The President

…Cabrera, El señor presidente (1946; The President). In Hombres de maíz (1949; Men of Maize), the novel generally considered his masterpiece, Asturias depicts the seemingly irreversible wretchedness of the Indian peasant. Another aspect of that misery—the exploitation of Indians on the banana plantations—appears in the epic trilogy that comprises the…

…Asturias’s El señor presidente (1946; The President) and Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949; The Kingdom of This World). Asturias’s novel, about the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera in Guatemala, employs Surrealist techniques to create an aura of fear and the sense that events are guided by supernatural…