The Cartel

 

I’m gonna go contemporary on y’all for a bit. Make no mistake, this is a Frontier Partisan story, but it lacks the beautiful patina of time that covers the dark and grim stories of the bad old days with a certain romantic glow. This is the raw, real shit that goes down on the southern U.S./Mexico Border every day. It’s Borderland Noir alright. Dark as it gets.

Don Winslow’s “The Cartel” drops today. It is the sequel to one of the most compelling novels I’ve ever read — “The Power of the Dog.” Winslow has woven fictional characters into the real events of the War on Drugs in a bloody tapestry that is a masterpiece of American crime fiction. “Dog” started in the 1970s and ran through the 1990s. “The Cartel” brings the horrific story up to the present day.

Traffickers and DEA agents; whores and priests. Law enforcement agencies overtly and covertly picking winners and losers in the drug trade; intelligence agencies using drug trafficking as an asset to further murky agendas.

“Dog” was so good that I re-read it immediately after I finished it — something I almost never do. Years later, I can still conjure the conflicted characters in all their brutal complexity, still put myself in that dark, fascinating world, guided by a masterful storyteller.

This is a story we need to understand. The vast American appetite for drugs and the billions of dollars that appetite generates has helped turn parts of Mexico into a war zone.

Winslow addressed this in an Esquire Magazine interview:

“I think all drugs should be legal and I wish nobody used any of them. I have no problem with people smoking a little dope. But it always amazes me where people who are so persnickety about buying fair trade coffee, and farm-to-table beef, and about where their chicken was raised, think nothing of buying marijuana, which in all likelihood was raised by murderers, sadists, sociopaths, and in a lot of cases harvested by slave labor. So I don’t want to harsh anyone’s buzz, but I think that’s something that we need to look at because we really are in so many ways responsible for the violence in Mexico through our schizophrenic attitude toward drugs, including marijuana.”

The Cartels are every bit as brutal as ISIS — maybe worse. These guys behead people with chainsaws.

“I think there is a very direct connection between the Mexican cartels and ISIS in the sense of the atrocities they carry out, and largely ISIS learned this behavior from the cartels and that’s what makes the second phase of the Mexican drug war and cartel wars so intriguing. You know, when I was writingDog, criminals tried to hide their killings. Now they proclaim them and put them on social media. And that started with the Mexican cartels, who started putting these things on the Internet as propaganda and intimidation and recruiting tools. And that’s exactly what ISIS does.”

The cruelty and brutality is almost beyond comprehension, and yet Winslow with his investigator’s doggedness and sharp eye and an artists fiery vision not only makes it comprehensible, he brings it alive. To his cost and to ours, perhaps, but if La Frontera is in your blood, this is stuff you’ve gotta grapple with, even if it makes you feel dirty, bloody and exhausted.

The horrible thing — the deeply scary thing — is that the brutal, flagrant sadism of cartel murders is not the product of monsters, at least not of the supernatural kind. These horrors are perpetrated by humans. Winslow has the guts and the artistic integrity to get inside their point of view, to see the violent world they operate in and seek to survive in through their eyes.

And through the eyes of those who fight monsters at the risk of becoming that which they battle against.

The L.A. Times ran a good profile of Winslow on June 19. He’s got Frontier Partisan cred.

“He worked as a private investigator during the sleazy heyday of Times Square in the 1970s, then returned to school for a graduate degree in military history, intending to join the State Department as an expert on counterinsurgency warfare in Africa (he’s conversant in both Zulu and Swahili) but became a safari guide instead.”

Yeah.

“Winslow says he never meant to write something as terrifying or historically detailed as ‘The Power of the Dog.’ His previous novels are fairly traditional crime fiction, although not run of the mill. But one … he picked up the paper and read that 19 people had been machine gunned to death in Ensenada, a Mexican beach town just over an hour south of San Diego where he and his wife vacationed. He soon found himself unable to turn away from the daily reports of narco violence.

“It took Winslow 10 grueling years and countless perilous trips Mexico to complete ‘The Power of the Dog.’ When he finished he swore he’d never revisit its bloody terrain.”

But the bloody terrain of La Frontera has drawn him back. By all accounts, “The Cartel” is equally as powerful as “Dog.” I can’t overstate how good “Dog” is, and I’d recommend reading it before plunging into “The Cartel.”

But be warned: This is the stuff of nightmares. There’s a reason Winslow tried to run from it. And there’s a reason he circled back. Steel yourself and let him take you there. It ain’t pretty, but you need to look. We all do.

••••

A sad and moving ode to Ciudad Juarez, casualty of cartel violence. Tom Russell’s “Goodnight Juarez.”

A small note of hope: There are signs that Juarez is coming back to life as the massive murder rate drops and the terror lifts — at least for now. Of course, the “peace” is a pax narcotics, as Winslow himself notes. The Sinaloa Cartel won the war for the Juarez Plaza. Some believe the government colluded in the triumph of Sinaloa, allowing the least worst to come out on top just to stop the out-of-control violence. And, with 100,000 dead across Mexico in a decade-long civil war, it’s hard to turn up your nose at that kind of real politick.