The Cartel by Don Winslow / Review

The Cartel by Don Winslow

Maybe I should stop writing reviews on famous writers who have already attracted the attention of consolidated newspapers and magazines but The Cartel by Don Winslow (Arrow Books, 2015) that I just finished deserves some more attention. It is indeed a great work for a writer to show the machine behind the drug world and its business with a similar civil indignation as Saviano’s Gomorra showed but with the structure of a novel.

I had already read The Winter of Frankie Machine in Italian and put it among the books of interesting authors to keep an eye on. I had searched The Force in original but could not find it and opted for  The Cartel, whose basic theme is the war on drugs between the United States and Mexico between 2004 and 2012. Obviously there is a novel preceding The Cartel, begun with The Power of the Dog, in which the protagonist is Miguel Angel Barrera and and Adan Barrer, his nephew, ends up closed in a prison in Mexico. In The Cartel, the protagonist is Adàn Barrera, the “avenger”, Art Keller, who is always an operative member of the American government in charge of working in the field. There is also plenty of other characters, some of them mischievous, disgusting, brutal some other admirable, courageous, and brave. The storytelling moves between fiction and reality, with a lot of violence that has nothing to do with the graphic aestheticism we have been accustomed to in these last decades. Remember that violence, in Winslow’s terms is never voyeuristic or pornographic, or gratuitous, although it is brutal, impactful, terrible, just like it is in was stories.

If you’re the kind of readers who feel the stomach churning and you’ve been horrified when you watched Traffic (S. Soderbergh) or you have felt a sense of deep existential unease at Sicario (a great, brutal movie by Denis Villeneuve, 2015) and you’ve found Scarface (the one with Al Pacino) a bit cloying in terms of violence; if you appreciate Gomorra for directing but you find the scenes of violence really too much exaggerated, you are not ready to read The Cartel. If, on the other hand, you like hardboiled books that don’t make discounts and don’t offer consoling endings or misplaced hopes, devote some time to this book and forget Traffic, and all those I mentioned, because Winslow’s writing impresses a completely new turbospeed to the relationship between fiction and reality.

The writer did a remarkable job in reconstructing the war on narcos and in offering a contemporary deconstruction of the criminal imaginary, traditionally ambivalent, hypocritical and complacent in cinema, to which we are linked when we watch TV series about drug-trafficking (and the mafias associated with it). Winslow has taken the imaginary that we like so much when we see characters as Jenny Savastano or Scarface, and has shown what there is behind and who surrounds us: beings that are vampires on society, people who would be better if they didn’t exist but who, instead, are here and contribute to the wealth and recirculation of what is meant as the universal equivalent – money.

Winslow’s novel shows to us a phenomenology of organised crime, without neglecting the fundamental principles of fictional narrative: characters and plots, intense dialogues and mobile points of view. Working directly on important sources of traditional journalism (only to mention the first ones I remember, Ioan Grillo, El Narco; Anabel Hernandez, Narcoland; Charles Bowden, El Sicario. Confessions of a Cartel Hitman and Murder City as well as articles from The Texas Observer and Milenio Diario, La Prensa, El Norte) and dedicated blogs such as El Blog del Narco, Insight Crime, Borderland Beat Winslow unfolds the story over a ten-year span and traces an extremely detailed and documented map of the war on drugs in which the main, secondary, tertiary, boundary characters, present and absent, move, live and die without anything and nobody being spared by the direct or indirect violence that contaminates and destroys everything.

The novel unfolds over six hundred pages, most of which are directly inspired by real events and real characters (not least Javier Valdez’s, killed this year in a way many of the characters in Winslow’s book are  (in Valdez I quote an article here) with detailed descriptions of the military and tactical operations that the USA has been carrying out with Mexico for years against the Cartels. In the novel, the dialogues between the operative, and the crossroads of the various abbreviations CIA, DEA, Governo, Federales, etc. manage to draw a map of individual and collective destinies in which the distinction between the two parties at war lies in the means available, in the containment of the damage (social, political, economic, financial) and in the ability to anticipate the enemy’s moves in the attempt to put at least an embankment to chaos and exert some sort of control.

Apart from the decidedly complicated plot and the large number of male and female characters in the secondary and underlying plots with descriptions of a sombre realism, the scenario is set in Mexico and partly in Guatemala, with brutal events and a violence almost unbearable even when mediated by the written word. Cruelty, madness, brutality are methods that these (in)human beings use to exert control over a business which is actually a war. The Cartel is not a crime novel, at least not only this. It is, if anything, a war novel and as such it should be read. It is not by chance that in papers, the war of drugs is called a conflict, a war.

The victims among civilians are often side effects; the means employed to contrast (and to fight against the enemy) are military ones, the resources are huge, and yet with few exciting results to be celebrated (according to the UN the war on drugs is a lost war), the executioners are so well organized to be capable, at times, to overrun their opponents,  who may be rivals of the same mould in the everlasting fight for the control of a territory: Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, Chihuahuahua, Veracruz, Michoacan.

In this sense, Don Winslow does not make prisoners. Not only is it impossible to divide the world into good and bad; not only it becomes useless and unrealistic to even try to draw a line, but even the attempt to show that something is safe is, at the end of the day, a utopian act, the last remnant of a “humanity” intended not in the sense of the biological belonging to the species but as a term referring to “a feeling of human solidarity, understanding and indulgence towards others”. In other words, few of the characters may be having some “humanity”.

For this reason, it seems to me that The Cartel with its events, with the narrative emphasis on personal vendetta, paradoxically understood as something that still makes us human, even if in a brutal, animal way, makes also ask ourselves, given the context in which people live and die across the border, whther it is possible to maintain a shred of moral integrity. The problem regards Keller, the straight man as we would like to see him, except for the fact that in a war novel, you need to abandon the fair play and opt for the lesser evil. Keller is the one who has to cross the line of morality, of ethics and opt for the old, obsolete way: revenge at least to try to redress personally what the system failed to accomplish.  It is self evident that the war to the narco traffic is the ultimate, inexorable failure of Capitalism and the real face of its brutality behind the mask of a necessary economic growth.

In the 1960s, William Burroughs said that dope is the last commodity and that it generates in the human body what he used to call “an algebra of need” that continually renews the demand for the substance, made available on the market by a capillary organization that moves huge amounts of capital which neither banks, nor governments, nor the infamous world finance disdain. Like food, cocaine (and to a lesser but no less harmful extent, methamphetamine) is a product available on the market for a price, which responds to an individual need perhaps only in appearance, but certainly capable of producing irreparable damage to the social fabric creating side effects which may become basically an enormous social problem.

We know, Romans used to say pecunia non olet (money has no odour), and even a parallel and illegal society like that of the drug cartels is well aware of how important the hierarchy in the chain of command is, not so much differently from what happens in an International Corporation with its top management and intermediate plans, its ramifications, its affiliates, located around the world.  The Cartel, in fact, is set in Mexico but contains a basic element to understand the economy in general and the one of drugs in particular, which appears almost paradigmatic: the interdependence of everything and everyone at any level of society, on a national and international scale. We might not be touched by the fate of a poor whore blinded by her torturers in Ciudad Juarez because she was a spy for a policeman; or a combative doctor who lives in Valverde and strives every day to make her town a better place; or a journalist too idealistic and unsuccessful and a plethora of poor miserable people who live in militarized cities where human life is not worth the bullet that the Zetas squadrons use to make them out; or even a pathetic junkie who buys the dose and he is the last ring on a chain of desperados (among other things, in the book, there are very few “classic” scenes of people who use cocaine and the drug is really treated in a way that is very well thought out). We may be saying that this is only fiction, as we always do when we watch Gomorra and see the (not so much) distant places depicted like human zoos of illegality.

These are all epiphenomena of a society in which dope is sold at every corner; the cartel is a business system that has ramifications just like a corporation would do: United States, Europe, Italy (Winslow also talk about the’ Ndrangheta and the percentage of Italian GDP ascribable to drugs) and moves to conquer new markets and new customers. The Cartel moves as a self-fueling machine, which never stops its supply chain; it is a feudal and anarchic system (strange but true, in its contradiction) at the same time, brutal and systematic in removing obstacles, tending towards monopoly but extremely flexible in terms of alliances necessary to prolong and consolidate its power on the market. A system that requires instruments of contrast to the limits of legality and often outside the international law (very interesting is the chapter entitled “Jihad”) with men aware of the risk of losing everything once they return to bare life just like old combatants would do after an armistice.

On the other side of the front, there are the leaders, psychopaths, opportunists, villains, who, like puppeteers, plot strategies and market tactics, think of their offspring and their own survival as in a world of beasts where society is just a biological ecosystem of corruption in which they obviously can thrive. Winslow clearly shows the dynamic of the winner, of the Alpha male and his transversality. The concept embodied by the successful man, rewarded even by the resonance boxes of world capitalism and its minions, is the ghost who obsesses everyone.

There is a passage in which Keller, on the plane with the official with whom he works in the field carrying out the Barrera fighter, browses an issue of Forbes:

“You’re going to like this”

Keller gives Orduna a questioning look.

“Page eight”, Orduna says.

Keller turns the page and sees it. Adàn Barrera is listed as number sixty-seven on the Forbes annual list of the world’s most powerful people.

“Forbes”, Keller says, tossing the magazine down.

As in a long war account, in the book there are indescribable but all too real violent episodes, helpless victims and very painful side-effects; I recommend not to become too fond of the characters of Marisol or Pablo, Ana and Keller (but you will do so, especially with Marisol and Pablo, whom I adored) and not to seek within you a bit of humanity to save the memory Madga Beltran. Compassion is a side-effect of reading novels, which perhaps make life more bearable but we should always remember that there are real people who probably inspired this story, people who fight with the scarce means available, such as newspaper articles, anti-corruption mentality, field work and, in some way, novels of denunciation.  Beyond our role of passive readers, attracted or disgusted by a world like this, there is a real society that is sometimes hard to be imagined, geographically distant and difficult to accept. But this society, these business methods are much closer than we think, something that we should keep in mind each time we think at the characters we see in films as pure fictional creations. They are when we see them on a screen, in society, everything can be much worse.

LA LETTRICE IMMAGINARIA