Cinquantamila.it La storia raccontata da Giorgio Dell'Arti

It was happening again, Don Winslow explains. 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. As violence in Mexico reached surreal new heights, he dove back in, this time producing The Cartel. 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.
For Winslow, at least, such a scene felt unavoidable. 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. He’s quick to note that this is nothing compared to living through those episodes, but it weighed on him nonetheless. “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 thought he was done—again. It felt good.
But the story wasn’t finished, and it wasn’t finished with him. 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. 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. The story wasn’t over yet.
WATCH10 Gym Essentials Pietro Boselli Can’t Live WithoutThe result is The Border, released last week. Where the first two novels dealt with DEA agent Art Keller’s war with Adán Barrera (a stand-in for Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the former chief of the Sinaloa cartel), the third begins with the vacuum left by Barrera’s absence. From there, it quickly tracks outward to tell the stories of, among others: a Staten Island heroin addict; a straight-and-narrow New York policeman working undercover as a dirty cop; a young boy who escapes a slum in Guatemala only to find himself in juvenile migrant detention in the States; the drug-hoovering, social-media-wielding sons of Mexican cartel bosses; and John Dennison, the barely-fictionalized, immigrant-denigrating American president with a son-in-law dealing with mounting legal troubles.
About that last one: in 2017, Winslow took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, framed as a tweet to Trump, to decry the chaos and misery caused by a war on drugs we’ll never win. These days, he regularly fires off scathing, peak-#Resistance anti-Trump tweets. Two decades of deep immersion in failed American drug policy have turned him into something of an accidental activist: how many other novelists are summoned onto Morning Joe, as Winslow was last week, to explain why Trump’s wall won’t stop the flow of drugs into the US?
But The Border is anything but liberal wish fulfillment. It is a sensitive sketch of human weakness, greed, and occasional grace. It is breathtaking in its scope and fury, and it is overwhelming in its commitment to telling a very simple truth—that our boundless appetite for drugs has significant, material, human consequences. And while news broke Thursday that the whole trilogy will become at television series at FX, The Border is something else for Don Winslow, too: the end.
AdvertisementGQ: Something I was struck by in The Cartel, and then as the El Chapo trial was going on, was: Your character, Adán, so often considered to be a version of El Chapo, is so much more interesting than the real Guzman—who is kind of a boring guy. He can’t read. He’s pretty quiet. He’s got a mustache. That’s interesting, I guess.
Don Winslow: I guess. I never bought that Chapo Guzman is celebrity. That was what that whole Sean Penn thing was about. And I can’t tell you, I literally am not allowed to tell you the inside story to that. 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. But that’s the advantage we have over you, frankly. By we, I mean fiction writers, as opposed to you journalists. We’re allowed and we should create thoughts and feelings and emotions and lives. And we can ask questions and speculate in ways that you at least shouldn’t do. You know? At the same time, I want it to be realistic and plausible. The Adán character was never based on Guzman.
Come on.
No, let me explain it. In the first book, you meet him as a 19 year old. Guzman at the time was a very minor player. [Adán] was more drawn on the Arellano Felix brothers in Tijuana. But when I came to write The Cartel, the major action of the Mexican drug wars was no longer in Tijuana. They weren’t driving it. The Sinaloa Cartel was the driving engine of everything that was going on. And so to tell that story, I had to follow the Sinaloa Cartel. So it follows Guzman’s actions, but it really was never Guzman.
That gets at this idea of—do you understand yourself to have a responsibility here?
Sure.
And is that responsibility to the reader? Or is it to the bookseller? Is it to the truth?
Well, all of the above. Look, I’m a thriller writer. I’m a crime fiction guy. I will never run away from that label, okay? My job is to write an exciting, interesting novel that gives people information and takes them into a world that they probably otherwise couldn’t get into. Now the technique I choose—I’m not saying it’s the only right one—is to try to see that through the character’s eyes. My deal with the reader is that I show them a real world. As real as I can possibly make it. That’s my responsibility.
So at times I have to remind myself that I’m a novelist, so I don’t have to list every killing in Juarez. I don’t even have to have them in the correct chronological order. I can rearrange things to create dramatic structure and novelistic structure and things as long as it’s realistic.
This is something that I’ve sort of checked myself on. It’s funny—did you see either of the Sicario films?
I saw the first one.
So, the first one I enjoyed.
For the first ten minutes.
The second one is kind of a nightmare. And I guess what I mean is that it felt exploitative, right? It felt like it was using a significant multinational tragedy purely to shock.
I think that’s a real danger, and that’s a real risk I run as well. And I think that at times I might have crossed the line. It’s a very fine line to walk, because I want to tell the story. I want the reader to understand what’s going on, albeit through fiction. And at the same time, sometimes I do feel that I’m exploiting the situation or that I’m being a voyeur—that I cross the line into the pornography of violence. I think that’s a real danger, and I think it’s a valid criticism.
AdvertisementHow do you mitigate against that? Do you talk to people, do you have other friends who read and sort of give notes in that way?
I think it’s a matter of letting your intent show through the prose. Do you know what I mean? It’s that I’m going to take you there, but I’m going to try to make it as real as possible. When I give it context so that people can understand it historically and culturally and politically, I think that is what tends to remove it from exploitation. I’m not always sure that it does. I’ve tried to make the books valuable in the sense that people understand [the issue]. And then I’ve also put my own resources into campaigns to mitigate some of these things.
That’s another interesting place for us to go: you’ve advanced something of a political project in these books. I don’t know if you meant to at the outset, or thought you would.
No, I did not.
You write one or two of these and you realize, Oh, I’m making an argument here.
Well, now I’m mad. I mean, that’s the deal.
And it was, what, two years ago you put that ad in the Times?
Two years ago in the Times and three or four years ago in the Washington Post.
I can think of someone else who’s put out a very angry full page ad calling for something in the New York Times, and that’s [Donald] Trump with the Central Park Five. I want to talk about him for a minute. How do you wind up focusing a large chunk of this most recent book on him?
How do you not? I write about our times. So what am I supposed to do, pretend that it’s a different president? Am I supposed to pretend it’s Harrison Ford, or create some entity, which would take the book out of its time and make it kind of foolish? But then also, I’m writing about corruption, I’m writing about the harmful effect of dirty money, drug money in the American economy. It was the natural place to go. Now, I have no information that the Trump organization was involved in dirty drug money. But in the book, part of the plot, I thought I made it up, was a crisis about Deutsche Bank pulling out of the loan.
It turns out we have a fairly realistic model for how someone in the highest halls of power might have laundered money.
So it would have been foolish not to have, and plus Trump comes in and he shoots his mouth off about the border and the border in terms of drugs. I can’t avoid that. There’s no way an Art Keller character can avoid that.
Look, there are various estimates. Mexicans don’t release their tax returns, but then again neither does our president—the latest estimate I saw from a Mexican security official was $65 billion a year [created by the drug trade], from a guy who would know because he took quite a bit of that. The Mexican economy can’t absorb that amount of dirty money. Most of it comes back here.
It’s got to find somewhere to go.
And as the book says, it goes into lending institutions and banks and real estate and all of that. That’s what I wanted to write about. I wanted to bring the war home.
I’ve said it so many times. Everyone’s ready to vomit, including me. So get ready. It’s not the Mexican drug problem, it’s the American drug problem. And that’s really what I wanted to write about in this book.
AdvertisementSo you’ve said it a lot, I’ve read it a lot. Do people hear it yet?
I think they’re starting to hear it, because it makes sense. It’s irrefutable. I was on the phone with some dope this morning. No pun intended. In St. Louis, I think. And he went, “Oh yeah, I guess that makes sense.” You know?
I feel like we’re shifting the window leftward on a significant number of things in advance of 2020. But it doesn’t quite feel like drugs or prisons are part of that conversation in the same way.
Oh, I disagree.
It feels like we’re talking about healthcare. It feels like we’re talking about taxes.
I disagree. And I disagree with you because, no offense, I might just be better informed because I deal with this all the time. There is a real groundswell of opinion on both criminal reform and drug issues. And you know where I get it the most from? Cops. I met a police chief from a major American city a year ago [who said,] “You know, I read your book, Cartel.” He said, “[You’re] just the kind of left wing liberal asshole I can’t stand. But you’ve got some good ideas. Can we talk about it?” And he was saying, “I have a problem. 85% of the people I bring into my chair are on dope and I’ve got them for 30, 60, 90 days and I feel those days are wasted. Do you have any thoughts?” I said, “Yeah, I do. How about putting a treatment center in the jail?"
Congress just passed the FIRST STEP Act, which starts addressing excessive drug sentences. But the real actions come in from the states. There’s been 111 last year: state legislative measures passed that address the positions. The real action is happening on our local level, which is where it should.
It’s fascinating that you find yourself in the position of—activism doesn’t quite feel like the word, but that you are now the kind of person who can facilitate communication between the head of a police department and someone who can set up a treatment center.
It’s shocking and not entirely happy. I never wanted to be a political person. I never wanted to be an activist. I never wanted to be on news shows. Yesterday morning I’m on [Morning Joe], I was talking about these issues.
I watched the clip and I couldn’t think of too many other novelists who get that call—who get asked to talk about the real thing.
I know. I’m with you. I’m not completely happy about it. At the same time, I’m really happy if I can help a police department set up a drug treatment center. I’m really happy if I can talk to a conservatives on just very practical, common sense level and say, “You’re spending $88 billion a year to make things worse. Wouldn’t you rather put that 88 billion back in your pocket, in terms of a tax cut, or spend it something that might help?” And I have some suggestions as to what that would be. So, that stuff makes me happy, but no, I never pictured this. But then again, part of it’s my own fault. I mean, I did take out an ad in the Washington Post and New York Times.
Do you find yourself feeling optimistic?
Yeah. Because pessimism’s not a choice. It’d be the easier choice, frankly. Cynicism and pessimism—and I’m guilty of both—are easy. It’s real easy to go around moping and saying snarky things, and God knows I do that. But it’s not a choice because you still have to get up in the morning.

SAM SCHUBE