I the Supreme
I the Supreme
by Augusto Roa Bastos
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set in early nineteenth-century Paraguay; published in Spanish in 1974 (as Yo el Supremo), in English in 1986.
SYNOPSIS
A dying dictator, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, contemplates the major events of his 26-year rule over Paraguay, and tries to justify his motives and actions.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
Born June 13, 1917, in the rural Guaira region of Paraguay, Augusto Roa Bastos learned to speak both Spanish and Guaraní at an early age. His family lived near a sugar plantation where his father worked as an administrator. He attended military school, fought in the Chaco War (1932-35) against Bolivia, and worked as a journalist covering the exploitation of laborers in the yerbales (maté tea plantations in northern Paraguay). In 1947, though he never belonged to any political party, he was labeled a communist subversive by government authorities and was forced into exile. He moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he wrote all of his major works of fiction, including Yo el Supremo, while supporting himself variously as a journalist, teacher, and screenwriter. During the tragedy of Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1975-78), unleashed by a neofascist military junta against alleged communist subversives, he was again forced to move and took a teaching position at Toulouse University in France. He returned to Paraguay in 1989 after the fall of the dictator Alfred Stroessner.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Colonial Paraguay
Because of its geographic isolation, Paraguay was a politically and economically peripheral Spanish colony. It served as a buffer state protecting the more prosperous colony based in Buenos Aires from hostile Indians and from the rival Portuguese territory of Brazil. Paraguay’s colonial economy revolved around the cultivation and export of one crop, yerba maté, from which a tea (mate) is made. Over-dependence on this single cash crop led to the neglect of staple foods. As a result, Paraguay had to import basic foodstuffs at a high price, which helped to mire common Paraguayans in a state of chronic poverty.
Benefiting the most from this monoculture economy were the two elite groups at the top of Paraguayan society: Spaniards and creóles (Paraguayans of European descent born in Spanish America). Concentrated in the capital, Asunción, Spaniards dominated trade and the higher level positions in the government and military. Although the smallest segment of the society, they wielded the most political and economic power. Below the European-born were the established creole families, who, though wealthy and powerful, lived in a subservient, antagonistic position to the Spaniards.
The majority of the society lived as poor farmers and peasants and were comprised of Guaraní Indians (the main indigenous group in Paraguay), mestizos, blacks, and mulattos. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Guaraní Indians had thrived under the missionary rule and paternalistic protection of Jesuits throughout southern Paraguay and northern Argentina. The missions had grown in power and wealth until they threatened the power and the commercial enterprise of the colonists. When the Jesuits were expelled from Paraguay in 1767, the missions fell under the control of civil authorities, who exploited the Indians and let the missions diminish in size and power.
DR. FRANCIA’S EARLY YEARS
Born in Paraguay on January 6, 1766, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia was the creole son of a career military man and an aristocratic mother. While a student at the University of Cordoba, Francia studied and found inspiration in the work of Enlightenment thinkers such as that of the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (In fact, José Gaspar Rodríguez added “de Francia” to his name as a tribute to his French allegiances.) Enlightenment thinkers celebrated the human ability to reason, promoting the idea that people had control over their fate, which they could improve through education and their ability to reason. The revolutionary philosophies and politics of the Enlightenment fueled the American and French Revolutions, and later contributed to Francia’s own absolutist and nationalistic politics.
Francia graduated as a Doctor of Theology and returned to Paraguay to teach Latin. Disputes over his radical religious and political ideas, however, would force him to resign from the seminary of San Carlos several years later. Known as Dr. Francia, he became a lawyer and gained a reputation throughout Asunción for his fearless integrity and protection of Paraguayan peasants. He took only small sums in payment from his poor clients, but demanded large payments from wealthy clients.
Paraguayan independence
In the early 1800s the Spanish Crown was losing its tight grip on its South American colonies. In 1810 the porteños, or citizens of the port city of Buenos Aires, rebelled and deposed their royalist governor. An assembly of prominent Paraguayans met to discuss their reaction to this new situation. The porteños controlled the Río de la Plata, which was the only river by which Paraguayans had access to the Atlantic Ocean. Francia shocked the assembly by calling for Paraguayan independence from Spain. Since the Crown did not have the power to govern effectively or to protect the colony from possible porteño domination, he argued, sovereignty reverted to the nation. The Spanish elite rejected Francia’s bold suggestion, but did censure the actions of the porteños. In response the Buenos Aires colony blocked Paraguayan trade on the Río de la Plata and sent spies to foment revolt in Asunción.
A porteño army under the command of General Manuel Belgrano moved north to demand Paraguayan submission and met a Paraguayan army in battle. Initially the tide favored the Argentines, and the Spanish officers commanding the Paraguayans fled in panic; in Asunción most Spaniards, including the complacent Governor Bernardo de Velasco, prepared to flee the city. However, in a reversal of fortune, the creole officers rallied the Paraguayan forces to defeat the porteños. From this victory the creole officers realized that the dominance of the Spaniards in Paraguay had come to an end; it was the turn of the creóles to rule. After a second defeat of the porteños, the creóles accepted Belgrano as a kindred spirit against the waning Spanish domination and let him and his army retreat peacefully to Buenos Aires.
The creole officers staged a coup against Governor Velasco on May 14, 1811. In June a five-man junta took his place, with Francia as its most forceful and prominent member. Over the course of the next two years Francia would resign twice from his post to protest the junta’s decisions or relations with the army. He used the time to build his popularity with common Paraguayans. At gatherings Francia told the crowds that the revolution had betrayed the people by simply replacing the Spanish elite with a creole elite. A true revolution was necessary.
by November 1812 Francia’s leadership abilities were in demand. Continued agitation from the porteños and from Portuguese raiders had combined with internal dissension among the creóles to thrust the government into a crisis. The junta asked him to return to his post, this time with personal control of half the army.
In September 1813 the first popular congress or assembly in Paraguay convened. This congress and the two that followed in 1814 and 1816 represented proportionally all segments of society; in other words, the peasant farmers had a voice that equaled their numerical superiority over the elite, an unheard of example of political egali-tarianism in nineteenth-century Latin America. On October 21, 1813, at Francia’s instigation, the congress declared Paraguay the first independent republic of South America. Francia had convinced the delegates that the best way to prevent Paraguay from falling into the untrustworthy hands of the porteños was to form a strong independent nation.
Initially the government was ruled by the joint consulship of Francia and Fulgencio Yegros. At the next year’s popular congress Francia appealed to his rural supporters to end the shared consulship and declare him dictator. He wanted to streamline the government and said that one absolute ruler would prove more efficient and effective than two, especially when dealing with the civil war that was breaking out in the Río de la Plata region. Over 90 percent of the rural delegates voted for Francia. This victory granted him, for a period of five years, the title and authority of Supreme Dictator of the Republic, from which historians have derived the name “El Supremo” or The Supreme One, though none of Francia’s contemporaries referred to him in this way. Opposition to his rule centered in Asunción among the creole and Spanish elite who would suffer the negative effects of the unregulated authority given Francia. In 1816, at the third and last popular congress held before Francia’s death, he gained the dictatorship for life.
Nowadays the title “dictator” has only a pejorative association, but in the early nineteenth century a dictator was often seen as a positive leader. Most Latin American republics in the nineteenth century were democracies in name only, with voting restricted to men who held property and/or could read. As a result, typically less than 5 percent of the population voted and had their concerns represented in the government. In contrast the popular congresses that elected Francia as dictator had represented proportionally the entire nation. Francia believed that the congresses had delineated the concerns of the people, and that afterwards it was the dictator’s task to enact their will. His reign was to be a popular dictatorship that he would term “enlightened absolutism.” His ideas were based on Rousseau’s idea of the social contract, in which people give their sovereignty to a government in exchange for protection of their natural rights. In a letter to one of his military commanders about the continual rebellions among the porteños of Buenos Aires, Francia explained:
These convulsions are the consequence of a nation which still vacillates in its true aims and destiny because it still is not unified, because it does not have a truly popular form. For this very reason, at the time of the institution of the Republic here, I established the great Congresses at periodic intervals to make certain that the nation would join together in the same sentiments and so that we would all advance under a solidly based system.
(Francia in White, p. 76)
El Supremo’s reign
Francia distrusted the creole and Spanish elite as a threat to the nation he was building, and he made it a main objective of his reign to crush their power. He issued a law in 1814 that forbade men of European descent from marrying any woman who was not Indian, black, or mulatto. In addition people of European descent could not serve as godparents, an important social bond. This law helped over time to create a society dominated by mestizos. Francia countered the economic power of the creóles by imposing heavy taxes and fines. He nationalized huge ranches and gave the land as homesteads to poor Paraguayans. He attacked one of the most powerful institutions associated with the creóles and Spaniards: the Catholic Church. Francia appointed his own bishops without approval of the Pope, and in 1824 he nationalized Church lands and took fiscal control of Catholic wealth, even while Pope Leo XII ordered the American Church to aid Spain’s king in reestablishing his rule over all the former colonies.
The creole elite privately began to voice its dissent to Francia’s absolute power early on in his reign and gathered around the only political alternative, the career military man Fulgencio Yegros. Francia, however, during the first stages of his rule, built a state prison system with cells beneath the two largest Asunción military barracks to be used in response to any opposition he might face. Relationships between Francia and the diminishing elite remained tense for the next six years, until they came to a head in February 1820. Francia was informed of an assassination plot against him (by none other than one of its conspirators, Juan Bogarin) that would have resulted in Yegros assuming civil authority. He immediately had all the suspected conspirators arrested, and within a week imprisoned more than 100 members from the elite families. By the end of June 1821, 70 of them had been executed. Francia’s reign of terror had begun, and this systematic arrest and murder of his suspected opponents lasted until 1823. He imprisoned even his own mother for conspiracy against him. When the terror finally subsided, Francia had exterminated much of the Spanish and creole elite.
He was left, though, with lingering paranoia. In I the Supreme this paranoia is conveyed in one of the opening passages, in which Francia suspects his imprisoned enemies of penning an impertinent note even though, as his aide remarks, “They’ve been confined to utter darkness for years now” (Roa Bastos, I the Supreme, p. 5).
Any opponents of Francia’s regime—by word, gesture, or action—faced imprisonment, torture, and murder. Foreigners, always regarded as possible spies, had to gain the government’s permission to enter, remain in, or leave the country. As English essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote, “Paraguay had grown to be, like some mousetraps and other contrivances of art and nature, easy to enter, impossible to get out of” (Carlyle, p. 551). Already wary of intruders, both foreign and domestic, Francia established unquestionable authority and grew progressively insular in his political and social policies.
Unlike the social elite, however, the common people of Paraguay benefited from this absolute reign. Francia inaugurated Paraguay’s first public education system, created a public works program, maintained fiscal stability, reduced taxes to a minimum, and diversified the economy to include cattle ranching and more agriculture. The nation prospered during his relatively stable and tranquil reign, booming in population as refugees from troubled neighboring states fled to Paraguay’s comparative peace. In 1798 there were only about 100,000 people in Paraguay, but this number increased almost fourfold, to 375,000, by the late 1830s.
Instead of reserving government positions for members of the elite families—the standard colonial practice—Francia appointed commoners. As a result there was one serious problem: many of the appointees lacked the education necessary to fulfill their duties. The dictator himself attempted to take up the slack, and for most of his reign obsessively managed the government and nation. For example, he frequently audited the ledgers of the state’s tax collectors.
Francia devoted himself to his work and lived almost as a hermit in his palace, issuing forth his orders and decrees to the far corners of the land. Unlike most dictators he did not accumulate personal wealth, but lived simply on a small salary. Nor did he ever accept gifts, in contrast to colonial governors who expected lavish presents from favor seekers. Francia’s honesty was so well known that it became proverbial.
While his devotion to the nation raised the standard of living and won him great respect in many quarters—the Guaraní Indians referred to him as Karaí-Guasú (Great Lord)—he fostered the belief that Paraguayans were politically childlike and incompetent. Only the indispensable dictator was capable of making decisions, no matter how minute, for the country. He never forgave his enemies, and their rage against him outlasted his death and was passed down to their descendants. One historian exclaimed: “To this day it is impossible to hold a rational conversation about Francia with many of the descendants of Paraguay’s former upper class” (White, p. 12).
On September 20, 1840, El Supremo became El Difunto (The Dead One). Several months after his death, some enemies from among the upper class, not satisfied that he had died, stole his body from the cathedral in Asunción, and it has not been seen since. With Francia gone, his contemporary José Artigas reminded those left behind that the shadow of the man who had proclaimed himself the Perennial Dictator “will long continue to float over Paraguay” (Williams, p. 97).
Foreign relations
Between 1810 and 1880 fighting and civil wars were rife between rival American groups throughout the former Spanish vice-royalty of Rio de la Plata, a territory that included modern Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and parts of Bolivia. Brazil also entered into conflicts over control of the Río de la Plata, in which the Uruguay, Paraná, and Paraguay rivers converge and then flow into the Atlantic Ocean. The group that controlled the Rio de la Plata had a stranglehold on these rivers and therefore on the interiors of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, since these waterways were the interior states’ only connection to the rest of the world. The end of the Cisplatine War (1825-28), fought between Brazil and Argentina, would finish Brazil’s ambitions by creating the buffer state of Uruguay in 1828.
The only country that escaped the bloody turbulence of the era was Paraguay; Francia insisted on a strict neutrality in dealing with his neighboring countries. But at the same time, Paraguayan trade in yerba maté depended upon free passage on the rivers, which was often suppressed by hostilities and political pressures. Early in his reign Francia gave preferential treatment to two adventurous Scottish merchant brothers: John Parish Robertson and William Parish Robertson, with the hope that they would convince the British government to guarantee freedom of transport on the Río de la Plata. But in 1815 he saw that the brothers represented interests in the porteño government and would secure no British pledge. He expelled them in retaliation.
Also of concern were the Brazilian raiding parties that threatened the northern frontier of Paraguay. In 1825 the Brazilian envoy Antonio Manoel Correia da Câmara arrived in Asunción to seek Francia’s pledge of neutrality in the upcoming Cisplantine War with Argentina. Francia pressed the envoy for an end to Brazilian raids, but despite the envoy’s assurances to the contrary, the raids continued. When Correia da Câmara returned to Paraguay in 1827, an outraged Francia did not allow him to enter the nation beyond the border town of Itapúa. Believing that he could not pursue his diplomatic mission in the capital, Correia da Câmara left Paraguay out of frustration in 1829.
Francia maintained a strong defense force and a network of spies on the border out of his fear
“POLITICAL CATECHISM”
In the “Political Catechism,” which Francia prepared for use in primary schools, the dictator outlined the principles that guided his transformation of Paraguayan society:
Question: What is your country’s government?
Answer: The reformed fatherland.
Question: What do you mean by reformed fatherland?
Answer: Its regulation by known and just principles founded in nature, in man’s necessities, and the conditions of society.
Question: Who is it that declaims against this system?
Answer: The old Spanish government officials that proposed that we surrender to Bonaparte, and those ambitious for authority.
Question: How can one prove that our system is good?
Answer: By positive deeds.
Question: What are those positive deeds?
Answer: The abolition of slavery without affecting the owners, and to esteem public works as the common burden, with the total suppression of taxes.
(Francia in White, p, 101)
that Argentina and Brazil would unite to divvy up his small nation. Defense centered on the southern Paraguayan province of Misiones, a beautiful land on the frontier with Argentina and Brazil. Its bountiful crops of yerba maté and tobacco made it an attractive prize for an invading force. Skirmishes with the Argentine province of Corrientes went on for several years in the 1830s. Francia’s intent to keep Paraguay isolated and aloof from external conflicts was such that a porteño newspaper at the end of hostilities in 1834 wrote: “Paraguay did not want peace, nor war, with anyone” (White, p. 151).
The Novel in Focus
Plot summary
The plot of I the Supreme is deceptively simple: the dying dictator Francia ponders his reign and justifies his policies and opinions against the words of his detractors. The complication is that words and writings are themselves under attack in this ambitious literary experiment. Francia’s thoughts and dictations do not follow a linear progression, but travel back and forward in time and place—even into the future. They sometimes contradict, sometimes confirm one another, appearing in a variety of documents written (supposedly) by different hands. In counterpoint to Francia’s words are footnotes that contain historical and allegedly historical documents written by his contemporaries and later commentators. These and other explanatory notes—indeed all the manifold texts that comprise the novel—have been brought together by the “Compiler,” who claims that the book is a legitimate historical documentary, not a novel.
The following summary details what there is of a storyline, then continues with other elements (descriptions of the characters and documents) that are as key to this novel as its storyline.
Storyline. The main storyline is a word-byword transcription of Francia’s verbal ruminations about himself and his presidency. The setting for this “action” is his palace during the last months of his reign and life. The text varies in tone as Francia’s demeanor shifts; it is variously eloquent, impassioned, paranoid, self-aggrandizing, and self-loathing. Francia covers his entire reign along with other events from the past and future. He sometimes telescopes events that occurred at different times into the same moment.
The novel opens with the contents of a note found tacked to the door of the cathedral in Asunción. Signed in the dictator’s name, it orders that, upon the death of Francia, his corpse be decapitated, his head be raised on a pike for three days in the main plaza, his military and civil servants be executed, and after the three days his remains be cremated and the ashes thrown into the river. Apparently just handed the note, Francia accuses his enemies of having written it. This event triggers the next 400 pages in which Francia obsessively dictates thoughts on his reign and other topics to his personal secretary.
The point he emphasizes most often is that his decisions were prudent and necessary for the time and place, despite the conflict between his draconian, often brutal, politics and his Enlightenment ideals. This self-justification is aimed against the polemics of his enemies and the denunciations and characterizations of historians. However, a certain amount of self-criticism does appear as Francia doubts his decisions and questions his illusions. As the novel reaches its end, the self-doubts increase exponentially, along with the fragmentation of the texts themselves into smaller and choppier bits and pieces.
Francia’s voice finally comes to a halt in the middle of a sentence: “So then, Supreme Deceased, what if we leave you as you are, condemned to perpetual hunger to gobble down an egg, because you didn’t know …” (I the Supreme, p. 424). The implication is that Francia has died even while desperately trying to get everything written down. After this the Compiler has added an appendix full of documents related to a 1961 inquiry into the location of the dictator’s corpse. The novel ends with the “Final Compiler’s Note,” the first lines of which claim to explain the composition of the book:
The compilation has been culled—it would be more honest to say coaxed—from some twenty thousand dossiers, published and unpublished; from an equal number of other volumes, pamphlets, periodicals, correspondences and all manner of testimony—gleaned, garnered, resurrected, inspected—in public and private libraries and archives. To this must be added the versions collected from the sources of oral tradition, and some fifteen thousand hours of interviews, recorded on tape, filled with inexactitudes and confusions.
(I the Supreme, p. 435)
The cast of characters
José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia: the dying Supreme Dictator of Paraguay. The character of Francia enjoys two different temporal perspectives. Primarily he speaks of events from the vantage point of his last year of life in 1840, but occasionally he has knowledge of books that have not yet been written, of events that have not yet occurred—such as the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in the 1930s—and of devices not yet invented—such as an electric instrument of torture. Apparently in these passages Francia is speaking from the grave, and has the perspective of the author Roa Bastos from the 1970s. This voice beyond the grave amplifies the idea that Francia is literally the Perpetual Dictator, whose reign and ideas still loom over Paraguay in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Policarpo Patino: Francia’s personal secretary who takes his dictation throughout the novel. Like a machine, he appears to achieve the impossible task of transcribing every word as it is spoken, including his own exchanges with the dictator. Patino is an uneducated, fearful, and obsequious man, more concerned for his own comforts than his master’s great philosophies. Francia eventually sentences him to death.
Juan Parish Robertson: an opportunistic Scottish adventurer who takes advantage of Francia, until the dictator realizes the true nature of the man. Robertson conducts an affair with Francia’s octogenarian neighbor, Juana Esquivel, purely out of greed for her lavish gifts. After Robertson and his brother are expelled from Paraguay, they write a scathing account of Francia, depicting his dictatorship as a cruel tyranny.
Pilar the Black: Francia’s trusted personal servant who steals from the palace to support his mistress. He goes mad and wears the dictator’s clothes, which make the two men indistinguishable. He attacks his employer who is then forced to have him executed, but who suffers thereafter from guilt for Pilar’s death.
General Manuel Belgrano: porteño general who led a small army against Paraguay in 1810-11, but was defeated. He later led a diplomatic mission to Asunción and became a friend of Francia, who sees him as an honorable man.
Antonio Manoel Correia da Câmara: underhanded Brazilian envoy who breaks his word to end raids on Paraguay’s northern frontier.
Bernardo Velazco: Royalist governor of Paraguay who attacks Francia’s policies and personality in a series of letters.
Sultán: Francia’s dog and alter ego. He appears as an imaginary voice within Francia’s head that mocks the dying dictator for his failures and the loss of his idealism.
The Compiler: neither a traditional character nor a conventional narrator, the Compiler claims to have found, arranged, and annotated the documents that form the novel. From a perspective of the second half of the twentieth century, he claims that the book is an authentic scholarly work of history, containing documents from and about Francia’s dictatorship. He makes his presence known through recurrent “Compiler’s Notes,” or footnotes in the novel, and through parenthetical notes indicating lost pages, burnt text, and marginalia in the old documents; for example, “(edge of the folio burned)” (I the Supreme, p. 10).
The documents
The Compiler has conjoined several different types of documents to form the pseudo-documentary Yo el Supremo. Each has its own particular narrative characteristics.
The main text is the transcription of Francia’s verbose dictation to his secretary Patino. These sections contain Francia’s monologue as well as dialogue between him and Patino about the ongoing dictation. Francia regularly contradicts himself, corrects himself, and lambastes Patiño’s stupidity. Although the text appears to catch every word spoken, including those about the dictation itself, without a recording device such a feat is impossible. This impossibility mocks the supposed objectivity of real historical documents and histories.
The entire transcription is a pun with a serious message: the dictator is dictating, an irony not lost upon Francia himself. His aim in dictation is to order events and create a history that affirms his reign in contradistinction to the negative treatment he has received in the words of others. But his own words betray his version of order; out of ignorance or distraction Patino continually makes errors in his transcription and transposes letters to form inadvertent puns and vulgarities. In his obsession to mull over every aspect of his reign, Francia cannot even prevent factual errors in his own version or refrain from exposing his self-doubts and weaknesses.
Scattered through the novel are selections from Francia’s private notebooks written in his hand, which continue the same themes as the main dictation. These selections are joined by a variety of other texts, including what appear to be transcriptions straight from Francia’s stream of consciousness, although the Compiler indicates that they were scribbled by the dictator himself. These sections provide the closest view of his inner psyche. Toward the end of the novel Sultán, the dictator’s dog, appears in Francia’s head as something like an alter ego that accuses and mocks him for his obsession with creating texts.
The novel also features the Perpetual Circular, pronouncements by the dictator on his reign. For example, at the start of one such pronouncement he writes of his detractors, “The pasquinaders consider it beneath my dignity to watch tirelessly as I do over the dignity of the republic in order to safeguard it against those eager to wreak its downfall. Foreign states. Rapacious governments, insatiable grabbers of what belongs to others. Their perfidy and bad faith have long been well known to me” (I the Supreme, p. 76). The idea that such circulars are perpetual signifies both the status of his dictatorship for life and the validity these pronouncements continue to have for Paraguay and Latin America in the twentieth century.
The Compiler has added other documents in footnotes and an appendix, all of which refer to, clarify, or contradict some portion of Francia’s testimony. These texts include actual and fictitious documents that are presented as legitimate. Like the opening letter calling for his decapitation, they are illusions that play into the story of Francia. The mix of fact and fiction continues the novel’s parody of standard histories.
Enlightened ruler or despotic megalomaniac?
Because Francia made enemies of the creole upper class—the group that has written the histories of Paraguay—he has consistently been portrayed as an archetypal despot. Instead of a liberator, he is known as a tyrant who isolated Paraguay to submit its people to his will.
The earliest accounts about Francia for foreign audiences were written by men with whom
THE DICTATOR RESPONDS
Johann Rudolph Rengger, a Swiss doctor whom Francia had J refused permission to leave Paraguay for four years, attacked the dictator in The Reign of Doctor Joseph Gaspar Roderick de Francia. Francia responded in an article that appeared in a Buenos Aires newspaper on August 21, 1830:
This is the man who … has published a pretended historical essay, of which the object evidently is to undermine the reputation of the Dictator; but the raving and contemptible volume ought rather to have been styled an Essay of Lies. It may, without exaggeration, be affirmed that, as regards Paraguay and its government, it contains not a word of truth.
(Francia, p. 375)
he had had conflicts. The Robertson brothers, for example, wrote a scathing three-volume portrait, with one volume entitled Francia’s Reign of Terror. Exotic and often fantastic accounts of the dictator and the far-flung jungles of Paraguay appeared as occasional novelties in the nineteenth-century European press. The creole elite, in addition to allegedly desecrating his corpse, carried out an anti-Francia propaganda campaign that attacked his character in print. Even the dictator’s University of Córdoba records have been amended with a pen as follows:
Afterwards he was President of the Republic of Paraguay, and a very atrocious tyrant who has bloodied the history of that country with a world wide scandal. He was a monster who tore out the entrails of his country.
(A detractor in White, p. 12)
Critical portrayals and personal attacks like these became the source material for later histories of his regime, written by historians who did not take into account the polemical nature of their sources. I the Supreme reflects such contemporary works and later histories in the Compiler’s footnotes and in Francia’s obsessive self-justifications against their words.
Not all opinions about Francia have been negative. Auguste Comte ranked Francia with other great American revolutionaries, such as Simón Bolívar and Benjamin Franklin. In the 1840s the English essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote an essay praising Francia’s strong rule of law during a period of social upheaval. Attempts have also been made by some historians to vindicate his reputation. In a move that parallels Roa Bastos’s compilation of documents in I the Supreme, José Antonio Vázquez put together a compendium of primary sources for the regime with an interlocking narrative. Such efforts, however, have shown little effect.
Roa Bastos in I the Supreme gives the fictional Francia, at least, a chance to speak out against the ill treatment to which his memory has been subjected. Throughout the novel Francia differentiates between He—the odious tyrant he has been portrayed as—and Í—the man he sees himself as being. But his verbose self-justifications spiral away from him as much as they clear his name, due to his own self-doubts and to the slippery nature of language, which proves unable to secure the stability and order that he craves. The question of whether his rule was a travesty or triumph remains unanswered, but the novel interrogates history and language in a way that casts into doubt existing evaluations.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
Stroessner: a latter-day Francia?
After several years of political instability and mass emigration following Paraguay’s 1947 civil war, in 1954 General Alfred Stroessner took over as head of state, ruling the country with a totalitarian hand until 1989. A tradition of authoritarian rule in Paraguay had grown since the nineteenth century, beginning with Francia and continuing with dictators Carlos Antonio López (1840-62) and his son Francisco Solano López (1862-70).
Similar to Francia 140 years earlier, Stroess-ner took charge of a nation that suffered from geographic isolation, economic deprivation, and a political identity crisis caused by years of political in-fighting and civil war. Also like Francia, Stroessner ruled over a Paraguayan population that more readily gave its political support to individual personalities than it did to institutions or ideas. But unlike Francia, Stroessner declared that he was not a dictator, despite his absolute powers and tailoring of laws to harass his opposition, which earned him a horrendous record of human rights violations.
Like Francia’s appeals to common Paraguayans, one of Stroessner’s first moves was to gain the support of the masses, which he did by converting the Colorado party (the major political party of the day) into a popular nation-wide movement. He used this popular support to promote a new political doctrine called stronismo, which promised renewed strength and stability in government and gave him unconditional power. For Paraguayans who had suffered under the instability of previous administrations, Stroessner was seen as a comforting paternalistic figure who would guide the nation toward a brighter future. Thanks in part to a media blitz promoted by Stroessner himself, he became a symbol of national solidarity and growth, seen cutting ribbons at ceremonies, distributing graduation diplomas, inaugurating buildings, and meeting with prominent international figures. Stronismo, then, was designed to give Paraguayans a sense of political unity and tranquillity, but its true nature was far more brutal.
Like most authoritarian leaders Stroessner ensured the loyalty of his people through intimidation and a heavy emphasis on law and order. A strong police presence and a record of torture and executions cemented the foundations of stronismo. Given the degree of political violence recently witnessed by the politically unsophisticated Paraguayans, Stroessner’s strong-arm tactics were appreciated as a laudable commitment to law and order. Stroessner worked to convince the underprivileged that democratic developments were actually an affront to the established order of stronismo. In other words, anyone who desired a more competitive and responsive political system was acting against the best interests of the nation. In the end, Stroessner’s totalitarian society brought more political apathy than genuine support for the regime.
Unlike Francia, who sought an end to the economic advantages enjoyed by the upper class at the expense of the poor, Stroessner privileged his country’s elite. In fact, under stronismo the gap between rich and poor widened at an accelerated pace. In the 1970s massive construction projects and public works, such as the joint Paraguayan-Brazilian hydro-electric dam at Itaipu, brought a great deal of foreign credit into the country. The wealth lined the pockets of the well-to-do and well connected, and allowed the government to convince Paraguayans of its usefulness and distract them from its inadequacies.
Just the same, Stroessner’s repressive and biased policies caused thousands to flee the nation in search of greater economic and political opportunities. The 1980s brought the collapse of Paraguay’s credit-flush economy, and popular support for the dictator plummeted as the economy failed. In 1989 a military coup ousted Stroessner from office. Some political exiles, such as Roa Bastos, were able to return to Paraguay for the first time in years.
Literary context
Given the region’s political history, it is no surprise that Latin American literature abounds with novels about dictators; Ramón del Balba-Inclán’s The Tyrant and Miguel Angel Asturias’s The President (1946) are among the earliest examples. (Asturias’s Men of Maize is covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times.) Around 1962 Mario Vargas Llosa (see The Storyteller) and Carlos Fuentes (see The Death of Artemio Cruz) approached a number of Latin American writers—including Gabriel García Márquez (see One Hundred Years of Solitude) , Julio Cortázar (see Blow-Up and Other Stories) , and Roa Bastos—with the intent of putting together a collection of short stories about dictators. That particular project failed, but each writer agreed to write a novel on the subject. Vargas Llosa produced Conversation in the Cathedral, which evokes the regime of Peru’s General Manuel A. Odría. García Márquez wrote The Autumn of the Patñarch, about a fictional dictator, in 1975. A year earlier, no less than three such works appeared: Alejo Carpentieri The Recourse of the Method, Ernesto Sabato’s Abbadón the Exterminator, and Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme. (Carpentieri The Kingdom of This World is covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times.) Carpentier did not base his work on an actual dictator but blended facets of many dictators into one, while Sabato chose to depict a dictatorship—the waning days of Argentina’s series of military rulers from 1966 to 1973—rather than a lone despot. Added to these are José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers , both novels about dictatorships in Cuba. The majority of these works are set in the twentieth century, which makes Roa Bastos’s work stand out in his choice of a nineteenth-century dictator.
Reviews
Soon after its publication, I the Supreme received praise as an innovative work. Jean Franco commented that “Roa Bastos’s brilliant idea is to let the supreme dictator talk back” while at the same time allowing him to remain at the mercy of what others have written about him (Franco, p. 925). By the time the novel was translated into English, it had gained major international acclaim. Carlos Fuentes described the novel as “an impressive portrait, not only of El Supremo, but of a colonial society in the throes of learning how to swim, or how best to drown, in the seas of national independence” (Fuentes, p. 1). Michiko Kakutani, with a caveat about the often rhetorical and cumbersome feel of the work, exclaimed, “the novel remains a prodigious meditation not only on history and power, but also on the nature of language itself” (Kakutani, p. 25).
—Emerson Spencer Olin and John Roleke
For More Information
Carlyle, Thomas. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1858.
Foster, David William. Augusto Roa Bastos. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.
Francia, José Gaspar Rodríguez de. “Notes Made in Paraguay by El Dictador Francia on the Volume of John Rengger.” In Francia’s Reign of Terror. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1839.
Franco, Jean. “Paranoia in Paraguay.” Times Literary Supplement, August 15, 1975, 925.
Fuentes, Carlos. Review of I the Supreme. The New York Times Book Review, April 6, 1986, 1.
Kakutani, Michiko. Review of I the Supreme. The New York Times, April 2, 1986, 25.
Miranda, Carlos R. The Stroessner Era: Authoritarian Rule in Paraguay. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990.
Roa Bastos, Augusto. I the Supreme. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
White, Richard Alan. Paraguay’s Autonomous Revolution, 1810-1840. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978.
Williams, John Hoyt. The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800-1870. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1979.