By we, I mean fiction writers, as opposed to you journalists. But that's the advantage we have over you, frankly. I know exactly the people who were involved and why they were doing it and the movie plot that was going on to get that film made. And I can't tell you, I literally am not allowed to tell you the inside story to that. That was what that whole Sean Penn thing was about. I never bought that Chapo Guzman is celebrity. The story wasn’t over yet.ĭon Winslow: I guess. So when America’s interest in marijuana and cocaine gave way to a dependence on opiates and heroin, and as its prisons grew crowded beyond belief, and as Donald Trump kicked off his campaign with a declaration about Mexican immigrants, Winslow felt that familiar, uneasy tug.
Winslow’s novels are sprawling, but his central subject remains the same: the voracious American appetite for narcotics, and its neatly predictable effects-on public health, on incarceration, on the volume and degree of violence and corruption in Mexico and the US, on immigration to this country from both Mexico and the rest of Central America. It felt good.īut the story wasn’t finished, and it wasn’t finished with him. “Research-wise, I'd spend sometimes weeks at a time doing nothing but looking at atrocity videos and autopsy photos,” he says over coffee in the lobby of his Manhattan hotel. He’s quick to note that this is nothing compared to living through those episodes, but it weighed on him nonetheless. His north star is verisimilitude, and on The Cartel that meant spending hours digging into the carnage that spirals out of America’s drug war, soon to enter its sixth decade. The book was markedly more intense than its predecessor-one notable scene features a child soldier playing with a soccer ball onto which he’s sewn the face of one of his tormentors-but it was also a gigantic hit.įor Winslow, at least, such a scene felt unavoidable. As violence in Mexico reached surreal new heights, he dove back in, this time producing The Cartel. The decorated crime writer had been through this once before, in 2005: after he published The Power of the Dog, a blistering epic about America’s long entanglements with Mexican drug cartels, he thought his telling of the story was finished, but of course, that was just the beginning. It was happening again, Don Winslow explains.
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