Biopolitics and Authoritarian Power: A Foucauldian Reading of Latin American Dictator Novels by Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of authoritarian power in selected Latin American dictator novels by Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, supplemented by Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life. While existing scholarship on the Latin American dictator novel has predominantly emphasized protest, ideological resistance, and political opposition, this study argues that such approaches insufficiently account for the subtle and pervasive mechanisms through which authoritarian regimes govern everyday life. By offering a comparative reading of The Autumn of the Patriarch, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Conversation in the Cathedral, and The Feast of the Goat, the paper demonstrates how dictatorship operates as a biopolitical regime that regulates bodies, sexuality, fear, memory, and populations, while simultaneously deploying death as a normalized political strategy.

Through close textual analysis, the study shows how the dictator’s body functions as a symbolic extension of state power, how surveillance and fear become internalized forms of discipline, and how sexual violence and state killing serve as technologies of governance. Integrating necropolitics allows the analysis to move beyond Foucauldian life-management to address mass violence, disappearances, and historical erasure, revealing how citizens are reduced to bare life under authoritarian rule. Crucially, the paper reconceptualizes protest not as overt rebellion but as a life-struggle, manifested through survival, memory, silence, and everyday endurance. In doing so, the study challenges dominant protest-centered paradigms and contributes a nuanced theoretical framework for understanding power, resistance, and life in Latin American dictator fiction.