owe their most intimate support to their victims of longest standing; and that America's revolution is inconceivable without the Indian". Illustrating the importance of the Indian in Latin America is all the more prudent given that García Márquez's home country, Colombia, is distinguished as literarily not recognizing the Indian populations which are very much alive today. Luisa Valenzuela's The Lizard's Tail (Cola de lagartija, 1983) is set in the period after Juan Perón's return to Argentina in 1973, when the Argentine president was heavily influenced by the sinister éminence grise José López Rega. The novel deals specifically with themes surrounding the nature of male-female relationships during this regime of military oppression. The novel's title is a reference to an instrument of torture that was invented in the Southern Cone. Tomás Eloy Martínez's The Perón Novel (La novela de Perón, 1985) uses a mixture of historical facts, fiction, and documents to retell the life story of Juan Domingo Perón, "dramatizing the rivalries within the ranks of Peronism". This allowed the author to construct an intimate portrait of Perón rather than an historically accurate one. This method of analyzing Perón, that delves into his early history and family upbringing to theorize the motivation for his actions later in life, can be linked to Sarmiento's similar analyses of Facundo, and through him, Rosas. Gabriel García Márquez's The General in His Labyrinth (El general en su laberinto, 1989) is a fictionalized account of the last days in the life of Simón Bolívar. Bolívar, also known as the Great Liberator, freed from Spanish rule the territory that would subsequently become Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. However the character of the General is not portrayed as the glorious hero that traditional history has presented; instead García Márquez develops a pathetic protagonist, a prematurely aged man who is physically ill and mentally exhausted. Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo, 2000) recounts with "gruesome detail and dramatic intensity" the last days of the tyrant and dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo . Llosa describes Trujillo's weakening dominance over the Dominican Republic, as he becomes infuriated that, despite being a long-standing ally of the United States because of his anti-communist stance, he is no longer in favour with the U.S. administration who have withdrawn their backing after discovering his extensive human rights violations. Following several interwoven storylines—those of Trujillo, his assassins, and the daughter of a man who once served in Trujillo's inner circle of advisers, Urania Cabral—this novel reveals both the political and social environment in the Dominican Republic, past and present. The story opens and closes with Urania's story, effectively framing the narrative in terms of remembering and understanding the past and its legacy for the present.
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