Novelist Fuentes dies, age 83 Carlos Fuentes, one of the Spanish-speaking world's most celebrated novelists, has died in a Mexico City hospital at the age of 83 after suffering heart problems. Fuentes, whose literary career spanned more than half a century, carved out a formidable reputation as a critic of governments ranging from staunch capitalist through to communist. Tightly associated with Latin America's literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which included novelists such as Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez and Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa, Fuentes was outspoken on a variety of political issues. He was known for criticising the US government for its strict policies on migration as well as for its war on terror. Yet Fuentes, who was born in Panama to a Mexican diplomat, spent some of his childhood in the US and always expressed great offence when people accused him of being anti-American. To call me anti-American is a stupendous lie, a calumnia. I grew up in this country," he said. Indeed, while once considered by many to be a communist and a supporter of Cuba's Fidel Castro, he was also known for his criticism of the left. In one memorable quote, the always-elegant figure with a neat, cropped moustache, lambasted Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, calling him a "tropical Mussolini." His name and work were often linked to a possible Nobel Prize for literature, though he never won one. Unlike other famous Mexican novelists, Fuentes spent much of his time abroad, dividing it between his work as a diplomat - among other posts, he served Mexico as ambassador to France - and writing as well as teaching. His university posts included a professorship at Brown, as well as teaching stints at Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge. In his native Mexico, where he only took up residence from the age of 16, Fuentes was best-known for his acute social commentary, and his writings based on the failings of the country's 1910 revolution. In The Death of Artemio Cruz, for example, he gained fame by describing a post-revolutionary Mexico that had largely fallen short of the revolution's lofty ideals of bringing about greater equality. His other works, which totalled more than 20 novels, included Aura, Terra Nostra, and The Good Conscience. In the US, he was possibly best known for his novel The Old Gringo, which was based on the life of US writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared while travelling with rebel troops during the 1910 revolution. The novel, which he wrote in 1985, was turned into a film in 1989 starring Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck. The news of the death of Fuentes on Tuesday sparked a storm of mourning, the most immediate of which arrived through Twitter. Felipe Calderón, Mexico's centre-right president, wrote on his account: "I deeply lament the death of our beloved and admired Carlos Fuentes, a universal Mexican writer." Meanwhile, local media reported that Álvaro Mutis, the Colombian author, called Fuentes" death "a catastrophe ... he was magnificent at putting everyone in their place." Fuentes himself tweeted only one day, March 19 2011, saying: "There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it."