Pubdate: Sun, 09 Aug 2015
Source: USA Today (US)
Copyright: 2015 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/625HdBMl
Website: http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/index.htm
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/466
Author: Don Oldenburg
Note: The Cartel Don Winslow Knopf 616pp.

'EL CHAPO' LOOMS LARGE IN TIMELY, BLOODY 'CARTEL'

A Drug Kingpin's Escape Builds to an Epic Showdown

Talk about timing. Don Winslow's new novel, The Cartel, which 
fictionally chronicles the past decade of Mexico's brutal drug-lord 
wars, echoes the stunning, headline-grabbing jail break from a 
maximum-security prison by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the legendary 
billionaire drug kingpin.

Want to know why El Chapo probably won't be captured anytime soon? 
Never mind the evening news: Truth is in fiction. Read this 
disturbing and, yes, addictive epic tale instead. Within the first 70 
of its 600-plus vivid pages, Adan Barrera, the fascinating, suave, 
drug-cartel patron - loosely based on El Chapo - escapes from his 
country's most secure prison to rebuild his Sinaloan drug-trafficking empire.

The novel begins in a New Mexico desert monastery where its 
no-nonsense hero, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency superstar Art Keller, 
has found sanctuary from his years of obsessively fighting Mexico's 
drug cartels. His peaceful routine of tending beehives ends when he 
learns of Barrera's escape. You see, in their younger years, Keller 
and Barrera were friends. They chose different paths and now they're 
bitter enemies sworn to kill each other, which they try to accomplish 
throughout the book.

Overshadowing Keller and Barrera's personal grudge, however, is a 
vast, powerful, darkhearted, graphically violent, procedural tale of 
drug-traffic economics, shifting allegiances and betrayals, bribery 
and corruption, and an accelerating rampage of torture, killings and 
massacres that drives recklessly toward the novel's final and 
unforgettable showdown.

The author of 17 novels - including The Cartel's 2005 prequel, The 
Power of the Dog - Winslow is a true-crime writer skilled at creating 
deep and compelling characters. He populates the novel with so many 
memorable secondary personalities that, initially, they're hard to 
track. Among them are Magda Beltran, Barrera's ultra-sensual and 
smart mistress; Edward "Crazy Eddie" Ruiz, a former Texas high-school 
football star whose street deals pull him into cartel turf battles; 
Marisol Cisneros, a beautiful Mexican physician who loves Keller; and 
Pablo Mora, a Juarez journalist whose ethical dilemmas reporting 
Mexico's mayhem become the conscience of the book.

Filthy-rich drug lords, sociopathic narcoterrorist Zetas, corrupt 
Mexican politicians and law enforcement officials, even U.S. 
authorities who cross the line, fill out Winslow's intense narrative. 
Along the way, he embeds fine travelogue-like scenes of ordinary life 
in Mexico's various regions.

Occasionally, his storytelling gets pulpy, like when he describes 
Keller as "a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero." 
Or, in the novel's first half, he distractingly shifts points of view 
within paragraphs, mixing trusted first-person narrative with 
unreliable third-person voices. But neither proves fatal in a 
bloodbath plot with a dizzying body count.

How much of Winslow's novel imitates actual events? Personalities 
have been changed, not so much the realities. In fact, having seen 
upclose the destruction of the drug trade, Winslow has become an 
outspoken critic of the War on Drugs, now in its 44th year. In June, 
the author took out a fullpage ad in The Washington Post urging 
Congress to stop the "unwinnable" war on drugs.

"A half-century of failed policy, one trillion dollars and 45 million 
arrests has not reduced daily drug use - at all," he wrote, echoing 
arguments made by his novel. "Every dollar we spend on drugs and 
every dollar we spend trying to interdict them raises the profits of 
the Mexican cartels and makes them more powerful."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom