This is a genuinely prophetic passage. Guzman Bento is the type of the brutal
dictator whose goal is absolute state power. When we recall that Nostromo was
witten in 1904, before the totalitarian reigns of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini,
we might well believe that Conrad had seen the sanguinary spectre of Guzman Bento
loosed to haunt the 20th Century.