"Mr. President" is a novel written by the famous Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias, winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize for Literature. It is one of his most important masterpieces. This book uses Estrada Cabrera, who was in power from 1898 to 1920, as the prototype, using comic exaggeration to create an image of a vulgar, cunning, cruel, and sinister autocratic tyrant. Under his clutches, the entire country was shrouded in an atmosphere of ignorance, poverty, terror, and despair.
In many chapters, readers can only identify the ghost-like shadow of the dictator from the words, deeds, psychology and descriptions of other characters' fates. He is invisible, but he is everywhere. He is a god living in everyone's heart. The novel uses this method of focusing on anti-object and combining fiction and reality to cast a layer of mysterious fog on the image of the tyrant. The gloomy and depressing atmosphere carefully designed throughout the book is reminiscent of hell under the rule of the devil.
"Mr. President", together with "The Funeral of the Dictator" by Usral Petrie, "The Decline of the Patriarch" by García Márquez, and "The Tyrant Banderas" by José Luis García Sánchez, are collectively known as "the four major anti-authoritarian novels in Latin America".
