There is a tradition of dictator jokes in Latin America (‘What time is it?’ ‘Whatever time you say, General’), and there is even a genre known as the dictator novel, of which Autumn of the Patriarch is no doubt the most famous instance. When it was learned that the remains of Carlos Fuentes, who died last month, were to be taken to Montparnasse Cemetery, observers were not slow to note that Porfirio Díaz, the last Mexican despot – well, the last pre-revolutionary despot – is also buried there. The joke was not on Fuentes, whose moderate left-wing credentials were impeccable, but on the culture: in the end, how far from the dictator will any of us lie, in life or death? The old claim about the long Mexican reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party was that it represented an ideal combination of fascism and incompetence. In other versions the phrase was fascism mitigated by corruption. This line of thought actually recurs, I’m sure without any allusive intent, in Larry Charles’s The Dictator, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as the evil Oriental Admiral General Aladeen. An eager American dissident says the police in her country are fascists. ‘Yes,’ our hero says, ‘but not in a good way.’

LRB 7 June 2012 | PDF Download