Pubdate: Thu, 06 Aug 2015
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2015 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: George Will

A TALE OF THE LONGEST 'WAR'

Don Winslow, novelist and conscientious objector to America's longest 
"war," was skeptical when he was in Washington on a recent Sunday 
morning. This was shortly after news broke about the escape, from one 
of Mexico's "maximum-security" prisons, of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, 
head of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Guzman reportedly disappeared through a tunnel almost a mile long and 
built solely for his escape.

Asked about this, Winslow, his fork poised over an omelet, dryly said 
he thinks Guzman might actually have driven away from the prison's 
front gate in a Lincoln Town Car. What might seem like cynicism could 
be Winslow's realism.

Fourteen years ago, Guzman allegedly escaped from another "maximum 
security" prison simply by hiding in a laundry cart. With exquisite 
understatement, the Wall Street Journal reports that his recent 
escape raised "new concerns about corruption in Mexican law enforcement."

Winslow, 61, was in Washington to publicize his 16th crime novel, 
"The Cartel," a sequel to "The Power of the Dog" (2005). Both are 
about Guzman and other heads of the Sinaloa and rival cartels.

The novels are, together, 1,200 pages of gripping narrative, 
mind-numbing carnage and mind-opening reportage about the "war on 
drugs" that is in its fifth decade.

Since President Nixon declared the war, the quality of drugs reaching 
U.S. streets has risen and prices have fallen.

More Mexicans have died in drug-related violence - 100,000 in 10 
years; overall, nearly twice the number of American fatalities in 
Vietnam. Winslow believes that the Islamic State is mimicking the 
cartels' "vocabulary of mutilation" to create its charisma of cruelty 
- - Internet videos of beheadings, dismemberments, crucifixions, 
flayings, immolations, etc. "The Cartel" is dedicated to 131 
journalists, all named, who, because of their reporting on drug 
violence, are known to have died or vanished. "There were others," he 
says. And there probably will be more.

Many of Winslow's lurid passages- all, he says, "inspired by actual 
events" - are essentially confirmed in Roberto Saviano's 
"ZeroZeroZero," a nonfiction book on the world cocaine trade, written 
by the Italian journalist who has had police protection since he 
first published in 2006 "Gomorrah," a report on a Neapolitan branch 
of the Sicilian Mafia. Saviano, a somewhat overwrought writer, 
understands the power of economics: One thousand euros invested in 
Apple stock in January 2012 would have been worth 1,670 euros 12 months later.

But 1,000 euros invested in cocaine in Colombia could have returned 
182,000 euros in Europe, assuming - a reasonable bet - you could get 
the cocaine past law enforcement.

Mexico is a casualty of a U.S. drug enforcement success.

In the 1980s, the South Florida Task Force produced the "balloon 
effect" - squeeze a balloon in one spot, it bulges in another.

The task force deflected seaborne cocaine imports to Mexico. Hence 
today's northward flow of drugs, southward flow of money and 
drenching flow of Mexican blood as the cartels war with one another 
and with Mexico's federal, state and local governments.

Some U.S. emergency room physicians are, Winslow says, glad that 
Mexicans, using precursor drugs from China, have taken over most 
manufacturing of methamphetamines because this has "standardized the 
product," making it easier for physicians to standardize treatment protocols.

In both novels, Winslow relentlessly but not unreasonably compares 
the war on drugs to the war in Vietnam- American "advisers," "the 
dull bass whop-whop-whop of helicopter rotors," defoliants, 
assassinations, intelligence failures and futility.

A man of the left, Winslow has scant sympathy for U.S. foreign policy 
problems in Central America during the Cold War, when, he says, 
arming anticommunists became entangled with the drug trade.

He favors drug legalization because interdiction "is a broom sweeping 
back the ocean" and because legalization would financially cripple 
the cartels. But less bloodshed in Mexico would mean more social 
regression in the United States: Today's levels of addiction are 
nowhere near the levels that probably would be reached under 
legalization, even without assuming the marketing measures that 
probably would be legal.

So read his novels as didactic entertainment - you will be vastly 
entertained while learning many disturbing things - not as policy 
prescriptions.

Winslow now lives in Southern California not far from the border. 
When he decided to become a writer he moved to Idaho, where his 
sister was mayor of the town of Hope. He settled in a nearby area 
known as - really- Beyond Hope, a good place to begin his path to "The Cartel."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom