Real-World Influences
The idea of a military dictatorship is old, perhaps surprisingly so. In fact, the very term "dictator" stems from an office that existed in The Roman Republic. While it was originally a temporary position only used in times of great crisis, Sulla re-established the office and made it a lifetime position late in the Republic's life, resulting in the word gaining its current connotations. In Feudal Japan, meanwhile, political power became concentrated in a military leader known as the shogun, with the Emperor reduced to a figurehead whose powers and duties were mostly ceremonial in nature. In the aftermath of the English Civil War and the abolition of the monarchy, Oliver Cromwell seized power from Parliament and took the office of "Lord Protector", a position that was briefly inherited by his son Richard before the monarchy was restored.However, it was in the 19th century that the trope as we know it began to emerge, and it took shape in Latin America during and after the various wars of independence. While certain Haitian revolutionary leaders had elements of it, it was in the Spanish colonies of Central and South America that examples of the first men who truly fit this trope appeared: ones who, more often than not, held the at least de facto title of caudillo
.While there are historians who believe that early examples of caudillos can be found in the conquistadores who conquered vast tracts of the New World in the name of the Spanish crown, or even as far back as the military leaders who fought the Moors during the Reconquista, they first took on a recognizable form during and after the Spanish American wars of independence. Against the backdrop of these wars, when violence and turmoil spread like wildfire and were stubbornly persistent, military strongmen could impose order and protect the people. Many of these men were able to gain huge amounts of power, both during the wars and their aftermath. Unlike the United States, Spanish America had no real tradition of democratic government; unlike with Brazil, state institutions in these former colonies were effectively destroyed, which meant a lack of continuity of government. As a result, a successful caudillo was frequently able to essentially build his own government from scratch. This was a major departure from previous examples of military rule, where there was generally at least the pretext of respect for established and accepted norms, often with "civilian" (for lack of a better term) officials able to keep their positions. The early 19th century in Latin America is frequently called the "Age of Caudillos", and rule by the caudillo (known as caudillismo) continued into the 20th century. Even after the age of the old-school caudillos came to an end, Latin American countries (even non-Hispanophone ones) were frequently under the control of military governments.
The Trope Codifier is likely Rafael Trujillo, who had the chest of medals, megalomania, Egopolis, brutality, corruption and Caribbean island to match; he was and is still considered one of the cruelest and most outright tyrannical of all caudillos for his fascistic ruling style, and even funded terrorist activities in neighboring nations, namely trying to kill the president of Venezuela and even targeting the United Statesnote . His image as this was cemented once and for all in The Feast of the Goat and In the Time of the Butterflies.
Aside from Trujillo, common inspirations include Fidel Castronote , Fulgencio Batista, Hudson Austin, Juan Domingo Perón, Juan Manuel de Rosas, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Solano Lopez, Alfredo Stroessner, Juan Velasco Alvarado, Antonio López de Santa Anna, Porfirio Diaz, Victoriano Huerta, Paul Magloire, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the Somoza dynasty, Jorge Ubico Castenada, Manuel Noriega, Dési Bouterse, Juan Vicente Gomez, Marcos Perez Jimenez, and Hugo Chávez. The many generals that led the Argentine and Brazilian military regimes are also favorites.
While traditionally Latin American, this type of villain can be based around any nation, particularly those of various developing and/or third-world regions across the globe. This trope is often used to make an Anvilicious point about said real-life dictator's policies.
The Middle East and North Africa is another favourite location in fiction for these types of rulers to thrive, especially in more contemporary works set after The Gulf War or during The War on Terror. Dictators such as these used to be contrasted with more traditional MENA governments, but now they're more likely to be contrasted with radical Islamists. The most popular are Saddam Hussein for the Middle East and Muammar Gaddafi for North Africa (even after their deaths), but other objects of satire are Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Abd al-Karim Qasim, Omar al-Bashir, Houari Boumédiène and Hosni Mubarak.
If East or Southeast Asian, expect them to be an Expy of Yuan Shikai, Chiang Kai-shek, Hideki Tojo, Khorloogiin Choibalsan, Suharto, Ferdinand Marcos, Park Chung-hee (and his successor Chun Doo-hwan)note , Lon Nol, Hun Sen, Ne Win, Than Shwe, Souphanouvong, Phoumi Nosavan or Plaek Phibunsongkhram. But the most popular examples by far are naturally The Rulers of North Korea.
If European, one can usually expect them to be based on fascist dictators such as Benito Mussolini, Ante Pavelić, and Engelbert Dollfuss; or communists, such as Leonid Brezhnev, Nicolae Ceausescu and Josip Broz Tito if Eastern. Other prototypes include Francisco Franconote , António de Oliveira Salazarnote , Ioannis Metaxas, Georgios Papadopoulos, Miklós Horthy, Ion Antonescu, Alexander Lukashenko, Ramzan Kadyrov (and his father Akhmad), and Slobodan Milošević. Mussolini and Franco were popular inspirations for this trope during their lifetime and for some time after they died, but Milosevic and Lukashenko have replaced them in pop culture for the 21st century.
Sub-Saharan Africa is another common location. Usually, generalissimos from this region are based on Idi Amin and Charles Taylor. Amin embodied the thuggish and arrogant military officer that was common during the Cold War, but has been overtaken in popularity by the present day by Taylor, who embodied the stereotypical African warlord that has become the face of this trope for African settings. Other examples are Siad Barre, Mobutu Sese Seko, Laurent-Desire Kabila, Juvénal Habyarimana, Yakubu Gowon, Sani Abacha, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Thomas Sankara, Blaise Compaoré, Samuel Doe, Seyni Kountché, Moussa Traoré, Robert Mugabe, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Yoweri Museveni, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Hissene Habre. Since postcolonial Africa is infamously unstable, examples of this type frequently come to power by staging a Military Coup or winning a Civil War, but ones who take over through less overtly violent means are also fairly common.
There are also somewhat less popular areas a Generalissimo can hail from. These include (among others) Central Asia (influences: Nursultan Nazarbayev, Islam Karimov, Saparmurat Niyazov, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow and Askar Akayev), South Asia (influences: Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf, Ziaur Rahman, Hussain Muhammad Ershad and Mohammad Daoud Khan) and Oceania (frequently influenced by Sitiveni Rabuka)
While never an actual head of state, Che Guevara is sometimes parodied in such a manner as well, as is fellow beret-wearing rebel Jonas Savimbi, although Savimbi was an anti-communist and the polar opposite of Che politically. There are also other people who were never officially a head of state or head of government, but still get depicted in this light and have had some influence on various forms of the trope. These include Abdul Rashid Dostum, Alexander Kolchak, Grigory Mikhaylovich Semyonov, Symon Petliura, Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, Zhang Zuolin (and his son Zhang Xueliang and his subordinate Zhang Zongchang), Prince Johnson, Joshua Milton Blahyi and Joseph Kony.
Surprisingly, Adolf Hitler is rarely parodied in this manner, perhaps because he himself is enough of an acceptable target (although one of his henchmen, Hermann Goering, did famously dress this way). Joseph Stalin is sometimes parodied in this way and has influenced the communist variant of this trope, but, like Hitler, he is uniquely infamous enough to represent a specific archetype of his own. Like Stalin, Mao Zedong sometimes gets parodied like this and has influenced fictional examples (especially East Asian communist ones), but also like Stalin, he's iconic enough to be a stand-alone archetype. Pol Pot gets this treatment on occasion, but fictional portrayals are more likely to focus on the sheer madness and depravity of his rule. In the Middle East, Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Khameini are frequently parodied in a similar manner to this trope, but often combined with The Theocracy, Corrupt Church, or Middle Eastern Terrorists. Gamal Abdel Nasser has influenced the MENA variant of this trope, but he himself is generally not portrayed as being like this; instead, he's often portrayed as a positive example of an Arab military leader compared to Gaddafi, who styled himself during his lifetime as the heir to Nasser's legacy. Likewise, Józef Piłsudski styled himself in a manner similar to this trope and has influenced some takes on the European variant, but he's generally depicted in a more positive and respectable light than the archetype. Those rare military dictators who voluntarily give up their power (such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Olusegun Obasanjo, Simón Bolívar, and Jerry Rawlings) are, as a general rule of thumb, unlikely to be portrayed in this light.
