The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes tells in The great Latin American novel a meeting he had with Mario Vargas Llosa in London in 1967. The meeting led to the idea of inviting a dozen Latin American authors to write about the inexhaustible gallery of caudillos in the region and to compile the texts in a single volume, The fathers of the homelandsThe project did not prosper, but it did lead to the launch of several books in the 1970s featuring despotic historical presidents, a genre that critics dubbed the “dictator novel”: I the supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos, The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The resource of the method by Alejo Carpentier, Office of the Dead by Arturo Uslar Pietri… The 21st century arrived and the democracies born after the fall of authoritarian regimes proved to be weak: heads of state exchanged their military uniforms for shirts and ties, but the nature of autocratic power remained intact.
Recent publications such as The lives of JM by Martin Caparros, The days of Kirchner by Fito Paez, Memoirs of a son of a bitch by Fernando Vallejo, Tongolele doesn’t know how to dance by Sergio Ramirez, Homeland or death by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Hard times by Mario Vargas Llosa or I was never a first lady Wendy Guerra’s works suggest a renewal of this literary genre. Absolutist leaders are no longer the main characters, but are portrayed through the description of the societies they have built or the anonymous people who surround them.
Venezuelan Hugo Chávez, Nicaraguan Daniel Ortega, Cuban Fidel Castro and Argentine Javier Milei wander through the pages of these books. They are usually the ones who pull the strings with which the protagonists move. The important thing here is to show the effects they have left in the nations where they proclaimed themselves as messianic champions. “We are facing a new phenomenon, and that is that before dictators came to power through violent coups d’état, and now they have the legitimacy of the vote. People elected Milei and Bolsonaro, also Bukele, Maduro and Ortega, but the latter believe that they will be presidents forever. These novels show the effects of their governments on society: repression, corruption, exile, but they do not address the figure as such. It is another branch of the dictatorship novel,” reflects Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez.
Ramírez—who was vice president of Daniel Ortega from 1985 to 1990 before becoming a persecuted dissident—depicts a country held hostage by the Sandinista revolutionary leader and his wife, Rosario Murillo, in Tongolele doesn’t know how to dance (Alfaguara, 2021). The book recounts the 2018 protests in the Central American country, led mainly by students, against a reform of the social security system that reduced pensions. The repression by the Army and shock groups was brutal and left more than 300 dead and thousands more tortured.
Another nation broken by political crisis and polarization is evoked in Homeland or death (Tusquets, 2015), by the Venezuelan Alberto Barrera Tyszka, who narrates the last days of Hugo Chávez’s life. While in I was never a first lady (Alfaguara, 2017), Wendy Guerra portrays the generation of daughters of the Cuban Revolution, helpless and rocking in a stranded utopia in the center of the Caribbean.
The days of Kirchner (Emecé, 2018), the third book by musician Fito Páez, does not include, despite its title, any appearance by former Argentine presidents Néstor Kirchner and his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. What is described is how Kirchnerism shaped a progressive mind in Argentines, mainly in young people, during the time they governed (2003-2015). The protagonist embodies this ideology: “La China was a hopeful young woman who believed that the world had the possibility of being changed under the invisible laws of the search for the common good.” The counterweight on the scale is provided by her boyfriend, El Mono, a Peronist who is not entirely convinced by the Kirchners’ one-way policies, whom he accuses of clientelism and corruption: “Try to know who you are before you go around the world evangelizing idiots. Drown in some doubt sometimes,” he says in one of the parts of the book.
“Each of these texts adapts the tradition of the dictator novel to its own poetics. They have understood that power is no longer exercised alone through a single man, but through an entire oppressive system that transcends these figures. Younger writers are making other types of books, also very political in other senses, but far removed from the patterns of boom novels,” says Jesús Cano Reyes, professor and researcher of Latin American Literature at the Complutense University of Madrid. Although fictionalizing dictators became popular in the second half of the 20th century, the tradition of fictionalizing these stories goes back much further in America, to the 19th century.
The novel Amalia (1851), by José Mármol, and the story The slaughterhouse (1871), by Esteban Echeverría, focused on the figure of Juan Manuel de Rosas, governor of Buenos Aires and creator of the parapolice force La Mazorca. Then came Tyrant Flags (1926), by the Spanish Valle-Inclán, considered by experts to be an important influence on this subgenre. Saint Evita (Alfaguara, 1995) about the influential Argentine first lady Eva Perón, by Tomás Eloy Martínez or The Feast of the Goat (Alfaguara, 2000) by Mario Vargas Llosa, about the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, provided new approaches.
The fact that they involve real people does not mean that they are novels documented in detail, as explained by Paola Celi, a professor of Language and Literature at the University of Piura (Peru): “The historical aspect of these novels does not interrupt the aesthetic flow, but, on the contrary, enriches it.” The resource of the method (Cátedra, 1978), the Cuban Alejo Carpentier invents a protagonist made up of the Venezuelan dictator Guzmán Blanco and the Guatemalan president Manuel Estrada Cabrera to recreate the figure of the enlightened despot who, the day after listening to opera in Paris, crushes popular uprisings. This fusion between fiction and reality is also used by Martín Caparrós in his first digital and interactive novel, The lives of JM (Anfibia Magazine, 2024). Caparrós creates a fictional character, Julio Méndez, to satirize the Argentine president Javier Milei, who defines himself as an “anarcho-capitalist.” He draws on real events from the protagonist’s childhood to explain his “resentful and furious” personality, as the writer and journalist explains.
“I don’t know if there is a new formula [de la novela del dictador]but there is certainly a new type of rulers who are much more ridiculous than dramatic. So, it is logical that the way of approaching them also changes and is not tragic, but farcical,” says Caparrós. In that parodic tone, fluctuating between facts and imagination, is situated Memoirs of a son of a bitch (Alfaguara, 2019), by Colombian Fernando Vallejo. Written in the first person, in the form of a diatribe, it portrays a fictitious president, successor of Juan Manuel Santos Calderón (2010-2018), whom he claims to have shot alongside Álvaro Uribe, César Gaviria and Andrés Pastrana.
The Colombian’s text is the one that comes closest to the classic style of dictator novels, by drawing a detailed portrait of an extravagant character, delving into his authoritarian motivations and contradictions. “These rulers who are intended to be criticized end up being, after so many pages, endearing or beloved by the writer and the reader. Frequently, there is a fascination for this type of megalomaniac characters around whom a mythical halo is created,” says Professor Cano.
The personality of these high-sounding speakers is usually captured from the perspective of other characters, as happens in Homeland or death. The protagonist, Miguel Sanabria, divided between the anti-Chavez extremism of his wife and the Bolivarian radicalism of his brother, says about Chavez, that he came to give a nine-hour conference in 2012: “He was above all a sensation, the origin of charisma that depended on the effusiveness of the masses. The cancer did not seem to affect his pride, his fascination with himself. On the contrary, he seemed increasingly convinced of his own greatness (…) His great triumph was to have consolidated his voice as the axis of society. He had created the talking State. Everyone repeated the words of the Messiah. It was a perfect structure because it was a voluntary and joyful exercise of submission.”
The same exercise of reconstructing populist leaders through the eyes of other characters appears in I was never a first lady. Wendy Guerra tells through her alter ego, Nadia, the daughter of Cuban guerrillas, talks about how since childhood she saw the heroes of the revolution—the Castros, Che, Camilo Cienfuegos—as omnipresent deities. “All my life I have gone to bed and woken up listening to some speech. I cannot forget the voice that haunts me,” she writes in the book. The work narrates the disillusionment of Nadia, who is not sure she lives in the “same Free Territory of America for which they fought, that country in their heads was a wonderful place.” The other pillars of the novel are her mother, Albis, and Celia Sánchez Rey, the latter secretary and supposed lover of Fidel, crucial in the overthrow of Batista in 1959. “It is a story of disillusionment, pain and loss. Today there are many Cuban women imprisoned for protesting in a country where the revolution asked you to revolutionize everything, it was the order,” she tells THE COUNTRY the writer.
Why is the history of Latin America marked by those who cling angrily to the throne? Ramírez suggests: “In Latin America there has never been a crystallization of institutions that is capable of resisting the weight of tyrants, who when they sit on top, crack them. Look at the time it took Bukele to take over all the institutions; in less than a year he already had control of the Assembly, the judges of the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor’s Office, the Police, the Army. This is what has happened in Nicaragua, but in the very long term. The institutions are weak and cannot withstand pressure.” Too many temptations.
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