Inside the war on drugs

By Regis Behe
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_331075.html
Sunday, May 8, 2005

If a mere 10 percent of Don Winslow's new novel, "The Power of the Dog," were true, it would be horrifying.

"I would flip that ratio," Winslow says.

That 90 percent could be true is nearly unfathomable. "The Power of the Dog" chronicles the war on drugs waged by the United States from 1975 to present day in a most shocking manner. Winslow, the author of the novels "California Fire & Light" and "The Death and Life of Bobby Z," contends that:

Children and women have been targeted by drug cartels in ugly blood feuds.

Clandestine deals involving arms shipments to the cartels were undertaken by government agencies under the guise of thwarting communism.

Billions of dollars have been misspent in the war on drugs for programs that only increase the worth of drugs for buyers and sellers.

"I've fictionalized characters, obviously, and at times compressed events and things like that, but there's very little in the book that didn't actually happen," Winslow says. "That's the scary thing. My editor kept saying, 'Don, this is over the top.' And my response would be I would think so too, except it happened. Which was what was so horrifying about writing the book."

The impetus for "The Power of the Dog" came from a brutal, drug-related massacre of 18 people, including women and children, in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, in 1998.

He wondered: "How do you get to that point? How does anybody get to that point?"

Winslow initially set the story, which took six years to research and write, in 1998. He quickly backtracked to 1993 and then 1985 before settling on 1975 to begin the book. That year marked the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency, which undertook defoliation operations of Mexican poppy fields with the goal of putting drug dealers in the Mexican state of Sinaloa out of business.

Instead, a beast was created.

"It was the reinvention of the Mexican drug industry from a group of local, rural drug growers into a cartel that was centralized," Winslow says, "and then realized it could make a lot more money importing cocaine from Columbia and moving it than it could by growing the poppy.

"It was a very pivotal year. It was the law of unintended consequences. We thought we were destroying the home ground of heroin importation in the country. The real consequences were just metastasizing it, just spreading that cancer and forcing it, in a way, to become better organized and more efficient, which it did."

Don Winslow

While the background information in the novel is derived from Winslow's research; the interaction of the characters is a work of his imagination.

There's Arthur Keller, a DEA agent who risks losing his credibility and family when he becomes embroiled in a personal vendetta against Adan Barrera, an intelligent and ruthless drug dealer whose life is changed when his daughter is born with a terminal disease. There's Nora Hayden, a young girl who becomes a high-priced escort and then a confidante of Father Juan Parada, a Catholic priest, reformer and champion of the poor who is at odds with the hierarchy of his church.

No one in "The Power of the Dog" is without sin; nor is anyone without some measure of redemption.

"It can be too easy to create silhouette villains," Winslow says, "and just have these black cardboard figures. And the same with heroes, I suppose. What I wanted to show was some of the moral and emotional complexity of the war on drugs.

"I tried very hard, with the characters who are pretty villainous, pretty evil, really, to nevertheless see things through their eyes, to see things through their point of view."

Winslow traveled to Mexico and other locales in the book to interview people with similar experiences as his characters. He won't identify anyone he talked to, only admitting that all points of view are accounted for and represented accurately.

"You have to play by the rules," he says. "And as long as the rules are clear, people are more willing to be forthcoming. I would simply tell them if they weren't, I'm going to write this anyway -- and I want to include your point of view. If you want it included, then help me get it right. Tell me what was on your mind, what you were thinking. Tell me what your take is on it, and I'll do my best to include it."

This approach might irk some who see the drug problem as a black-and-white situation. And the book might infuriate and cause controversy, particularly with some of its contentions about the Iran-Contra affair and how the war on drugs addresses the symptoms but not the causes of drug abuse. Winslow particularly puts across the idea that the obsession with the war on drugs, as personified by Keller, increases the worth of the trade to the cartels.

As the character Adan Barrera says, "... that is what the Americans cannot seem to understand -- that all they do is drive up the price and make us rich."

"The product is not the drug," Winslow says. "The product for the cartels is never the drug, and for any smuggler of anything it's not the physical material -- it's the ability to move it across a fictional line, a nonexistent line, a symbolic line, i.e., a border. That's the product. The product costs you 36 cents on one side, then you step over one foot and it costs $1.75. It's the ability to move it across that line, that's what the Mexicans understood, and made huge profits because of it."

Capsule Review

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys in Don Winslow's "The Power of the Dog," an expansive, thought-provoking dramatization of the war on drugs.

Over three decades, a cast of drug enforcement agents and drug dealers, government officials and religious leaders, willing participants and innocent bystanders, are swept up in a dizzying tidal wave of events that horrify and shock. But while some of Winslow's scenarios and subtle -- and direct -- allegations may stir debate and cause controversy, he never strays from the essential point of fiction: to tell a story, and tell it well.

Regis Behe can be reached at rbehe@tribweb.com or 412-320-7990.

REVIEW: THE POWER OF THE DOG

By Alex Beam, Boston Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/
July 28, 2005

The critic raves . . .

I'm a bit more cynical about those advertising-driven "Hot Summer Reading Lists" one encounters in May and June now that I've read one of the best books of this or any summer, which has gone pretty much unnoticed. It's Don Winslow's "The Power of the Dog," a brutally violent, brilliantly plotted alternative history of the war on drugs, from the 1970s to the present.

Be forewarned: This is no Oprah pick. Many animals, children, campesinos, priests, narcs, and drug lords were harmed in the making of this novel. Winslow writes as well as James Ellroy before he started believing that GQ pap about him being America's greatest writer; as well as Alan Furst before Random House started milking him for small, plotless, unrealized "books" every two years or so. I would compare "Power" to Larry Beinhart's wonderful "American Hero," the novel that spawned the movie "Wag the Dog." George Bush pere figures in both books, as eminence noir.

Winslow should fire his literary agent, ditch his fancy publisher Alfred A. Knopf (which devoted far more resources to promoting Philip Caputo's ambitious overreach, "Acts of Faith"), and relaunch the book next summer. Here's the blurb: "The Power of the Dog" is the best read for the summer of 2006, or any season before and after.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist.His e-dress is beam@globe.com.


'POWER OF THE DOG' POWERFUL

By YVONNE CRITTENDEN
Toronto Sun
http://www.torontosun.com/
September 19, 2005

Seldom has the story of America’s war on drugs been told more powerfully than in this novel by former private eye Don Winslow.

The novel covers four decades, from the rise of Mexican drug smuggling in the 1970s to the Iran-Contra business in the ’80s to the vicious drug wars of the ’90s and, finally, to the present when, despite billions of dollars spent on prevention, there are more drugs coming into America than ever.

The story involves the American Mafia, the U.S. government, communist insurgents in Latin America, and the drug cartels, particularly the Mexican ones as they struggle with one another for power.

The main characters include Drug Enforcement Agent (DEA) agent Art Keller, drug lords Tio Angel Barrera and his nephews Adan and Raul, a beautiful call girl who gets trapped in the action, a saintly priest who is murdered for his role trying to make peace, and a ruthless hit man who never loses his sense of mission.

In less skilled hands, the story’s wide scope and breakneck action could have proved unwieldy, but Winston’s powers of characterization, his keen ear for dialogue and his sheer storytelling abilities make it an unforgettable, Godfather-like read.