El Cartel Don Winslow

[Karina Edling]

AThere are several aspects. They (the cartels) hired special forces (either veterans or deserters) to go to work for them. That touched off an arms race of violence. They were out hiring cops, ex-cops and soldiers. At the same time, they brought up special forces from Guatemala, who were involved in anti-communist efforts in Guatemala, and very brutally so.

A. The violence has receded somewhat, because one of the cartels has won. There are some theories that say that the Mexican government basically picked the winner (the Sinaloa cartel). The Mexican government picked the least worst people.

A. I think you distance yourself one step at a time. I call it the Macbeth factor. At the start of the play, Macbeth is a great guy. Then the witches put an idea inside his head, then the king comes to visit, then he kills the king. Then he kills his friends, then women and children. Step by step, anything becomes possible.

In six intense short novels connected by the themes of crime, corruption, vengeance, justice, loss, betrayal, guilt, and redemption, Broken is number-one international best seller Don Winslow at his nerve-shattering, heart-stopping, heartbreaking best. In Broken, he creates a world of high-level thieves and low-life crooks, obsessed cops struggling with life on and off the job, private detectives, dope dealers, bounty hunters, and fugitives, the lost souls driving without headlights through the dark night on the American criminal highway.

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

From the internationally best-selling author of the acclaimed novel The Power of the Dog comes The Cartel, a gripping, ripped-from-the-headlines story of power, corruption, revenge, and justice spanning the past decade of the Mexican-American drug wars.

It's 2004. DEA agent Art Keller has been fighting the war on drugs for 30 years in a blood feud against Adn Barrera, the head of El Federacin, the world's most powerful cartel, and the man who brutally murdered Keller's partner. Finally putting Barrera away cost Keller dearly - the woman he loves, the beliefs he cherishes, the life he wants to lead.

Then Barrera gets out, determined to rebuild the empire that Keller shattered. Unwilling to live in a world with Barrera in it, Keller goes on a 10-year odyssey to take him down. His obsession with justice - or is it revenge? - becomes a ruthless struggle that stretches from the cities, mountains, and deserts of Mexico to Washington's corridors of power to the streets of Berlin and Barcelona.

Keller fights his personal battle against the devastated backdrop of Mexico's drug war, a conflict of unprecedented scale and viciousness, as cartels vie for power and he comes to the final reckoning with Barrera - and himself - that he always knew must happen.

The Cartel is a true-to-life story of honor and sacrifice as one man tries to face down the devil without losing his soul. It is the story of the war on drugs and the men - and women - who wage it.

And like all of Winslow's books, The Border is big. Doorstopper-big. It has a thousand characters, many of whom are dredged up from previous installments The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, and some of whom count as spoilers just by the mention of their names. The story doesn't so much bounce between POV characters as it grows through them like a chart showing the growth of a rampaging infection.

Everything I know about 11th century Scottish politics I learned from Macbeth. Most of what I know about the Wars of the Roses comes from the Henrys and Richard III. These plays, they present a simplified, dramatized, bloody, glossy, terrible, wonderful, moving vision of a history that was very real and present to fans of Billy Shakespeare's epic soap operas in the 1600's. Don Winslow's trilogy does the exact same thing for the war on drugs.

It is operatic. It is visceral. It has stakes that hang lives and nations in the balance. It begins, in The Power Of The Dog, in 1975, with DEA Agent Art Keller and a young Mexican man named Adn Barrera who will grow up to become the fictional head of the very real Sinaloa drug cartel. The trilogy tracks this relationship across decades, through war and prison, across continents. The Cartel ends in the jungles of Guatemala, in a huge battle which sees dozens of characters wiped out and Art Keller walking alone out of the smoke. A survivor whose war is finally done.

300 years from now, when our children's children's children want to understand the defining conflict of the late 20th and early 21st century ... there's a fair chance that this is what they will read.

Keller takes a job as the head of the DEA. Rises to become the leading general in the war that has been his life since 1975. And the story shifts from Mexico to the border, to New York and Washington D.C., tracking (as is one of Winslow's remarkable strengths) the totality of the drug war and the places where it touches politics, immigration, real estate, Wall Street and the opioid epidemic.

Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts, jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground.

Another exceptional character is Marisol Cisneros, a physician who Keller falls in love with. She is stubborn to the point that she puts her safety in question. Refusing to back down to the violence wrought by the cartels in Valverde, her home village where she runs a medical clinic for the poor, her story provides further evidence for the ruthless behavior employed by the sociopaths that head the cartels.

There are other characters and story lines that emerge for the reader to discover, but they all revolve around the drug trade, the domination of supply and distribution, particularly the burgeoning heroine epidemic in the United States, corruption of the Mexican government and law enforcement, and the violence as the cartels go to war with each other, with certain personalities continuing their vendettas.

Their respective plans for taking over the cartel are met with infighting and intrigue both from within the Sinaloa Cartel and from cartels in other states that set the young players against each other in ways that result in shockwaves of violence throughout the country.

Jim Ruland is the author of Forest of Fortune, co-author of My Damage with Keith Morris of Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and OFF!, and curator of the Southern California based reading series Vermin on the Mount, now in its 15th year.

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It's not just a crime novel, but a total immersion into the Mexican-American drug war. The seamless blend of fiction and fact provides blistering context to the most violent conflict in the Western hemisphere since the American Civil War.

"The Cartel" follows Winslow's acclaimed 2005 book, "The Power of the Dog," a sequel he swore he would never write. The two books chronicle 40 years of America's war on drugs from both sides of the border.

From his California home less than two hours from the border battle line, Winslow talked recently about why he wrote "The Cartel" and about 15 years tracking the horror, politics and human toll of America's interdiction policies.

We stand here on the northern side of the border and point the finger south. And talk about Mexican corruption. Of course there is corruption in Mexico, no one is going to argue that. But I ask a different question. "What kind of corruption of our collective soul does it require to be the largest drug market in the world?"

It is this machine that is now self-perpetuating in terms of police, judges, lawyers, prison guards, prison construction, the weapons and tools to fight the war on drugs on the border. Surveillance equipment, helicopters, rifles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It goes on and on and on. And what we don't seem to acknowledge is that it is entirely dependent on drugs. That is an addiction.

How could this happen? How do we get to the point where we are decapitating people and we're putting that on video clips? How do we get to the point where we're killing reporters? How do we get to the point where we're taking Central American immigrants off buses and mass raping them? Turning them into gladiator academies? Making them slaves on marijuana plantations? How do we get to the point where people in Juarez are on their way to work and stepping over bodies without noticing them, the way you'd step over trash on the streets of New York City?

A: The real-life stories behind "The Cartel" are incredibly inspirational and idealistic. The women I'm writing about in "The Cartel" are all based on true stories. I mean talk about idealists. Look at the women who became mayors, councilwomen, policewomen, social activists. I found courageousness beyond my ability to explain it. How do you explain a 19-year-old woman who says I'm going to become my town's police chief in the full knowledge that my four predecessors were killed for it?

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