The Death of Artemio Cruz
Carlos Fuentes
 Artemio Cruz—soldier, politician, journalist, tycoon, lover: all corrupt—lies on his deathbed, recalling the shaping events of his life, from the Mexican Revolution through the development of the PRI—the Party of the Institutional Revolution. His family crowds around, pressing him to reveal the location of his will; a priest provides extreme unction, angling for a deathbed confession and reconciliation with the Church (while Artemio indulges in obscene thoughts about the birth of Jesus); his private secretary has come with audiotapes of various corrupt dealings, many with gringo diplomats and speculators. Punctuating the sordid record of betrayal is Cruz's awareness of his failing body and his keen attachment to sensual life. Seventy-one-year-old Artemio Cruz is dying. He is a very rich and powerful man, made ruthless, godless and corrupt by his hard childhood and his soldiering during the Mexican revolution during which he had cheated death several times and had done, and suffered, betrayals. After the revolution, through corrupt wheeling and dealing and use of force for self-aggrandizement he became extremely rich. He now owns vast tracks of land, companies, a newspaper and, by himself, he is a major political player. He has a wife and a daughter whom he hates and who he knows hate him. His wife blames him for the death of their only son whilst fighting in the Spanish civil war, perhaps trying to imitate his father's (fraudulent) heroisms during the Mexican civil war but wasn't able to duplicate his survival. Artemio Cruz loved his son. He had another love: a prostitute, during the civil war, whom he had kidnapped yet she learned to fall in love with him. He valued his memory of her because it was a love given to him when he was still a nobody. It is not made clear what struck him (perhaps a stroke or cancer). Artemio Cruz hears, recalls and vaguely see images. But he's in pain, can't talk and is immobilized. The narrator is in a state of perpetual delirium, like mutterings of a brilliant poet with a soaring fever, hovering between life and death, describing glimpses of heaven and hell. Finally his thoughts decay into a drawn-out death. The Death of Artemio Cruz is dedicated to sociologist C. Wright Mills, who Fuentes calls "the true voice of North America and great friend in the struggle for the people in Latin America."