 Augusto Roa Bastos 's I , the Supreme ( Yo , el Supremo , 1974 ) is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth @-@ century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia . However , it is also a historical account , making use of real documents and accounts of people who knew Francia . Roa 's portrayal of a despot in Latin American fiction is distinguished " not only by the quantity of detail lavished on him , but by his remarkable capacity to seem at one moment a person , at another an embodiment of contradictory elements not usually associated with a single person , let alone a powerful tyrant " . Its title was derived from the fact that Francia referred to himself as " El Supremo " or " the Supreme " . Making use of non @-@ traditional writing techniques , the novel is composed of separate discourses with their own distinctive styles , and the demarcation between them is often blurred . Gerald Martin claims that Roa Bastos 's novel " was more immediately and unanimously acclaimed than any novel since One Hundred Years of Solitude , and critics seemed to suspect that its strictly historical importance might be even greater than that of García Márquez 's fabulously successful creation . " 
