This chapter examines the dictator's body in relation to the subject bodies, within the framework of what I refer to as the tropicality of being. Considering the body as a complex manifestation of power that generates unbridled metaphorical possibilities, the first part of the chapter primarily focuses on the intertextuality between García Márquez's El Otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) (1975) and L'État honteux (The Shameful State) (1981), mapping out the possible influence of the former on the latter text. Secondly, the chapter examines the textually embodied political culture under the paradigm of tropicality, a concept that runs through both authors’ works, underlining the ambiguous coexistence of vitality/precarity and scarcity/excess as the historical reality of the tropical body/society. This section draws on the varied imageries of tropicality from across the novels of the two authors to examine the intertextual ways in which they construct literary motifs and subvert political discourse in (con)texts where the celebration of life is tragically contiguous with the banalisation of death.