Author Carlos Montemayor dies

Carlos Montemayor, a Mexican author and guerrilla movement scholar, died Sunday, his publisher said. He was 62 and had stomach cancer, though the cause of death was not given.

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, born June 13, 1947, "distinguished himself for his social activism, especially in favor of the most vulnerable groups in Mexico," publisher 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 considered the definitive book on Mexico's "dirty war," a crackdown in the 1960s and '70s against rebels and suspected sympathizers in which hundreds of people died or disappeared.

--Associated Press