4 ideas
A half-mad beggar called the Pelele kills Colonel José Parrales Sonriente, one of the President's men, after the colonel taunts him. The regime ignores the real killer and uses the death to accuse its political enemies, General Eusebio Canales and the lawyer Abel Carvajal. Witnesses are tortured into confirming the false story, and Carvajal is executed for a crime everyone in power knows he did not commit.
Miguel Cara de Ángel, the President's handsome favorite, is ordered to help General Canales flee so that he can be shot while escaping. Cara de Ángel instead falls in love with and marries Canales's daughter Camila, and this private act of loyalty is treated as betrayal. He is sent to a dungeon, where a planted informer tells him Camila has become the President's mistress, and he dies of despair while she is actually living elsewhere with their son.
The dictator rarely has to act in person, because fear turns officials, jailers, informers, neighbors and servants into self-directed instruments of his will. Each person denounces, lies or looks away to protect themselves, so the regime's cruelty is spread across countless small acts of complicity. The leader's absence from the scene makes his power feel total rather than weaker.
Hallucination, dream sequences, repeated sounds and distorted speech show how dictatorship feels from the inside, not only what it does. When truth depends on the ruler's whim, ordinary perception becomes unreliable and daily life takes on the logic of a bad dream. Read this way, the surreal style is itself evidence about what tyranny does to people's shared sense of reality.