How did The President portray the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera in Guatemala?

In the context of Latin American literature, the novel The President (1946) serves as an impassioned denunciation of the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Written by the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, the work portrays the regime as a climate of pervasive fear and systemic corruption.1

While the historical Estrada Cabrera maintained power through a standing army, secret police, and the suppression of political liberties, Asturias’s novel captures the psychological and moral degradation inherent in such a system. By blending his background in Surrealism with a commitment to social protest, Asturias depicts the dictator not merely as a political figure, but as a symbol of absolute, arbitrary power that stifles the aspirations of the people. The novel reflects the broader reality of the era, during which Estrada Cabrera plundered the national treasury and kept the indigenous population in a state of peonage to serve an oligarchical system.21