The Democrats are hardly agents of change, or even remotely interesting talkers or reality observers. The workings of actual power in the US is so remote from the ordinary person, who, it seems, can only be victimized by it, but is powerless to change anything.

What I see of the US Presidential elections from down here makes me want to disengage from that particular reality and just hole up and read. It's true. I think if I were living in the US, I would just turn my television and radio off for a year right now, and just read.

There is a culture of corruption in many parts of the Mexican media, of course. It seems that there are fewer and fewer media outlets that permit authentic free expressions. But Mexico also has extraordinary journalists who, despite the dangers they face, have also been leading the way in this battle, who've really played a role in keeping the cause of justice alive in the Ayotzinapa case. And no matter what, they'll keep doing that.

The Peña Nieto government is not going to investigate itself; there's no true autonomy in the investigative and justice branches of the government in Mexico. The recent Mexican crimes and scandals, is profoundly structural, and you'd have to change the way Mexico is run, create a truly independent special prosecutor's office, to even have a chance to get close to achieving justice. People, including the families and many others throughout Mexican society, aren't going to give up in fighting for just that kind of change.

I've written one book-length piece of journalism. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? That book had an impact. Eight years after it was published it's still having an impact in Guatemala. I remember when I wrote it, a surprising number of people said things to me like, "That is such an amazing story; why didn't you turn it into a novel?"

I don't impose political responsibilities on my fiction. The last thing I would ever want to do, for example, is write a novel that would appear to want to tell people what to think about the immigration debate, and I would never write a novel whose sole ambition was to give a "positive" view of immigrants. I'm for open borders, by the way - down with the nation state!

I'm not against anything that anybody might want to try to pull off in fiction. Fiction writing has to, at least, always represent a possibility of absolute freedom.