Alejandro Páez Varela (Ciudad Juárez, 1968) is a writer and journalist born in the state of Chihuahua and with a career also in Mexico City. He was deputy director of Día Siete magazine, which brought culture and journalism to Mexico for 11 years. He was an editor at Reforma, El Economista and various other media outlets; he was also editorial deputy director of El Universal. He is currently the general director of the SinEmbargo portal and, together with Álvaro Delgado, hosts Los Periodistas, an internet television program.

He is the author of a trilogy of novels about northern Mexico: Corazón de Kalashnikov, El Reino de las Moscas and Música para Perros. His latest novel, Oriundo Laredo, travels along the border, in a middle country –as he calls it–, straddling the north of Mexico and the south of the United States. He has two storybooks: Does Not Include Batteries and Parachute That Does Not Open. Páez Varela has drawn in his novels a literary geography for extreme characters who go without distinction across the border, between the southern United States and the Mexican north that merge, that embrace and refuse to separate.

As a journalist, Páez Varela coordinated the collective book La Guerra por Juárez and has participated as co-author in several more: Los Amos de México, Los Suspirantes 2006, Los Intocables and Los Suspirantes 2011, with biographies of Roberto Hernández, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas , Julio César Chávez and Marcelo Ebrard, a character, the latter, who led him to write, in 2011, the biographical book President in Waiting.

Together with the journalist Álvaro Delgado, he launched La Disputa por México in 2022, which became an almost immediate sales success in Mexico and the United States. It describes those two Mexicos that have been vying for power for two centuries, and that with the change of regime in 2018 became two polar forces.