The debut novel of Miguel Ángel Asturias, The President, tells a story steeped in the tradition of banana republics, Latin American dictatorships, America’s history of supporting authoritarian rule when it serves their purpose and the literary genre of magical realism. Although the setting is a fictional netherworld of historical construction, it is a compendium of all the various tyrants that have ruled through fear and intimidation in a vast number of countries to the south of the border America shares with Mexico. The President has been termed a nightmarish vision of geographically-based history and a symbolic showdown between the forces of good and evil, among other things, the one thing it had never become over the course of its first seventy years of existence, one thing it had never been labeled was a prescient vision of an existential dystopian threat which would inevitably one day fall like a shadow over the powerful and manipulative partner-in-crime to the north of all those banana republics.
And then the novel turned seventy-one years old and everything change. Although written by an eventual Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, The President never quite captured the affection and attention of the American reading public the way it did throughout much of the rest of the world, especially among Spanish-speaking countries. Obviously, some of that oblivion can be attributed to the fact that it was written in Spanish by a Guatemalan author most Americans have never heard of. What must also be taken into consideration is that the story is not one to which Americans have been easily able to relate. The sheer abundance of dictators assuming power through a bloody military coup in countries to the south of Mexico makes the story part of the historical DNA of that readership. Understanding the dynamics of living under unpredictable repressive and oppressive authoritarian regimes comes as naturally to much of that popular as understanding the dynamics of western movies.
What makes The President stand out as rather unique among the genre of “dictator novels” is that the title character remains shadowy and elusive for most of the narrative. He is the central figure, assuredly, but he is really the straw the stirs the drink of oppression. For this reason, the novel has been interpreted as being just as much about good and evil on a larger symbolic scale. Except that, for the most part, there is little that is good while almost everything eventually becomes a servant of the evil that is the President. What is really at stake in this approach is the ability to make a figure that is not readily available to the reader become an entity capable of staining every aspect of existence with his darkness. Rather than centralizing the President as a figure of political influence serving only his own interests, the novel’s dystopic portrait is much more chilling in that it presents in concrete terms how a figure that is similarly detached and isolated from most of the population can still impact their lives on an hourly basis.
A Punch and Judy-style puppet show early on serves as a realization of this trickle-down theory of unseen evil. “Don Benjamin thought that the painful element in the drama would make the children cry, and his surprise knew no bounds when he saw them laugh more heartily than before, with wide open mouths and happy expressions.” Don Benjamin cries out that this response is entirely illogical to which Dona Venjamon responds it is logical and short argument ensues. It is a funny scene for various reasons, but eventually the full extent of its horror will be revealed. The sight of young children being massively entertained by the sight of unexpected violence creating undeserved suffering is part of a massive recurring pattern of degeneracy of basic humanity throughout the story.
At all points along the way where empathy and hope could combine to create a positive outcome, that outcome is stifled and reversed. Suffering is widespread and seems to be under the control of demonic forces that are not entirely natural. But that is the point. They are not natural, but they are not otherworldly. They are the unnatural outcome of a system of evil which flows like oil through a pipeline until every consumer gets their fill. The political system is flawed, the military is flawed, the church is flawed, loyalties become flawed and all because of infection spreading like a virus throughout the country. The choice of the author not to present the President directly as a controlling agency of evil gradually starts to make sense: the President is merely a hub whose evil influence is utterly dependent upon the cooperation of everybody else and this cooperation is best attained not through force or even coercion, but simply by appealing to their own self-interest.
It is a portrait a political system that for seventy years seemed so alien to the reliable system operating in America that the story had no inherent connection to their lives. History had made allowed them to remain comfortably disconnected from the DNA of tyranny through complicity which made the term banana republic possible. And then the book turned seventy-one and almost overnight it the dark vision of Asturias became relevant to readers above the Mexican/American border to a degree no one had ever predicted.
