The Cartel

THE CARTEL by Don Winslow exemplifies a new breed of mystery that I call narco noir. Like the Detective Emilia Cruz series, it’s part thriller, part crime fiction, and part murder mystery, all wrapped up in the war on drugs.

I recently co-authored an article with Jeanine Kitchel, author of WHEELS UP: A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival about narco noir fiction. Drawing on my CIA experience and Jeanine’s journalism background, we wrote: “Narco noir borrows heavily from contemporary history, as well as from insider knowledge of cartel smuggling operations and law enforcement techniques. As a result, the imagery of narco noir is frequently graphic and disturbing, with depictions of cartel threats, bribes, tortures, and killings. The landscape ranges from jungle meth labs to killing fields to military war rooms. Few characters survive unscathed, either physically or emotionally [and] The breakdown in civil authority invariably provides an unsettling backdrop.”

THE CARTEL is the second in journalist and former private investigator Don Winslow’s brutally realistic Power of the Dog series, although each book is a standalone. POWER OF THE DOG, first in the series, primed audiences with character types that would soon become the essential narco noir cast: federal agents, narco-traffickers, cartel killers, corrupt local officials, mediating Catholic priests, and hookers.

The series pits DEA agent Art Keller against Adán Barrera, a character based on El Chapo Guzman, head of the Sinaloa Cartel and currently on trial in New York. Both Keller and Barrera are painted in shades of gray; Keller will do anything to stamp out Barrera and vice versa. This kill-or-be-killed game is played with every resource each man can garner. At the same time, both have personal lives, must create alliances, and occasionally do a bit of soul searching. Keller,however, soon is able to justify any action and becomes more like Barrera with every step he takes.

Bottom line? THE CARTEL is a masterful chess game. Keller and Barrera constantly outwit, out-hunt, and out-kill each other. The body count grows. The game the all-consuming.

Winslow’s writing style uses clever changes in tone to differentiate character voices. Nearly all characters are imbued with a deep point of view, which serves to emphasize the omnipresent danger.

Besides El Chapo, other key characters in THE CARTEL are based on true people including the late Mexican physician and mayor María Santos Gorrostieta Salazar, the anonymous researcher behind the daring Blog del Narco website, the Mexican editor who closed the newspaper Norte, El Chapo’s teenaged beauty queen wife, and the children who serve as cartel sicarios, or assassins. Winslow holds up to the light many of the facets of the war on drugs: the infiltration of Mexican law enforcement by cartels, infighting between US law enforcement and Washington politicos, and the untenable position of Mexican journalists attempting to report local cartel crimes.

This review originally appear on High Fever Books: https://www.highfeverbooks.com/reviews/the-cartel-by-don-winslow-narrated-by-ray-porter

Writing a review for a work like The Cartel is intimidating. Don Winslow presents an epic narrative of the War on Drugs, populated with rich characters, an immensely strong sense of place and time. The events that carry us from one scene to the next, from one character to the next, are all beautifully constructed and pack an emotional wallop. It’s a supremely intelligent work of crime fiction, but the simple fact of the matter is that The Cartel is so good it’s actually surprisingly difficult to express all the various ways for which it deserves praise.

Winslow knows his stuff, and that knowledge appears on each and every page, living within each of this book’s broad cast of characters. It’s clear that Winslow has done his homework, and the plot points of The Cartel are backed-up with plenty of factual research that bleeds seamlessly into the narrative, informing every aspect of the book. It’s both provocative and frighteningly impactful.

Writing about the Mexican drug cartels and the US response requires a firm commitment to honesty, arguably now more than ever, and the relationship that exists between Mexico and America is a deeply, deeply complicated web, one that is frustrating at the best of times, and violently brutal at the worst. At one point, a character sums up these complexities in the most succinctly, and devastatingly accurate, way possible: America hates Mexico for selling it the drugs it buys and consumes. If ever a relationship could be both parasitical and symbiotic, it is that of the drug cartels and the various drug enforcement agencies and governments that war against and feed off one another. The War on Drugs itself is an ouroboros, infinitely consuming its own tail.

The War on Drugs is a grand idea, but the reality of it is far, far different than the governmental public relations talking points. In The Cartel, it’s a war that draws in and insinuates itself amongst the people, the police, government, oil industries, the press, and terrorists. Mexico is, of course, the focal point, with cocaine and heroin pouring unstoppably across the border, but it’s an issue that ranges far wider than merely this one country.

Following his arrest, Adan Barrera is sentenced to prison and extradited back to Mexico. But even behind bars, the former head of the Barrera drug cartel is still able to buy influence and allies that will allow him his eventual escape from prison to reestablish his dominance at the head of the various syndicates of the Mexican drug cartel. Hunting Barrera, again, is DEA Agent Art Keller. Keller’s choices in The Power of the Dog have made him a wanted man, and Barrera has put a multimillion dollar bounty on his head. Keller knows its either him or Barrera, and so he finds himself drawn back to the border, back to Mexico, back to the cartels.

Winslow spares readers none of the pain that lingers in the fallout of these two men’s lives, actions, and consequences. The Cartel is a brutal, bloody, vicious read, with scenes of torture and violence regularly punctuating the narrative. As Mexico falls deeper into the control of rival drug gangs and the violence between Barrera and the burgeoning Zeta cartel escalates, Winslow paints a grim, almost apocalyptic picture of hopeless ruthlessness. Police are murdered, busloads of innocent civilians are captured, raped, and executed. Journalists are hunted. Politicians are forced into exile or slaughtered in the streets. DEA agents are gunned down on the side of the road. Rival gang members are abducted and set on fire, or beheaded, or dismembered with their body parts littered around town as a warning to others.

And Winslow makes you feel every inch of it. Over the course of this audiobook’s 23 1/2 hours, we become intimately familiar with the central players in his densely populated crime drama. Winslow grandly manipulates our sense of empathy, to the point that we feel even for some of the drug kingpins and gang members who meet terrible ends. How odd is it that we see some of these character perform such contemptible and grisly acts, but at the moment of their demise we actually feel a twinge of sadness, if only because they’re not as bad as the crazed leaders of the Zetas?

That, too, becomes a powerful point of The Cartel. The more we fight against the tide of drugs, the more the violence escalates. There is no clean exit from Mexico and the powerful drug cartels that ruin it, no easy solution to the war, not a single magic cure-all that will fix everything, regardless of what politicians on either side of the border promise. We are all the cartel, each and everyone one of us, and the only thing we ever succeed in is making the war worse. Action and reaction, until we are forced to compromise our morals, our sense of basic human decency, into making peace with the lesser of two evils, all so the war can go on… and on… and on…

This book is a very good read but also a very tough one. It’s not for the faint-of-heart. Don Winslow takes us inside the world of Mexican drug cartels. The violence at times can be nearly overpowering. You think that surely the author is using literary license here. Then you read the news story about three moms and several kids being massacred just south of our border with Mexico. and you understand just how real and awful the violence is. Don Winslow’s masterful writing can help you to plow through all the horrors in this long book, but it is definitely for the tough-minded only.

There are several writers who have done excellent jobs explaining the Mexican Drug Cartels. Don Winslow explains the beginning and growth of the Mexican Drug Cartels which are such a large part of economy. This is a novel built around a nonfiction story and it keeps the reader mesmerized the whole way through. It comes to a satisfactory ending but I wish he had gone on to write more of the story. Oh well, perhaps he’ll write a sequel.

This was well-written and really takes you into the mindset of the drug world. I read it after watching “Pablo” the bio-pic series, so much of that drama ran parallel to this. That drug sales are a full-on way of life and a basic part of the economy is underscored here with the dramas of the characters.

Between 2004 and 2014, Art (Killer) Keller—an Ex-DEA agent turned special ops/vigilante—hunts for his arch-enemy, Adan Barrera, Mexico’s biggest drug lord of the century. Along the way, Art witnesses the horrific destruction of Mexico as the drug narcos wage war on each other, nearly eradicating the land they love. Don Winslow is a master storyteller, and with his descriptive, blunt style, he exposes the power-hungry kingpins of the drug world for the ruthless killers they are. They crush everything in their paths for greed of power and money. These evil, soulless men snatch kids off the streets to replenish their armies, rape and murder innocent women, and violently exterminate thousands of their country’s people, stopping at nothing to take what they want and protect their territories. Art has lost everything except his need for revenge—and when a man has nothing left to lose—there’s nothing to stop him from descending into hell to catch the devil. Dedicated to the hundreds of journalists that were murdered or disappeared during this time trying to bring the truth to their countrymen, the author emphasizes the enormous damage that drugs can unleash on the world. It makes one question who are the real criminals? The narcos or the drug users that buy their products? Without them, would we have the other?

My second Winslow book in two weeks. The Cartel is not for the squeamish. If you like gritty, realistic stories about true crime, get this one.

well. hard to say. Wislow is good writer and a great researcher. but i do not want to read a documentary. the beginning was great and than a great drop quite boring saga of narcotics. maybe it tried too much to follow reality, but…not great plot, not really interesting characters, the women are just house wives or whores. a lot of violence which just serve to describe sort of reality but where is the thriller? so i got bored after half of it. the only real piece of writing was Art Keller as a monk growing bees.

Top 5 books I ever read.

Already rated.