Guatemala City (Guatemala), 1899 – Madrid (Spain), 1974

By Flávio Aguiar

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967, he descended from a wealthy Guatemalan family. He studied law in his country and anthropology in Paris, where he was influenced by the surrealist group and many other Latin American writers such as René Depestre. In 1942, he was elected a deputy and later appointed ambassador to Mexico and France. With a body of work characterized by its militant nature, which earned him the Lenin Peace Prize (1966), his first significant book, Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), points to the paths of his best literary production, developed in a rich, baroque language marked by the Mayan language and culture.

Following in the footsteps of Guatemalans Wyld Ospina and Flavio Herrera, he incorporated indigenous elements into regionalism. One of his most famous titles, Hombres de maíz (1949), weaves together popular misery and mysticism to illuminate the actions of colonizers exploiting peasant lands. He merges the mythical and the marvelous with the violent indigenous reality through a profusion of regional images and terms. His work resonates with that of Alejo Carpentier, affirming, however, the pre-Columbian memory in opposition to the contemporary myths recorded by the Cuban writer.

He does not shy away from the traditional dictator novel, a recurring center in the works of expressive writers such as the Venezuelan Arturo Uslar Pietri. Published after being censored for protesting against oppression and terror, El señor presidente (1946) caricatures the dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera through the struggle between the forces of good (the people) and those of evil (the dictator). In 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas came to power, forcing him to initially exile in Chile, then in Argentina, where he could not remain due to anti-communist repression.

Miguel Ángel Asturias and writer Roman Francis Pacurariu in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1961 (Image reproduction/Wikimedia Commons)

He published the trilogy Viento fuerte (1952), El Papa verde (1954), Los ojos de los enterrados (1960), in which he denounced various forms of imperialism against Latin America, similar to another fiction writer and political activist from Trinidad and Tobago, Cyril Lionel Robert James. He translated indigenous poetry and wrote essays. Another work includes América, fábula de fábulas (1972).