Pubdate: Fri, 07 Aug 2015
Source: Columbus Dispatch (OH)
Copyright: 2015 The Columbus Dispatch
Contact:  http://www.dispatch.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/93
Author: George F. Will, Washington Post Writers Group.

AUTHOR DETAILS CARTELS' 'VOCABULARY OF MUTILATION'

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 escaped through a 5-foot-tall tunnel almost a mile 
long and built solely for his escape. Asked about this, Winslow dryly 
said he thinks Guzman actually might 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 escaped from another "maximum security" prison 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 Richard Nixon declared the war, 
the quality of drugs reaching American streets has risen and prices 
have fallen.

Many Mexicans have died in drug-related violence: 100,000 in 10 
years. Winslow believes that 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.

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 2006, 
when he first published Gomorrah, a report on a Neapolitan branch of 
the Sicilian Mafia.

Saviano 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 been sold for 182,000 euros in Europe, assuming 
you could get it 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 whopwhopof helicopter rotors," defoliants, assassinations, 
intelligence failures and futility. A man of the left, Winslow has 
scant sympathy for U.S. foreignpolicy 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 
America: Today's levels of addiction are nowhere near the levels that 
probably would be reached under legalization. So read his novels as 
didactic entertainment, not as policy prescriptions.

Winslow now lives in Southern California. 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