South of the Border: Don Winslow, El Chapo & Narcos

Lately my mind has been south of the border.

And not just because multiple toxic waste sites in Texas are still under water from Hurricane Harvey, including at least one Superfund site, and no representatives of the Scott Pruitt-led Environmental Protection Agency are on site (welcome to the Trump-era EPA).

At present I'm 3/4 into "The Power of the Dog" author Don Winslow's brilliant, hard-hitting fictional 2005 novel about the origins and rise of the Mexican drug cartels and one determined DEA agent's efforts to stop them.

The book was first recommended to me by my friend "Charles", an ex-Navy SEAL who served in the Iraq War and still makes a living doing dangerous contract work overseas.

"Charles" and I both graduated from West Windsor-Plainsboro South HS, he was younger than me but my younger brother (his classmate) introduced us and we became friends when we both lived out in Los Angeles.

This was 2010 - 2011, and though we'd moved there separately, both of us were living out there as two of the scores of aspirational screenwriters trying to break into the business, and over the years we've edited and critiqued each other's writing, bounced creative ideas off one another, offered mutual encouragement and shared suggestions for different books and films.

From my perspective, "The Power of the Dog" is one of those books that's a must-read for screenwriters, and for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the origins of the Mexican drug cartels, the men and women who populate their ranks - and the immense power they wield.

Winslow's no-nonsense prose slams into you like a freight train, he's a master of crime fiction with a tight, mesmerizing writing style that pulls the reader in with graphic, unsparing details of brutality, violence, corruption, death, sex and money that are at times, both hard to read and impossible to look away from.

What's frightening about his writing (aside from his ability to inject humor in the most horrific kinds of scenarios) is that it stems directly from his exhausting research into America's pointless and costly 40-plus year "War on Drugs" - which he chronicles in painstaking detail - and the Mexican drug cartels who've made billions of dollars off of the insatiable global appetite for drugs.

While the complex, morally-ambiguous characters who populate the pages of his books are fictional, like the characters in Mario Puzo's "The Godfather", they are all based on real individuals - and the sometimes harrowing situations they face are based on actual events.

DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena 

For example, in exhaustive and graphic detail "The Power of the Dog" offers an account of the story behind the infamous February 7, 1985 kidnapping and brutal torture of DEA undercover agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena.

Camarena, a 37-year-old Mexican-born veteran of the US Marine Corps, provided intelligence that led to the Mexican authorities' destruction of a 2,500-acre marijuana plantation worth an estimated $8 billion that was owned by notorious drug lord Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo.

A year later, as he was walking to meet his wife for lunch, corrupt Mexican cops snatched him off the streets of Guadalajara in broad daylight, threw him in a Volkswagen and took him to a ranch near Guadalajara where he was savagely tortured for 30 hours.

An act which stunned the globe and prompted a massive manhunt for those responsible.

Camarena's interrogation was so brutal that a local doctor was kept on hand to inject him with drugs to keep him conscious while his abductors pressed him for information and tortured him.

That doctor, Humberto Alvarez Machain, was later extradited to the U.S. to face charges but he was eventually released by a federal judge for lack of evidence.

Winslow's book also uses fictional characters to tell the true story of drug trafficker Hector Luis Palma, whose wife Guadalupe Serrano was seduced by his one-time partner Rafael Enrique Clavel - a drug trafficker from Venezuela. (Palma founded the Sinaloa cartel with Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman)

While Winslow changes some of the specifics, "The Power of the Dog" offers details on the infamous story of how Clavel forced Palma's wife to remove $7 million from a bank before he decapitated her, mailed her head back to Palma in a box - and then reportedly had Palma's two young children Jesus and Nataly thrown off the Puente de la Concordia bridge that spans a gorge near the border between Venezuela and Colombia.

I remember reading that story in the news in the late 1980's and being horrified.

Author Don Winslow

Winslow's unsparing look at the rise of the Mexican cartels also delves into their connections between the American mafia, the Catholic church and the CIA.

It punches serious holes into the ideological fiction peddled by the Reagan and Bush administrations during the "War On Drugs".

I'm definitely looking forward to ordering Winslow's 2015 sequel, "The Cartel" - check out Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times.

If you're interested, he was interviewed last Wednesday on the Leonard Lopate Show to discuss his new novel, "The Force" which centers on drug dealing and corruption within the NYPD.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Winslow's look at the Mexican drug cartels, is that it forces the reader to step back and look at American culture differently.

Consider major U.S. cities for example.

As far back as the 1950's, the Republican Party in America has been dealing in the currency of the distorted narrative of "Urban America", both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used it as a wedge issue to manipulate white voters into a more conservative stance.

Luring them to the Republican Party by tapping into anxieties, apprehensions and deeply ingrained racial and ethnic prejudices; like Reagan using the term "Welfare Queens" to demonize American women who receive federal assistance like welfare, housing subsidies or SNAP food assistance.

A popular conservative talking point that continues to be bandied about by Fox News and the assortment of usual suspects from right-wing media - talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Laura Graham and their ilk, despite evidence that the vast majority of American people who receive federal assistance work full time.

Facts reflected by a 2015 study by the University of California at Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education, as Patricia Cohen of the the New York Times reported, "Nearly three quarters of the people helped by programs geared to the poor are members of a family headed by a worker." 

Americans who are often forced by economic conditions, lack of affordable housing and stagnant wages to live in areas affected by the wide availability of heroin and crystal meth - the two drugs which now drive the profits of the Mexican cartels.

Map showing drug trafficking routes from Mexico
into the United States

Winslow's books punch through that hypocrisy by offering unsettling insight into how for years the U.S. judicial and legal system in conjunction with the law enforcement community and politicians (on the federal, state and local / municipal level) have allowed major urban areas to become destination points and distribution centers for the billions of dollars in drugs shipped into this country every year.

To say nothing of the proliferation of guns, which in some parts of Chicago, are actually easier to purchase than fresh produce.

This global commerce in narcotics is directly linked to America's prison and industrial complex which flourishes with the help of judicial and legal policies that criminalize drug use and incarcerate people for addiction; helping to tear apart the fabric of communities and (not coincidentally) diffuse the political base in communities that tend to vote Democratic along the way.

For example, as the Brennan Center For Justice based at NYU reported back in July, the state of Florida permanently blocks anyone with a felony conviction from voting unless they go through the arduous process of petitioning to have their voting rights restored by filing an appeal with the state's Office of Executive Clemency.

That policy prevents 1.6 million people in Florida from exercising their right to vote; 1 in 5 of those blocked from Florida polls are African-American - who, as studies have shown, are shown to be disproportionately targeted, prosecuted and convicted for minor drug offenses even though blacks and whites use drugs at the same rate.

Want some deeper insight on the impact of narco-trafficking on American communities?

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman in custody in the U.S.

Paul Solotaroff's must-read article "The Hunt For El Chapo" published in the August 24th issue of Rolling Stone, is a disturbing look at how cities like Chicago have become distribution networks for the tons of potent Mexican heroin and crystal meth now flooding into the country.

He tracks the rise of Joaquin "El Chapo" (or "shorty") Guzman's rise from the rural hills of Sinaloa, Mexico to the pinnacle of global drug trafficking

Solotaroff details how the Mexican cartels have become the principle conduit to ship drugs from Asia, South America and Mexico into the United States (and to Europe) using a range of highly complex smuggling routes that are now controlled by the Mexican cartels - who, I think it's important to note, also victimize the Mexican people who are so often denigrated by the current American president and some of his top advisers.

It's also an eye-opening reflection on the approach to marijuana legalization efforts in the U.S.

The article describes how El Chapo and other cartel leaders basically gave up shipping pot into America because the growing legalization took all the profit out of it; and shifted resources into heroin and crystal meth production.

As Solotaroff details, El Chapo visualized a darkly brilliant plan to undercut the U.S. pharmaceutical industry's monopoly on the opioid pain killers that exploded in popularity across wide swaths of America, by hiring chemists to manufacture more potent heroin - then flooding U.S. markets with it.

If you're reading this you're likely familiar with the fact that many heroin users in America, started using it because it was cheaper and more powerful than the opioid-based painkillers prescribed by doctors that have devastated parts of states like New Hampshire and Kentucky.

Chances are that much of that heroin was shipped here by El Chapo's Sinaloa cartel - by the way he's currently in the U.S. awaiting trial in Brooklyn and as the NY Daily News reported yesterday, he's already retained attorney Jeffrey Lichtman (who got "Junior" Gotti off in federal court four times) and other high-powered defense lawyers.

Actor Pedro Pascal in season 3 of Narcos on Netflix

El Chapo could have tens of billions of dollars stashed around the globe, so that, and his knowledge of corrupt Mexican officials who've been bribed by the cartels, could mean that his tenure as one of the world's leading drug traffickers isn't over - and his upcoming trial in federal court is sure to attract global attention and will have repercussions far beyond the borders of the United States.

So as I said, my mind is south of the border - and not just because of El Chapo either.

Season 3 of Narcos was just posted on Netflix, fortunately, and not coincidentally, the weekend after the season 7 finale of Game Of Thrones on HBO.

So like many people, I'm spending no small portion of my Labor Day weekend binge-watching Narcos - which to the uninitiated, chronicles the rise of the Columbian drug cartels and DEA, CIA and Columbian authorities efforts to stop them.

After the death of the world's former number-one drug trafficker, Columbia's Medellin cartel leader Pablo Escobar at the end of season 2 last year, season 3 focuses on the DEA's pursuit of the self-described "Gentlemen of Cali", the Cali cartel.

Those who are fans of Narcos may find Heavy.com's comparison of the real-life Cali cartel figures and season 3 interesting.

Well that's it for my first blog of September folks, my easy chair, wireless headphones and the Gentlemen of Cali await.

Vaya con dios!