Pubdate: Thu, 06 Aug 2015
Source: Oklahoman, The (OK)
Copyright: 2015 The Oklahoma Publishing Co.
Contact: http://www.newsok.com/voices/guidelines
Website: http://newsok.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/318
Author: George Will, Washington Post Writers Group

THE CARTELS' 'VOCABULARY OF MUTILATION'

WASHINGTON - 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-foottall tunnel almost a mile 
long and built solely for his escape. Asked about this, Winslow 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 
escaped from another "maximum security" prison simply by hiding in a 
laundry cart.

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 American streets has risen and prices have fallen.

More Mexicans have died in drug-related violence - 100,000 in 10 
years; over all, many more than twice the number of American 
fatalities in Vietnam. Winslow believes 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.

Many of Winslow's lurid passages 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.

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 sea-borne 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 methamphetamine 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 
anti-communists 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, 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."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom