Dictator novel

The dictator novel genre includes I, the Supreme (1974), by Augusto Roa Bastos, about Dr. Francia of Paraguay, and The Feast of the Goat (2000), by Mario Vargas Llosa, about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.

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.

[5] Other literary treatments of the dictator figure followed, such as Jorge Zalamea's El Gran Burundún Burundá ha muerto, but the genre did not gain impetus until it was reinvented in the political climate of the Cold War, through the Latin American Boom.

[9] The most celebrated novels of this era were Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State (1974), Augusto Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme (1974), and Gabriel García Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975).

[10] Within this group he includes those novelists who took to task authoritarian figures such as Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) and Denzil Romero's La tragedia del Generalísimo (1984).

González Echevarría argues that: Dr. Francia's fear of the pasquinade, his abuse of Policarpo Patiño ..., [and] his constant worry about writing all stem from the fact that he has found and used the power implicit in language itself.

[15] In Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, for example, Trujillo faces serious opposition shortly after losing his material backing from the CIA, previously held for over 32 years in light of his anti-communist leanings.

"[22] Their strong-arm tactics include exiling or imprisoning their opposition, attacking the freedom of the press, creating a centralized government backed by a powerful military force, and assuming complete control over free thought.

[27] The positive side-effect of the collapse of international trade meant local Latin American manufacturers could fill the market niches left vacant by vanishing exports.

[27] In the twentieth century, prominent Latin American dictators have included the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, among others.

"[15] In the first decade of the 21st century, the pendulum swung in the other direction, introducing a series of 'left wing' governments to the region that curtailed civil liberties and set up their own messy version of popular dictatorships through a process that has been called "competitive authoritarianism".

[29] The most well-known of these was President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and came to include other countries in his Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras—and in some ways Argentina, though it was not an official member) in what was called the Pink tide.

[30] In 1967 during a meeting with Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, and Miguel Otero Silva, the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes launched a project consisting of a series of biographies depicting Latin American dictators, which was to be called Los Padres de la Patria (The Fathers of the Fatherland).

[15] After reading Edmund Wilson's portraits of the American Civil War in Patriotic Gore, Fuentes recounts, "Sitting in a pub in Hampstead, we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America.

[32] As M. Mar Langa Pizarro observes, the project was never completed, but it helped inspire a series of novels written by important authors during the Latin American literary boom, such as Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Set in post-colonial Buenos Aires, Amalia was written in two parts and is a semi-autobiographical account of José Mármol that deals with living in Rosas's police state.

"[10] In the early twentieth century, the Spaniard Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Tirano Banderas (1926) acted as a key influence on those authors whose goal was to critique power structures and the status quo.

[56] In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), by Julia Álvarez, tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, whom patriotism transformed from well-behaved Catholic débutantes to political dissenters against the thirty-year dictatorship of the Trujillo régime in the Dominican Republic.

The story of Distant Star (1996), by Roberto Bolaño, begins on 11 September 1973, with the coup d’état by General Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende, the President of Chile.