Asunción (Paraguay), 1917 – 2005

By Flávio Aguiar

The genesis of Roa Bastos’s writing lies in his exile, divided between Argentina and France, after he left Paraguay in 1945 as a correspondent for the newspaper El País in Asunción. He returned forty years later with the fall of the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989). Poetry marked his literary debut in the 1940s, and, along with prominent figures like Josefina Plá, he was instrumental in the aesthetic renewal of Paraguayan literature. However, it was in prose that his work solidified.

His first novel, Hijo de hombre (1960), focused on the terror inflicted by successive dictatorial regimes in Paraguay. His persistence in exposing the degenerate underpinnings of military politics continued with Yo el supremo (1974), a landmark of Hispanic-American literature, where the narrative voice is that of a dictator who plays with past and present, revealing the complicity between writing and power. This work earned him the Cervantes Prize (1989), and his Paraguayan citizenship was revoked in 1982.

Like the Peruvian José María Arguedas, he adopted distinctly lyrical elements to depict national reality, using a lexicon rich in Guarani indigenous vocabulary. His commitment to social justice was also a recurring theme, as seen in the novel Vigilia del almirante (1992), where he critically and ironically addressed the issue of the discovery—and cover-up—of Latin America.

Similar to the Brazilian Érico Veríssimo, he is recognized for questioning the relationship between the construction of official history and national elites. He dedicated himself to producing short stories, essays, plays, and film scripts. Another work of his is Contravida (1994).