A new English translation of “El Señor Presidente,” by the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, speaks not only to Latin America’s cycles of tyranny but to a U.S. and a Europe confronting a new wave of authoritarian leaders.
Asturias’s novel tells the story of an unnamed country ruled by an unnamed man.The life of a writer is buoyed, fraught, consumed, or scarred by the drama of recognition. Most writers never achieve it. Some are ahead of their time and miss it. Others will not see their work published before they die. And some simply suffer from bad timing. The Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias was among the latter.
Asturias was born in Guatemala City, in 1899, a year after President Manuel Estrada Cabrera took office. Estrada Cabrera ruled by terror, running a network of secret police, and persecuting, torturing, and killing political opponents, while delivering control of the country’s resources to the United Fruit Company, the American corporation that acted as a de-facto colonial power in Central America during the early and mid-twentieth century.
“El Señor Presidente” tells the story of an unnamed country ruled by an unnamed man, who makes very few appearances in the novel himself, but whose presence configures and dooms every breath of life in the country. Nothing, including dreams and inner feelings, escapes his touch. Everyone lives in terror.
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