One of the most notable works of the dictator novel genre, El Señor Presidente developed from an earlier Asturias short story, written to protest social injustice in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in the author's home town.

Although El Señor Presidente does not explicitly identify its setting as early twentieth-century Guatemala, the novel's title character was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera.

His use of dream imagery, onomatopoeia, simile, and repetition of particular phrases, combined with a discontinuous structure, which consists of abrupt changes of style and viewpoint, springs from surrealist and ultraist influences.

The themes of Asturias's novel, such as the inability to tell reality apart from dreams, the power of the written word in the hands of authorities, and the alienation produced by tyranny, center around the experience of living under a dictatorship.

The US Government, in particular the CIA, attempted to suppress the book through numerous front organisations, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom[1] In a 1970 interview, the German critic Gunter W. Lorenz asked Miguel Ángel Asturias why he began to write and the novelist replied: Yes, at 10:25 pm on the 25th of December in 1917, an earthquake destroyed my city.

[2]This experience, at the age of 18, led Asturias to write "Los mendigos políticos" ("The Political Beggars"), an unpublished short story that would later develop into his first novel, El Señor Presidente.

While living in France, he continued to work on the book and also associated with members of the Surrealist movement as well as fellow future Latin American writers such as Arturo Uslar Pietri and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier.

For example, as critic Jack Himelblau explains, "Asturias [...] wrote his novel primarily with his compatriots in mind, who, undoubtedly, had lived through the tyranny of Estrada Cabrera from 1898 to 1920.

[6] Asturias integrated and reworked incidents from Estrada Cabrera's dictatorship into the novel, such as the torture of a political adversary, who had been tricked "into believing that his innocent wife had been unfaithful to him".

[8] In the ensuing trial, Asturias served as a legal secretary and so, as Gregory Rabassa's biographical sketch points out, he had the opportunity to base his own fictional leader—the President—on his observations of the disgraced Guatemalan dictator.

Asturias claims that Jorge Ubico y Castañeda, the dictator of Guatemala from 1931 to 1944, "prohibited its publication because his predecessor, Estrada Cabrera, was my Señor Presidente which meant that the book posed a danger to him as well".

Eventually relieved of charges by the President, Fedina de Rodas is purchased by a brothel, and when it is discovered that she is holding her dead baby in her arms, she is placed in a hospital.

[23] Carvajal's wife runs all over town, visiting the President and influential figures such as the Judge Advocate, begging for her husband's release because she is left in the dark regarding what has happened to him.

[27] Literary scholar Kevin Bauman notes that readers are not let into the mind of the President; instead his appearance is "continually re-evaluated, re-defined, and, ultimately, re-constructed according to his perception by others, similar to Asturias's own novelistic (re)vision of Estrada Cabrera's regime".

She is the very picture of the adolescent who has been denied even the smallest margin of liberty, as critic Callan observes: "when Camila was thought to be dying a priest came to administer the sacrament of Penance.

[34] Critic John Walker argues that, by "choosing the Idiot as a representative of the innocent, the a-political, who suffer the abuses of a totalitarian regime [...] Asturias shows how dictatorship corrupts people and destroys their values to the extent that compassion for one's companion in distress ceases to exist.

[36] The novel includes a host of minor characters who, in Richard Franklin's words, "grope for the means to assert the validity of self and to anchor this individuality in a nightmare which constantly faces it with black nothingness".

[37] These characters range from Colonel José Parrales Sonriente, otherwise known as the "man with the little mule",[16] whose murder at the Cathedral Porch opens the novel, to a series of beggars, prisoners, minor officials, relatives, flatterers, barkeepers and prostitutes.

[38] According to scholar Luis Leal, in the genre of magic realism, "the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts.

Because Asturias spent a decade writing the novel, the delay in its publication, and the fact that it never names its eponymous President, many scholars have noted that it could equally be taken to apply to the subsequent regime of Jorge Ubico.

Assistant Professor of Spanish at Walsh University, Jorge J Barrueto, argues that El Señor Presidente has been heralded as epitomizing dictatorship, "a phenomenon perceived to be a natural and inherent trait in the region".

[47] With its stylized magic realism, Asturias's El Señor Presidente broke from this realist paradigm—it is an avant-garde novel that laid the foundation for many other authors to develop what is now a broad and extensive genre.

[49] Literary scholar Gabriele Eckart gives as an excellent example of Asturias's surrealist style his portrayal of The Zany's psychic processes in which "language sometimes breaks apart into incomprehensible sounds".

[51] Himelblau also highlights how El Señor Presidente projects "reality in relative, fluid terms—that is it allows its characters to disclose the temporal setting of the novel's fictional events".

In this regard, then, Himelblau notes that El Señor Presidente "is also, as far as we are aware, the first novel in Spanish America that seeks to render fictional reality of time as a function of point of view".

Latin American writer and critic Ariel Dorfman notes that the mixing of dream and reality is partly a result of Asturias's frequent use of figurative language.

Furthermore, the novel is set in a country similar to Guatemala and includes references to Maya gods (such as in the chapter "Tohil's Dance") but no direct statement by any character confirms this.

Mostly this was from other left-wing writers and intellectuals, who recognized and praised both its stylistic innovation and its political commitment, if sometimes with the complaint that the novel was overly influenced by European modernism.

The passionate vigour with which Asturias evokes the terror and distrust which poisoned the social atmosphere of the time makes his work a challenge and an invaluable aesthetic gesture.

RCTV lost its terrestrial broadcasting rights in mid-2007 when the government of Hugo Chávez (who was democratically elected, but accused by opponents of harboring dictatorial tendencies) did not renew the network's license.