Carlos Montemayor, 62, Mexican author, dies

MEXICO CITY - Mexican author and guerrilla movement scholar Carlos Montemayor died yesterday, 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 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.

- AP