El Señor Presidente

Miguel Ángel Asturias finished El Señor Presidente in 1933 but could not publish it for thirteen years; the novel appeared in 1946. Asturias, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in Spanish, and the book is one of the earliest landmarks of the tradition of fiction about dictators in Latin America.

Its subject is political tyranny and its effect on an entire society. Although the setting is never named as early twentieth-century Guatemala, the figure of the President was inspired by the long presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, and the character himself barely appears in the narrative; Asturias builds a large cast of other people around him to show what the regime does to them.

The novel grew out of a short story Asturias wrote to protest social injustice after an earthquake destroyed his home town, and it belongs among the first books to use the technique later called magic realism. Its dream imagery, its sound effects, its repeated phrases and its abrupt changes of style and point of view all come out of the surrealist and ultraist movements he had encountered in Paris.