What's Vargas Llosa really writing about in Feast of the Goat?

Note that the 3 strands of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, which I commented on yesterday are all "internal" strands - that is - each - the return of the estranged daughter, the disillusioned Trujillo aide, and Trujillo himself - all present us with a view of Trujillo's distatorship from the inside. This strategy is both crafty and disingenuous. Where it works best is through Vargas Llosa's making us as readers feel, if only for a few moments, as if this brutal tyranny is normal, healthy, jocular, hilarious - such as the long chapter I read last night about the celebratory dinner Trujillo holds for the U.S. Marine who trained him in his youth - the dinner full of quips (We are very generous in the DR, especially with bullets) and with offhand remarks about how Trujillo solved the Haitian problem by cutting thousands dead with machetes. We have to pause for a moment and regain our moral compass and think about this from the Haitian point of view - as a massacre and a genocide, as Danticat and perhaps others have written. This moral uneasiness helps us see how people can be terrified and brutalized into believing that the Trujillo dictatorship was to the benefit of the people of the DR. And that's the other side: the perspective of this long book is narrow; we don't see or feel or understand ordinary people in the country, whether terrified or disillusioned or duped into believing in the General, the Benefactor, as he calls himself. Perhaps that's also a wise narrative strategy, or perhaps it's a mark of Vargas Llosa's limitation - too much inside, too much at the heart or seat of power. All told, I also wonder about his decision to focus on Trujillo and the DR for his portrait of a tyrant: I wonder if readers more knowledgeable about V-L than I have sensed that he was using the DR as a screen and was actually writing, for those who could open this possible roman a clef, about a dictatorship much closer to his native Peru, something he could not have safely (or comfortably) written about openly?