Land (1942) by Jorge Amado, The Shipyard (1961) by Juan Carlos Onetti, and Three Trapped Tigers (1967) by G. Cabrera Infante. But at present I have neither the time nor the energy to do so and so must remain content with their absence from the account I have constructed here. I hope that others will read their works and give to them the kind of significance they deserve. Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala : 1899' Asturias is essentially a political writer and a mythographer of more humane worlds; a writer whose stories are both lamentations over the terrors of dictatorships and the moral wildernesses they create as well as urgent recollections of myths of more generous times; a historian of pain and a man who knows that the one way to get release from cycles of violence is to learn once again from kinder and older civilisations ways of establishing a radically different relationship with the earth and all that abides on it His social and moral understanding was shaped by two contrary sets of experiences in his childhood and youth. His parents, who were financially comfortable, had to leave their home in Guatemala city after Estrada Cabrera seized power and abolished all traces of a democratic government Unfortunately for Guatemala, Cabrera's dictatorship was not a temporary aberration. He was followed by a series of dictators, each one of whom not only deepened the poverty of the country, added to its squalour, corruption and sorrow, but also inflicted upon it his own peculiar and unashamed kind of brutality. As one has come to expect in Latin America, each of these dictators was supported by US business companies (of which the United Fruit Co. was particularly notorious) and the Marines who had to be sent in often enough to protect them. Asturias came to hate the unholy alliance between local gangsters and foreign merchants and wrote a series of brilliant and popular novels attacking them. His first novel The President published only in 1946, after the dictatorship of Ubico ended, presents a grotesque world of mutilated beggars, madmen, rape, pigs, dunghills, political prisoners dragged bleeding across the city square, church bells. Hashing knives, wailing. Avoiding the dull formulas of socialist realism and its sentimentalism, the novel makes successful use of surrealist images, historical details, Goyaesque cartoons and fantastic verbal rhythms often verging on delirium, so as to create a demonic parody of a good city. Asturias's later political novels are angrier and more direct in their condemnation of puppet dictators and their US sponsors. These include the popular trilogy about banana plantations : Strong Wind (1950), The Green Pope (1954) and The Eyes of the Buried (1960). Apart from getting to know the profoundly evil world of political terror and economic ravage early in life, Asturias also came into contact with the native Indians. From the rhythms of their lives and from their stories he gathered hints of another kindlier and more vibrant vision of the world and of the possibilities of life in it Their stories memorialised the earth as a good place which was scat-Journal of Arts and Ideas 101