I'm a little skeptical of so-called narco fiction, I have to say, though some writers I admire may have written some narco fiction. You feel the dread and the atmosphere in Yuri Herrera's extraordinary novels, but you'd never say that what he writes is narco fiction. The same goes for Martin Solares's novels, inspired by the nightmare city of Tampico, where he's from. Valeria Luiselli, Álvaro Enrigue, I know that they're deeply affected by what goes on in Mexico, but their wonderful writing points in another direction, though not necessarily always and only.

People in the big rich countries are often extremely dismissive of the small countries. They think nothing that happens there is of any interest or that it matters at all, but, at the very least, with that attitude they miss out on some extraordinary stories.

The writing that most interests me isn't about narcos or sicarios or police or whatever. It's about the victims and the survivors, and about the suffering and trauma that so many in Mexico and Central America endure, and that is all around us whether we notice it or not.

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?"

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'm not a Mexican writer, but I think everything that happens in Mexico affects the Mexican writers I know, in their sense of being human and of being Mexican, even if they don't in any explicit way address these issues in their writing.

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!