The purpose of this research is to examine Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz, with a view toward showing how Artemio's character personifies the ultimate betrayal of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which Artemio's character develops, and then to show how Fuentes uses him as an analogue for the success of the goals of the revolution on one hand, and for the failure of the ideals of the revolution on the other.
Artemio is an emblem of the successful revolutionary who has co opted the goals of the revolution to achieve economic gain and a more generalized personal power. To put it another way, one set of oligarchs (disguised as petty bourgeois) has supplanted the other, and by the time the new oligarchy has been established, one can hardly tell the new regime from the old one, where the mass of people is concerned. Whatever ideals of property redistribution that may have been contained in the hearts of the revolutionaries are superseded by more immediate, parochial interests. The trade off for Mexico has been between what emerges as having been the foolishly repressive Diaz cadre of bullies and the revolutionary bourgeoisie to whom physical torture may be repellent but for whom the mass of Mexican peasantry in whose name the revolution was fought is also an afterthought. In this connection, Hart comments that one of the principal factors in the revolution of 1910 was "pequena burguesa disillusionment with dictatorship and boss rule" (4:9). Had Diaz been more genteel, perhaps, the peasantry (which was deprived and repressed) and bourgeoisie never would have fought on the same side. As it was, of course, after the revolution the bourgeoisie's gentility kept the peasantry as materially oppressed as it had ever been. But the symbol of a common revolution retained power with erstwhile cross class allies long enough for the better educated and financed to entr...