Mexico’s New President Makes Novelists Swoon

Latin America’s caudillos, or charismatic strongmen, have always made good muses. The agonizing final days of liberator-turned-authoritarian Simon Bolivar inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write “The General in His Labyrinth.” Paraguayan dictator Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia was the template for Augusto Roa Bastos’s megalomaniacal tyrant in “I, the Supreme,” while Argentina’s Juan Peron fathered a small library of fevered tales.

So how will Mexico’s incoming President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador be portrayed? Due to take office in December, the self-styled populist redeemer is still a working draft. But few leaders have begun their mandate with such a keen sense of narrative destiny as the man Mexicans known as AMLO.