Carlos Fuentes was the son of a Mexican diplomat and spent years living abroad, including in the United States. But Mexico — the country, its people and politics — was central to his writing.

Fuentes, one of the most influential Latin American writers, died Tuesday at a hospital in Mexico City at the age of 83. He was instrumental in bringing Latin American literature to an international audience, and he used his fiction to address what he saw as real-world injustices.

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One of his most famous novels was The Old Gringo, about an American writer who travels to Mexico to die. It was made into a Hollywood movie starring Gregory Peck as the writer and Jimmy Smits as a Mexican general.

The Old Gringo became the first novel by a Latin American writer to make it to The New York Times best-seller list.

Read transcript, and listen to NPR’s Morning Edition AUDIO here . . . 

A wonderful scene from the movie can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40A24x_Kwuc&feature=player_detailpage