Mexican author Carlos Montemayor dies at 62

MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexican author and guerrilla movement scholar Carlos Montemayor died Sunday, his publisher said. He was 62.

A historian and linguist whose academic work centered on indigenous culture and rebels, Montemayor was sympathetic to the armed Zapatista uprising in 1994 in the southern state of Chiapas.

Montemayor, who had been battling stomach cancer, “distinguished himself for his social activism, especially in favor of the most vulnerable groups in Mexico,” Random House Mandadori said in a statement.

In 2008 he joined a commission tasked with mediating between the government and the leftist People’s Revolutionary Army, or EPR, over the group’s claims that two of its members were taken by security forces in Oaxaca state.

His best-known novel, “War in Paradise,” is a fictional account of a real-life guerrilla movement led by Lucio Cabanas in southern Guerrero state in the 1970s, and the government’s campaign against it.

“War in Paradise” is considered the definitive book on Mexico’s “dirty war,” a 1960s and ‘70s crackdown against rebels and suspected sympathizers in which hundreds of people died or disappeared.