BUENOS AIRES – Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes said that it is important that authors “play around with truth and lies” because the alternative is to promote the idea that absolute truth exists, which would imply “a dictatorship.”

In a talk Wednesday at the Latin American Art Museum in Buenos Aires, Fuentes said that the “separation between the press and literature” lies in the fact “it’s assumed the press aims to tell the truth.”

“We suppose the press tells the truth and not lies, although that’s relative because a lot of editorializing is possible,” the author said in a lecture titled “Literature and Journalism.”

The writer, who arrived in the Argentine capital to promote his new novel, “Adan en eden” (Adam in Eden), added that there is “ambiguity and uncertainty” in novels, but “the press isn’t allowed to play those games.”

“On the first, second and third page, the press says what it claims is the truth. And although it sometimes isn’t, the person writing it thinks he’s being objective,” the 81-year-old Fuentes said.

Speaking to a packed auditorium, the writer also talked about the relationship between the novel and history, which he said “is not an accumulation of facts, but a horizon of possibilities.”

“With a dead past there’s no living present,” Fuentes said in the talk, in which journalists Natalio Botana and Jose Claudio Escribano also participated.

The Mexican writer and regular contributor to Spanish and Mexican newspapers used the occasion to present his latest book, “Adan en eden,” which tells the story of a powerful businessman and an unscrupulous minister.

Fuentes, known for his experimental narrative style such as the use of second-person form in works such as the novella “Aura” and the novel “La Muerte de Artemio Cruz” (Death of Artemio Cruz), arrived in Argentina after taking part in the Santiago Book Fair.

The Cervantes Prize winner told Efe in an interview in September in Spain, where he received a journalism prize, that his latest novel is “very journalistic” and tells “how the country is being undermined by drug traffickers and by different kinds of corruption.”

Fuentes said the narrator of the new work is “a powerful businessman” who, seeing the damage that drug trafficking is causing his country, “decides to beat drug traffickers and criminals at their own game, becoming an even bigger criminal than they are.” EFE