The President

Background

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. I saw something like an immense cloud conceal the enormous moon. I had been placed in a cellar, in a hole, in a cave or someplace else. It was then that I wrote my first poem, a song of farewell to Guatemala. Later, I was angered by the circumstances during which the rubble was cleared away and by the social injustice that became so bloodily apparent.[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This experience, at the age of 18, led Asturias to write "Los mendigos políticos" ("The Political Beggars"), an unpublished short story that would later develop into his first novel, El Señor Presidente.[3] Asturias began writing El Señor Presidente in 1922, while he was still a law student in Guatemala. He moved to Paris in 1923, where he studied anthropology at the Sorbonne under George Raynaud. 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.[4] The novel was completed in 1933, shortly before Asturias returned to Guatemala.

Even though El Señor Presidente was written in France and is set in an unnamed Latin American country, governed by an unnamed President in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, there is still plenty of support linking the novel to the Manuel Estrada Cabrera era in Guatemala. 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."[5] Estrada Cabrera was notorious for his brutal repression of dissent in Guatemala, and Asturias had been involved in protests against his rule in 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".[7]

Estrada Cabrera was eventually forced out of office as a result of popular disturbances and the intervention of U.S. and other foreign diplomats. Rather than go into exile, however, the ex-president opted to defend himself against criminal charges.[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.[9] As Asturias himself put it:

I saw him almost every day in the prison. And I found that there's no doubt that men like that have a special power over people. To the extent that while he was a prisoner people would say: "No, that can't be Estrada Cabrera. The real Estrada Cabrera escaped. This is some poor old man that they've locked up in here."[10]

El Señor Presidente was not published until years after it was written. 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".[2] Additionally, because Ubico was Guatemala's dictator while the novel was being finished, critics have linked him with the characterization of the President in El Señor Presidente.[11] As Himelblau notes, elements of the book "could easily have been interpreted as reflecting [...] General Ubico's dictatorship".[12] The novel eventually first saw the light of day in Mexico, in 1946, at a time when Juan José Arévalo was serving as Guatemala's first democratically elected president.

Despite the manifest influence of Asturias's experiences in Guatemala under Estrada Cabrera and Ubico, and despite certain historical ties, critic Richard Callan observes that Asturias's "attention is not limited to his times and nation, but ranges across the world and reaches back through the ages. By linking his created world with the dawn of history, and his twentieth-century characters with myths and archetypes, he has anchored them to themes of universal significance."[13] Asturias himself affirms that he "wrote El Señor Presidente without a social commitment".[14] By this he means that unlike some of his other books, such as Leyendas de Guatemala (Legends of Guatemala) or Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize), "El Señor Presidente had a wider relevance because it did not focus so heavily on Guatemalan myths and traditions."[14] Asturias depicts aspects of life that are common to all dictatorial regimes, and so establishes El Señor Presidente as one of his most influential works.


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