I, the Supreme: Literature and Caudillismo in Latin America

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"There is no power that does not leave a scar" — Augusto Roa Bastos (my translation)

Introduction

On July 31, 2025, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador approved a constitutional reform allowing President Nayib Bukele to run indefinitely for reelection. The decision, supported by a pro-government parliamentary majority, has drawn national and international criticism for its impact on the separation of powers and institutional weakening. This recent episode revives a figure deeply rooted in the continent’s political history: the caudillo.

Far from being an anomaly, the concentration of power in the hands of charismatic, paternalistic, and authoritarian leaders is part of a tradition that has marked Latin America since the 19th century. Literature has served as a relentless mirror of this reality, revealing the mechanisms of absolute power, the logic of fear, and the moral degradation produced by perpetual rule. This article analyzes four key works that portray the figure of the Latin American dictator: El Señor Presidente (1946) by Miguel Ángel Asturias, I, the Supreme (1974) by Augusto Roa Bastos, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) by Gabriel García Márquez, and The Feast of the Goat (2000) by Mario Vargas Llosa.

The Caudillo as Nightmare: Asturias and Power Without a Face

In El Señor Presidente, Miguel Ángel Asturias inaugurates the tradition of the "dictator novel" with an atmospheric and oppressive portrait of an all-pervasive authoritarian regime. Set in an unnamed country, but clearly inspired by the Guatemala of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the novel constructs an allegory of institutional violence. The dictator, barely visible, exerts his will through a network of servile officials, denunciations, and psychological torture. “The President doesn’t sleep; he keeps watch even in others’ dreams” (my translation), suggests one of the voices within the novel.

Asturias combines social realism with poetic symbolism and surrealist elements to represent a system that has distorted language and the perception of reality. Fear becomes a narrative structure. Sentences fracture, dialogues overlap, as if syntax itself were under suspicion. The dictatorship not only oppresses bodies but the very possibility of thought.

Writing as Battlefield: Roa Bastos and the Supreme’s Delirium

I, the Supreme is arguably the most radical work in its reflection on language and power. Inspired by the figure of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, dictator of Paraguay from 1814 to 1840, Roa Bastos’s novel builds a complex textual apparatus that blends interior monologue, footnotes, apocryphal documents, and unranked glosses. The Supreme himself declares: “The Word became flesh, but the flesh became ink. And ink, the sealed paper of power” (my translation).

Within this verbal architecture, the dictator becomes the author of his own history, but also its prisoner. Writing, which seeks to fix the narrative of power, overflows and undermines it. Each sentence conceals a fissure, an involuntary irony, an excess that betrays the delusion of control. Roa Bastos subverts the figure of the caudillo by portraying him as a paranoid subject defending himself from his own voice.

The Tyrant’s Eternity: García Márquez and the Baroque of Power

In The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez elevates the representation of the dictator to a mythical, almost theological dimension. The Patriarch, whose name is never revealed, is an amalgamation of several Latin American tyrants: Trujillo, Gómez, Somoza. He lives in a decaying palace, surrounded by cows grazing in the halls and a court of flatterers who extend his longevity like a spell. The narrative unfolds in suspended, circular time, without clear punctuation: “Time did not pass for the Patriarch, because he was time itself” (my translation).

García Márquez turns language into a baroque whirlpool that reflects the confusion between the real and the fantastic, between the ruler and divinity. The caudillo appears as an ancestral curse, a cycle repeating with different faces but the same logic of impunity and excess.

Memory as Resistance: Vargas Llosa and the Chivo’s Trauma

Unlike the previous novels, The Feast of the Goat opts for a more classical structure and ordered chronology. Mario Vargas Llosa narrates in parallel the last night of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, and the return of Urania Cabral, a woman scarred by the regime’s violence. The tyrant, nicknamed the Goat, appears as a man obsessed with absolute control—even over women’s bodies. “He wasn’t the government. He was the entire country,” writes Vargas Llosa (my translation).

The novel reveals the darkest side of caudillismo: the blend of political repression with sexual abuse, the destruction of intimacy, and the impossibility of forgiveness. Through Urania, the author introduces a feminist and testimonial dimension, showing how personal and historical trauma become intertwined.

The Return of the Myth

The approval of indefinite reelection in El Salvador is not merely a political event, it is also a cultural symptom. It reveals the persistence of a political imagination shaped by the figure of the providential savior, the authoritarian father, the redeeming caudillo. As Roa Bastos warns: “The peoples who forget are condemned to repeat the voice of the master” (my translation).

In response, literature continues to be a critical space, capable of dismantling the fictions of power, exposing its mechanisms, and recording the scars it leaves on collective memory. The novels of Asturias, Roa Bastos, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa are not only testimonies of the past but urgent warnings for the present.

Notes

1. The constitutional reform in El Salvador was approved on July 31, 2025, with 57 votes in favor and 3 against in the Legislative Assembly, enabling indefinite presidential reelection. The ruling party Nuevas Ideas, along with its allies from the PCN and PDC, passed the measure without prior public debate. See: El País, August 1, 2025; Reuters, July 31, 2025; AP News, August 1, 2025.
2. Miguel Ángel Asturias, El Señor Presidente, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1946.
3. Augusto Roa Bastos, Yo el Supremo, Siglo XXI Editores, 1974.
4. Gabriel García Márquez, El otoño del patriarca, Editorial Sudamericana, 1975.
5. Mario Vargas Llosa, La fiesta del chivo, Alfaguara, 2000.

Bibliography

• Asturias, Miguel Ángel. El Señor Presidente. Mexico City: FCE, 1946.
• García Márquez, Gabriel. The Autumn of the Patriarch. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1975.
• Roa Bastos, Augusto. I, the Supreme. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1974.
• Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Feast of the Goat. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000.
• “El Salvador approves indefinite reelection for Bukele.” El País, August 2, 2025.