In this blog post, we examined how Miguel Ángel Asturias’s ‘His Excellency the President’ combines the historical realities and myths of Latin America with surrealist imagination to depict dictatorship and human aspirations.

A work that opened up new horizons in world literature

What struck me most while reading ‘His Excellency the President’ was that this work is not merely a political novel dealing with a nation’s dictatorial regime. Miguel Ángel Asturias was a Guatemalan writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967; he was the second writer from Latin America to receive the award, following Gabriela Mistral. The year 1967, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, was also a time when the works of the Latin American “Boom” generation, as well as those of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz, were beginning to gain recognition in the Western world, including France. ‘His Excellency the President’ also began to gain international recognition when a translated edition was published in the United Kingdom in 1963 and in the United States in 1964.
Amid this trend, I felt that Asturias’s Nobel Prize in Literature was not merely an event recognizing the literary achievements of a single author. It was a symbolic event heralding the incorporation of literature from non-Western regions, including Latin America, into the canon of world literature. Notably, 1967 also saw the publication of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel García Márquez, who would later come to represent Latin American literature.
The French critic Pascal Casanova divided the landscape of world literature into the center, the semi-periphery, and the periphery, viewing Paris—which had first attained literary autonomy—as the center of world literature. According to his logic, for a writer from the periphery to become a world-class literary figure, they must neither unconditionally imitate the aesthetics and techniques of the center nor remain confined to excessively indigenous and regional forms. They must create a form that can engage with world literature while still embodying local content.
I believe this is precisely why writers from Latin America, including Asturias, have reshaped the landscape of world literature. They fused the political and historical realities of the Latin American continent with its oral folk tales, combining them with surrealist and avant-garde aesthetics. Rather than merely denouncing social issues, they sought to examine the deeper meanings of the reality unfolding before their eyes from multiple perspectives. Asturias was one of the writers who pioneered this literary movement, which blends reality and fantasy to explore the hidden aspects of reality. In this sense, his Nobel Prize in Literature can be interpreted not only as recognition of him personally but also as symbolic recognition of the entire body of Latin American literature that followed in his footsteps.

A Writer Who Viewed Mayan Mythology and the Reality of Dictatorship Together

Asturias was born in 1899 into a middle-class family in Guatemala City. His father was a judge and his mother a teacher. After acquitting students who opposed the regime of dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera, his father faced psychological pressure and resigned from his position as a judge, leading the family to settle on a farm in the provincial town of Salama. There, the young Asturias experienced the lives of the indigenous Maya people firsthand and heard Maya myths and folktales from his indigenous nanny. It was fascinating to note that these childhood experiences formed a crucial foundation for his later literary world.
After his family moved to the outskirts of Guatemala City in 1908, he spent his teenage years attending school; it was during this time that he conceived the initial draft of ‘Mr. President’. After entering college, he founded a people’s university with friends to share knowledge with low-income communities, and while initially studying medicine, he switched his major to law. At the University of San Carlos, he actively participated in student movements opposing the Estrada Cabrera regime, wrote a thesis addressing social issues facing Indigenous peoples, and received his Bachelor of Laws degree in 1923. His activities during his college years would later have a significant influence on his writing of ‘His Excellency the President’.
After receiving his degree, he initially planned to study political economy in England but changed his mind and traveled to Paris to study anthropology at the Sorbonne. He continued his creative work while meeting various poets and novelists in Montparnasse and was also influenced by the surrealist André Breton. At the same time, he became deeply immersed in Mayan culture and spent a long time translating the ‘Popol Vuh’, which contains Mayan creation myths, into Spanish. Thus, for Asturias, Mayan mythology and Surrealism were not separate entities. One was the spiritual foundation rooted in his own region and history, while the other was the modern method that enabled him to express that world through literature.
In 1930, he published his first novel, ‘Legends of Guatemala’. Paul Valéry spoke highly of this work and urged Asturias to return to Guatemala and continue writing works that would inspire a sense of wild wonder in European readers. He meant for Asturias not to be a writer who merely imitated European literature, but one who would represent the indigenous world and its voices during a time when modern national systems were taking shape. It is unclear to what extent Asturias took this advice to heart, but in 1933, after ten years in Paris, he returned to his homeland.
However, the reality of his homeland did not readily permit literary freedom. While working as a journalist, he published a collection of poems titled ‘Sonnets’, but it was difficult to directly criticize society amid the political repression of the Ubico regime. Ultimately, he had no choice but to express social criticism indirectly through his elegant prose. He continued to write even while serving as a member of Congress and a diplomat, and the political reality of Guatemala—where dictatorship persisted—deeply permeated his literary imagination.
‘His Excellency the President’ was born out of these political realities. Although Asturias depicted a society centered on an unnamed dictator against the backdrop of a fictional Latin American country, the work was by no means unrelated to the reality of Guatemala’s dictatorship. It was not until 1946, after the Ubico regime had ended, that he was able to publish the work at his own expense through a small publishing house in Mexico. This episode illustrates just how much the political situation of the time acted as a psychological constraint on him.
Later, Asturias supported the government of Jacobo Arbenz, which was promoting land reform and socialist reforms. However, when rebel forces backed by the U.S. CIA invaded Guatemala and overthrew the Arbenz government in 1954, he was stripped of his citizenship and forced into exile. Even while in exile—traveling through Argentina and Chile before settling in Genoa—he never stopped writing. In 1967, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his body of work, which was rooted in the traditions of Latin American indigenous peoples and the unique characteristics of Guatemala.
Knowing this background, ‘His Excellency the President’ no longer felt like a novel simply imagining a dictator. The dictatorship, fear, surveillance, media control, and political repression depicted in the work were closely tied to the reality the author had lived through, while Mayan mythology and surrealist expressions served as literary devices that allowed readers to view that reality from a different perspective. I came to believe that Asturias deserves to be recognized as a pioneering writer who combined the myths of the Maya indigenous peoples, the historical realities of Latin America, and surrealism to express the reality of Latin America through a universal aesthetic.

Memories of Dictatorship Projected in ‘His Excellency the President’

Although the setting and characters in ‘His Excellency the President’ are fictional, the dictator in the novel strongly evokes Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who ruled Guatemala for a long period. In particular, the fact that Asturias’s father was forced to relocate to the countryside after acquitting students who opposed the dictatorial regime—and that the young Asturias witnessed the lives of indigenous people there—provides crucial context for understanding the work. His childhood and youth were shaped by the terror of dictatorship, relocation to the countryside, and experiences of the struggle against the regime. Consequently, it was difficult to separate the terror, intrigue, media control, and isolation from the outside world depicted in ‘His Excellency the President’ from the author’s own life.
News of Estrada Cabrera was limited to government-controlled newspapers, and in an era when there wasn’t even a radio, rumors and mythical tales surrounding his supernatural abilities circulated widely. After the dictatorship ended, Asturias, who was studying law at university, wrote a short story titled “The Political Beggar,” and while studying anthropology in Paris, he conceived the idea of expanding this story into a full-length novel. At the time, the work was titled ‘Tohil’, taken from Tohil, the ruthless god of fire in Mayan mythology who demands human sacrifices. For Asturias, who was deeply immersed in Mayan mythology, it must have been a natural idea to portray the dictator as a ruthless god of fire and injustice.
However, the political situation in his homeland was not conducive to publishing a novel about a dictator, as the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico had been in power from 1931 to 1944. Asturias completed the first draft of ‘Tohil’ in 1939, but he changed the title to the more universal and accessible ‘His Excellency the President’ to avoid a title that might be unfamiliar to readers unfamiliar with Mayan mythology. Later, when the police raided and searched his home, mistaking it for an anti-government gathering, the manuscript was fortunately stored in a bank vault.
When Ubico resigned and Juan José Arevalo took office, ushering in progressive reforms such as social security and land reform, Asturias finally decided to publish the work. He retrieved the manuscript from the safe in 1945 and published the first edition the following year through a small Mexican publishing house. It was later republished by Rosada Publishers in Argentina, and the edition—in which the author corrected typos and refined the details—became the de facto definitive version.
The resulting ‘Mr. President’ depicts a dictator’s charismatic rule, a meticulous surveillance network, a public gradually tamed by political intrigue, and a small minority dreaming of resistance within that system. I was particularly struck by the fact that the name of the central character, Miguel Cara de Ángel, is similar to the author’s own name. Initially a close confidant of the president, he plots a rebellion against the dictatorship and is tasked with eliminating General Eusebio Canales, who has been framed for the murder of Colonel José Parales Sonliente, a close aide to the president. However, his life changes completely when he falls in love with General Canales’s daughter, Camila. He marries Camila but incurs the president’s wrath and is imprisoned; ultimately, he meets a tragic end amid false rumors of his wife’s betrayal.
The name Miguel Cara de Ángel means “the face of the angel Michael.” Linked to the author’s name, Miguel Ángel, this name suggests that the character is an alter ego of the author. In reality, the author and his father led lives different from those of Miguel Cara de Ángel in the novel, having fought against the dictatorship by moving to the countryside or studying abroad. However, by endowing the character with the contradictory attributes of being “as beautiful and wicked as Satan,” the author appears to have projected even his own inner self onto the character. Just as Asturias himself served as the principal of an alternative school, a newspaper editor-in-chief, and a diplomat, Miguel Cara de Ángel is portrayed as having held positions such as newspaper editor-in-chief, diplomat, school director, and mayor before becoming a close aide to the president.
Particularly striking was the setting in which Miguel Cara de Ángel’s underground prison cell is shrouded in darkness for twenty-two hours a day, with light entering for only two hours. These twenty-two hours of darkness symbolize Estrada Cabrera’s twenty-two-year dictatorship. In a sense, the darkness of the prison cell where an individual is confined serves as a condensed representation of the era of dictatorship endured by an entire nation. It was striking how even the spaces and individual numbers within the work were connected to historical reality.

The Most Complex Character: Miguel Cara de Ángel

I felt that Miguel Cara de Ángel was the character with the most complex psychology in ‘His Excellency the President’. His inner world is portrayed as far more complex than that of the president or even General Canales, who later prepares for the revolution. He is a character into whom the author has projected his own self, while also being a composite figure created from episodes drawn from various historical figures of the time. His position and appearance are derived from Víctor Sánchez, a close associate of Estrada Cabrera, while his life after arrest overlaps with the stories of Pedro Pellaez, a major Guatemalan landowner of the time, and Mexican General Carrasco. Furthermore, his final moments bring to mind the story of Manuel Pas, who was imprisoned under the Estrada Cabrera regime and died of exhaustion after learning of his wife’s betrayal.
For this reason, Miguel Cara de Ángel is a character who cannot be fully explained by any single aspect of his personality. While living as a dictator’s confidant, he longs to break free from that system; while loving Camila, he discovers other desires within himself. His desire to help her intertwines with his desire to possess her physically, and through this complex love, he seeks to escape the survival-of-the-fittest principle. He is sick of a world where everything can be logically dismantled like the parts of a machine; instead, he believes the world of dreams and irrationality is better.
The world he dreams of is not one of grand revolutions or social reform. The life he desires is to build a family with Camila and break free from the president’s grip. When Camila was in danger of dying from pneumonia and a nervous breakdown, he fell into despair and ultimately decided to marry her as a way to save her life. He chose marriage after hearing a spiritual healer tell the comatose Camila that love was the only power capable of overcoming death. Miraculously, Camila survived, but the prospect of escaping the President’s influence and building an ordinary family remained a distant dream.
It was also interesting that Miguel Cara de Ángel’s aspirations and despair revolved not around democratization or social justice, but around his love for Camila. Holding onto the hope of escaping the president’s clutches, he accepted an offer to serve as a special envoy to Washington, but was ultimately arrested. While in prison, he hears false information that Camilla has become the President’s lover. The belief that the love he cherished most has crumbled shatters his very reason for being, and he dies in despair.
Throughout the work, his ambivalent feelings toward his role as the President’s confidant, his dreamlike and fantastical inner projections, mythical elements, inner monologues, and stream of consciousness are intertwined. These expressions poetically reveal Miguel Cara de Ángel’s inner world. His passion to break free from the vile chains of power is ultimately and consistently expressed through his love for Camila. To save Camila, he rescues Colonel Parfan and, knowing full well that the President will be enraged, performs a spiritual wedding ceremony with her. However, a false rumor of Camila’s betrayal shatters the very reason he has to live.

The President’s Power, Resembling That of Tohil in Mythology

His Excellency the President, who stands at the center of the work, is a man who rose to the presidency after studying hard to become a lawyer despite coming from a poor background. He trusts no one and often drowns his loneliness as the supreme ruler in alcohol, yet he is also extremely cunning and violent. He establishes a meticulous surveillance network to prevent people from trusting one another, governing by monitoring their every move. The President, dressed in black, is superimposed onto Tohil, the ruthless god of fire from Mayan mythology, thereby expanding real-world dictatorial power into a mythical dimension.
Yet the President’s psychology is, surprisingly, depicted in a rather one-dimensional manner. In fact, I felt that this very restraint made the President all the more unsettling. He monitors and controls everyone, yet the inner world behind his thirst for power remains almost entirely hidden. Thus, the President becomes a figure who symbolizes the highest echelon of power—seeming omnipotent on the outside but hollow within. The scene where a poet praising the President likens him to Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” (Superman) as a powerful leader can also be read as a satire of the political situation leading to fascism between the two world wars.
The reason a dictatorship can be maintained cannot be explained by the power of a single dictator alone. The masses in the work also play a crucial role. The scene in Miguel Cara de Ángel’s vision, where people dance to honor the god Tojil, satirically depicts these masses. They live their lives tamed by the dictatorial regime, having never truly experienced either life or death. It is precisely this populace, driven by fear and the instinct for survival, that forms the foundation upon which dictatorial power is maintained.
General Canales, who serves as a counterpart to the President, values military honor highly and is portrayed as a figure of justice and courage—even going so far as to kill a doctor who torments the weak while on the run. He prepares for a revolution guided by socialist ideals aimed at land redistribution for indigenous peoples, social justice, and the elimination of the wealth gap. However, after learning from the newspaper that his daughter has married Miguel Cara de Ángel, a close confidant of his political rival, he dies of a heart attack. This unexpected death transforms ‘His Excellency the President’ from a mere epic novel or social critique into a complex satirical novel that incorporates melodramatic elements.
The Inspector General of Defense, who leans on the president to handle political cases and routinely engages in brutal torture, also appears as a henchman of the dictatorship. Although he fabricates interrogation records regardless of the defendant’s testimony and pursues his own self-interest, he carries the irony of playing the organ at church. Thus, the characters in the work are not simply divided into good and evil. Their individual desires, fears, and instincts for survival are intertwined, thereby propping up the dictatorship.
The lives of supporting characters—such as Colonel Parpan, Juan Canales, Vázquez, and Genaro Rodas—also unfold within this structure of fear and depravity. Colonel Parpan, who once found himself in danger of being eliminated after drunkenly ranting about starting a revolution, seeks to advance his career by arresting Miguel Cara de Ángel, the man who saved him. Vázquez kills the dim-witted beggar Pelele on orders from his superiors and helps kidnap Miguel Cara de Ángel’s wife, Camila, only to be arrested himself in the end. Henero Rodas, too, is arrested because of his wife, but after accepting an offer to monitor Miguel Cara de Ángel, he is released and works as Colonel Parpan’s assistant. None of them can escape the instincts of the strong preying on the weak and survival of the fittest.
Ultimately, the fear and survival instincts depicted in the work accumulate like sediment that transforms life into death, and His Excellency the President’s regime is sustained precisely upon that sediment. A dictatorship is not built solely on violence imposed from above; rather, it is gradually strengthened with every moment people distrust one another and sacrifice others for their own survival. This is what made ‘His Excellency the President’ feel far more weighty than a mere story about a dictator.

The Love of Women, More Intense Than the Political Struggles of Men

What was particularly striking about the work was that the female characters were portrayed as even more noble and compelling than the male ones. While the male characters, who embody the political thesis and antithesis, move like agents in a thesis novel, the female characters are placed at the center of the work in a different way—through their love for their husbands and their maternal instincts. Pedina de Rodas is arrested while trying to protect her child; even as she endures all manner of physical torture, she watches her child die because she cannot breastfeed him. Ultimately, she resolves to become a living tomb cradling her dead child, and in that state, she is sold into a brothel where, despite being subjected to the taunts of men, she fulfills her role in silence.
Camila’s nanny, Chavelona, also continues to search relentlessly for the young lady, believing she is playing hide-and-seek with Camila, even after suffering a head injury from the violence of Vázquez during the raid on the general’s house. When the Inspector General’s men search the house, she appears to have lost her mind as she searches for Camila; she is arrested and dies while being escorted away. It struck me as tragic that even amidst behavior that appeared to be madness, there remained a love determined to protect one person to the very end.
Attorney Carvajal’s wife also goes as far as the presidential palace to save her husband, but no one listens to her. She presses her ear against the prison wall to hear news of her husband, believing that if he were innocent, they would not kill him—yet he is ultimately sentenced to death by a military tribunal and executed by firing squad. She pleads for help everywhere and searches for any trace of her husband, but receives no assistance from anyone because she is the wife of a political prisoner. Later, she receives information about her husband’s death through an anonymous letter and tries to find his body, but ultimately fails to reach her destination.
Camila first appears as a naive sixteen-year-old girl. With her father being persecuted as a political prisoner, she receives help from Miguel Cara de Ángel and sets out to find her uncle, only to be devastated when her uncle and aunt turn their backs on her. Eventually, she falls into a coma due to a nervous breakdown and pneumonia. After marrying Miguel Cara de Ángel, who loved her deeply, Camila recovers her health and matures into a woman deeply in love with her husband. However, when her husband leaves for Washington and all contact is lost, she searches for him but is ultimately unable to find him. After giving birth to her son, Michel, she moves to the countryside and never returns to Guatemala City.
The love and maternal instinct of these women are portrayed with a intensity equal to that of Miguel Cara de Ángel’s love. Love that creates life beyond death and embraces it may seem like blind passion, but it functions as a counterforce against the regime of His Excellency the President, which is sustained by fear and the instinct for survival. In a world where violence and fear drive life toward death, love becomes the force that protects life from the other side.

The Boundary Between Reality and Fantasy as Portrayed by Pelele

Pelele, the protagonist of the short story “The Political Beggar”—which served as the starting point for ‘His Excellency the President’—is also a highly memorable character. Raised between a father who was a cockfighter and a womanizer and a mother who endured sacrifice, he ran away from home, wandered, and eventually ended up living in front of a church. He is mocked by the other beggars around him because he has a fit and runs away whenever someone calls him “Mother.” After murdering Colonel José Parales Sonliente, who had been mocking him, he flees but is pecked by birds, injuring his mouth, and falls into a garbage heap, only to be rescued by a woodcutter and Miguel Cara de Ángel.
The dream he has while in a coma felt like a crucial scene for understanding the relationship between reality and fantasy in this work. At first, a mother appears, soothing her son’s pain like the Virgin Mary, but when her son says that even his soul is sick, the mother replies that her own soul is sick as well. She then explains that she is half-lie and half-truth, and gives some people glass eyes and others real eyes. She says that those who receive glass eyes can see because they dream, while those who receive real eyes can see because they yearn. This scene clearly reveals the surrealist perspective, which views reality and fantasy not as separate entities but as part of a single, holistic reality.
The scene where Pelele, watching a circus tightrope act in a cathedral, dreams of an elevator carrying his soul between heaven and earth is also a fusion of real-world anxiety and surreal imagination. Pelele’s anxiety—drifting aimlessly in the vastness of the universe with nothing to hold onto—evokes the existential anxiety of humanity, which cannot escape reality. This sentiment is also connected to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The song’s emotional intensity—where life and death, motherhood, guilt, and the fear of death all surge at once in a state where it’s unclear whether it’s reality or fantasy—seems to overlap with Pelele’s fate.
Pelele is ultimately rescued by the beautiful yet wicked Miguel Cara de Ángel, whose beauty is so striking that the woodcutter who finds him atop a pile of trash mistakes him for an angel. However, on his way back to the cathedral, he is shot by Vázquez and falls to his death down the stairs of the archbishop’s mansion. It is paradoxical that the most despised character is murdered at the very beginning of the story, yet is simultaneously portrayed as the one who comes closest to the most sacred realm.
The events, which begin with Pelele’s accidental murder, lead to the elimination of the president’s political rivals. The conflicts among the upper class—centered on Miguel Cara de Ángel and Camila—and the incidents involving the lower-middle class—surrounding Hena Roda, Pedina, and Colonel Parpan—unfold along separate narrative threads. Pelele is the figure at the starting point of all these events. Though he lives like a drifter, he is also the figure who sets in motion the tragic current of the entire work.
Looking at Pelele, one might be reminded of the angel in Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’. That angel, with wide-open eyes and an open mouth, flaps his wings frantically, trying not to be swept away by the mighty winds of history. Yet at his feet, one ruin piles upon another. Pelele, too, is swept into a massive historical catastrophe against his will. In that the weakest are the first to fall victim to the violence of history, his death seemed to encapsulate the entire work.

The Literary Power of ‘His Excellency the President’, Transcending Reality and Fantasy

The most intriguing aspect of ‘His Excellency the President’ is that, while Asturias viewed Guatemalan history through an avant-garde prism, he did not fall into Western universalism. Nor did he remain confined to indigenism or regionalism, which emphasize only local color. He transformed verses drawn from Guatemalan oral traditions or popular songs of the time into more dramatic and poetic expressions that fit the flow of the narrative, and he reexamined the indigenous language on a transcendent and poetic level, rather than using it merely as a device to create a folkloric atmosphere.
Although inner monologues, automatic writing, and dreamlike worlds—all popular in the West—can be found throughout his works, it is important to note that these elements do not remain mere experiments in literary technique or imitations of Western literature. Asturias used these techniques to reveal the conflict between the indigenous traditions inherited from the Maya and the lived world of the Ladinos, a group whose heritage blends Spanish ancestry and culture. He portrayed the way tradition and modernity collide yet coexist and permeate one another, as well as the paranoia, fragmentation, and psychology of fear arising from the oppression of power, all within a single, holistic world.
Consequently, the internal monologues and dreamlike scenes in ‘His Excellency the President’ are not read merely as whimsical or pedantic expressions. At every moment when events unfold urgently and history careens toward catastrophe, the characters’ inner worlds are revealed as they traverse the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Their aspirations and despair collide, creating a single, vast fantasia. While reading the work, I found myself wondering whether reality and fantasy are not entirely separate—but rather, whether humans must view both worlds together to fully comprehend reality.
Ultimately, ‘Your Excellency, the President’ is a work that denounces the reality of dictatorship, while simultaneously weaving together love and fear, survival and death, myth and history, and reality and fantasy. Miguel Cara de Ángel’s love and despair, the maternal love and affection of the female characters, Pelele’s anxiety and death, and the President’s hollow yet omnipotent power—though they seemed to move in different directions—were all connected within a single historical reality. To express that reality, Asturias combined Mayan mythology, Latin American history, surrealist imagination, and modern Western literary techniques.
As a result, ‘His Excellency the President’ transcended the realm of a mere political novel denouncing a dictator. It was a work that traversed the boundary between fantasy and reality to show how humans are tamed by fear, how they can overcome that fear through love, and what traces historical reality leaves on the human psyche. The emotions of longing and despair that run through the entire work—sometimes realistic, sometimes dreamlike, much like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’—ultimately coalesced into a single, intense pathos.