The Power of the Dog [Audio Cassette]

Don Winslow's latest book (after _California Fire and Life_), _The Power of the Dog_, is an epic look at the US war on drugs from its earliest beginnings to more recent times. The book is violent and thrilling and heart-breaking, as it follows a large cast of characters from the early 1970s through 2004, showing how the competing interests and agendas of various government agencies (the CIA, the DEA, etc.) get in the way of successfully combatting the problem, and often only served to make things much worse.

Art Keller, the book's protagonist, is a half-Hispanic DEA agent who grew up in the San Diego barrio and saw the effects of drugs on his friends and family firsthand. As a rookie agent, he makes the mistake of befriending Don Miguel Angel Barrera, one of the top Mexican policemen, in an effort to topple the reigning drug kingpin. Barrera proceeds to move into the subsequent power vacuum and sets up La Federaccion, a much more well-organized and deadly organization than previously existed, and run by his two nephews, the intelligent and sensitive Adan, and the flashy and violent Raul.

This sets in motion a 30-year vendetta on Keller's part, as he attempts to take down the Barreras and atone for his mistake, a vendetta that will lead to the deaths of numerous innocent parties along the way, and to Keller's estrangement from his own wife and children.

The book was a very fast-moving, though extremely violent novel. In a little over 500 pages, Winslow does an amazing job of encapsulating a lot of recent history, including the Camarena murder, the Iran-Contra scandal, and other related events, into a very readable and entertaining novel, one of the best I've read recently. If you're not too squeamish, I'd highly recommend the book.

I find two varieties of five-star reads. Page-turners both, there are those that hit you like the best action movies - a quick rush, great fun while they last, a lightning shot of adrenaline - and all but forgotten a month or so down the road. And then there are the very special books that deliver all the thrills, the action, all the suspense while at the same searing an unshakable image in your soul that you know will stay with you for a very long time. Don Winslow's remarkable "Power of the Dog" is firmly in the latter camp.

Contemporary history buffs my remember US DEA Special Agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena who, while assigned in Mexico in 1985, was abducted, tortured, and brutally murdered by Mexican drug lords. While Winslow changes the names, the events leading to and subsequent to Camarena's murder play a central role in this epic tale of the violence, corruption, love, betrayal, and vengeance surrounding three decades worth of the trafficking of cocaine and heroine by Mexican drug cartels. So grand in scope, so exhaustively researched, and so authoritative in its delivery of the facts, and comparisons or analogies are strained. But for a starter, consider a role up of "Traffic", "The Godfather", and "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia". Winslow manages to demystify the shady politics and clandestine operations of Nicaragua and the Sandanistas and the Iran-Contra affair, the 1994 assassination of Mexican Presidential candidate Luis Colosio, NAFTA and others in enough detail to qualify as a docudrama, while the unspeakable brutality, depravity, and evil that travels alongside the drug trade is, well, plainly spoken. Winslow weaves tight story lines from Mexico's deserts and poppy fields to the Tijuana/San Diego borderland battlegrounds to New York City's Hell's Kitchen and Bensonhurst. His characters are much too real to be expected between the pages of pop fiction - all too believable in their flaws, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and failures.

In the end, it would not be giving anything away to say that the vaunted war on drugs is ultimately a war of futility. Drugs pour into the US in ever-greater quantities while drug lords get richer and the American taxpayer pours increasingly more money to fund corrupt politicians and dubious strategies. Notwithstanding, "The Power of the Dog" is a powerful and unapologetic tale of bitter fatalism, of redemption that rings ultimately hollow. If you are squeamish, or intend to keep naive delusions of our "noble" fight against drugs intact, this is probably not the book for you. But for what is bound to become a classic, plumbing the depths of evil in this dark history we'd probably all prefer to ignore, you simply must read this novel.

"El poder del perro"; The Power of the Dog. This novel delivers a healthy dose of reality, shadowing drug enforcement agencies, from the poppy fields of South America to the Mexican border. Laced with the politics of self-deception and political agendas, much goes unreported and unacknowledged as the US continues indefensible relationships with despots who perpetuate the violence of a drug-related economy.

Against this background, one figure traces the advances of the drug economy. Since Operation Condor in Sinaloa in 1975, Art Keller has been tracking the drug industry's recurring faces. A Company Man, Keller is one of the "lost, the lonely, the cultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither, half-Anglo and Half-Mexican". North American fire power and munitions meet South American business-as-usual, a disheartening mix of military power in the hands of the politically untouchable who decimate the country's economy in pursuit of profit. Keller pursues one small corner of this world, but he does so doggedly, revealing the complicated infrastructure and government involvement along the US-Mexican border.

Keller is infected with guilt; he once was duped by the man who is now a key player, Miguel Angel Barrera. But Keller handles most of his business outside of the purview of the government agencies, a lethal alphabet soup of DEA, FBI and ATF, all committed to keeping a lid on the current problems. Art believes all Third World slums are the same, "the same mud or dust, depending on climate or season, the same smells of charcoal stoves and open sewers...malnourished kids with distended bellies and big eyes". At least in Guadalajara, the middle class softens the edge between rich and poor. Not so in the South American countries, reduced to abject poverty and a tiny percentage of ultra-rich. South America is a killing ground, where the poor are slaughtered with impunity.

Following the corruption endemic to the drug trade, from Operation Condor in Sinaloa in1975, Guadalajara in 1984, El Salvador in 1985, Mexico and NAFTA in 1992 through the late nineties, is like descending the levels of Hell, each more complicated and fraught with moral indictments, the exorbitant cost of the lesser of two evils, where moral ambiguity becomes the coin of the realm. Art Keller's personal journey, navigating this particular nightmare, illustrates how deeply flawed is the attempt to control illegal substances.

This kind of fiction serves a dual purpose: it entertains and informs. While Winslow writes a fascinating fiction of drug trafficking and those it touches so intimately, he also exposes the agencies who have failed to control the uncontrollable, yielding a massacre of thousands in the name of profit, a system of bribery and corruption so endemic that each layer only reveals another, a mix of murderers and drug lords who act with impunity to protect a way of life. In a blistering indictment of the War on Drugs, American support of Third World guerillas financed by the illegal narcotics trade and the easy greed of officials who sell their accommodation to the highest bidder, Winslow spins a powerful yarn that is both informative and disturbing: "The hardest thing in the world isn't to refrain from committing an evil, it's to stand up and stop one." Luan Gaines/2005.