Don WINSLOW ("Savages") concise upending of legalization, cartel business of heroin epidemic.SPOILER
Excellent LONG read. Spoilers here will not spoil but inspire reading it all: He says that legalization of marijuana resulted in cartel business decisions to shift to heroin and marketing, that GUZMAN/"Chapo" had kept a relative "Peace" that dissolved into more violence each time he was imprisoned (like Saddam's removal), that he didn't "escape" two times, he was escorted out to restore the "peace" and much more.
********QUOTE*******
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a46918/heroin-mexico-el-chapo-cartels-don-winslow/
[font size=5]El Chapo and the Secret History of the Heroin Crisis[/font]
By Don Winslow
If you wonder why America is in the grips of a heroin epidemic that kills two hundred people a week, take a hard look at the legalization of pot, which destroyed the profits of the Mexican cartels. How did they respond to a major loss in revenue? Like any company, they created an irresistible new product and flooded the market. The scariest part: this might not have happened with El Chapo in charge.
.... For the record, Guzmán did not go out that tunnel on a motorcycle. Steve McQueen escapes on motorcycles. My money says that Guzmán didn't go into that tunnel at all; anyone who can afford to pay $50 million in bribes and finance the excavation of a mile-long tunnel can also afford not to use it.
Gentle reader, the man is worth $1 billion. He was thinking about buying the Chelsea Football Club. He went out the front door. ....
2001: Guzmán made his first "escape," which, like his most recent one, wasn't an escape at all. (An escape generally doesn't involve the active participation of one's jailers.) The cover story that year was that he went out in a laundry cart, but insiders allege he actually went off the roof in a helicopter. ....
I gave the same explanation to the media over and over again: Guzmán didn't escape; he was let out so that he could try to reestablish order. ....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-rubinstein/the-cartel-a-conversation-with-don-winslow_b_7637218.html
[font size=5]‘The Cartel’ A Conversation With Don Winslow[/font]
Mark Rubinstein
... By the time you get to the cartel era between 2004 and 2014, the drug lords were advertising. They were putting out demos on video clips. They were writing to newspaper editors and photographing banners over stacks of bodies, explaining what they did and why they did it. The drug wars became hyper-violent and widely known.
You dedicated The Cartel to more than 100 named journalists who were murdered or “disappeared” in Mexico during the period of the novel. Tell us about that.
The cartels came to a point where they realized they not only had to fight the war with bullets, but had to win ‘the hearts and minds of people.’ They wanted to control the narrative, so they began killing journalists who told the truth. They began bribing journalists, army officers, and the police—it was a matter of ‘Take this money or we’ll kill you.’ So, many journalists caved in and wouldn’t cover the cartels’ activities.
The novel clearly exposes the cartels as virtually a shadow government.
Yes. In fact, they are shadow governments. They control somewhere between eight and twelve percent of the Mexican economy. Their economic power alone makes them a shadow government. They began dictatorially controlling news coverage. And that meant intimidating, terrorizing, and killing journalists.
http://don-winslow.com/
New York Times bestselling author and Raymond Chandler award recipient Don Winslow has written seventeen novels, including The Kings of Cool, Savages, The Winter of Frankie Machine and the highly acclaimed epic The Power of the Dog.
The son of a sailor and a librarian, Winslow grew up with a love of books and storytelling in a small coastal Rhode Island town. He left at age seventeen to study journalism at the University of Nebraska, where he earned a degree in African Studies. While in college, he traveled to southern Africa, sparking a lifelong involvement with that continent.
Winslow’s travels took him to California, Idaho and Montana before he moved to New York City to become a writer, making his living as a movie theater manager and later a private investigator in Times Square – ‘before Mickey Mouse took it over’. He left to get a master’s degree in Military History. Winslow was supposed to go into the Foreign Service, but instead joined a friend’s safari firm in Kenya, leading photographic safaris there as well as hiking trips in the mountains of southwestern China, and directing Shakespeare on summer programs in Oxford.
While bouncing back and forth between Asia, Africa, Europe and America, Winslow wrote his first novel, A Cool Breeze On The Underground, which was nominated for an Edgar Award.
Now with a wife and young son, Winslow went back to investigative work, mostly in California, where he and his family lived in hotels for almost three years as he worked cases and became a trial consultant. A film and publishing deal for his novel The Death and Life of Bobby Z allowed Winslow to be full-time writer and settle in his beloved southern California, the setting for many of his books.
Winslow then branched out into television and film, his work attracting the attention of filmmakers and actors such as Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio. With his friend Shane Salerno, Winslow wrote a television series, UC Undercover, and he and Salerno later wrote the screen adaptation of Winslow’s novel, Savages, filmed by Oliver Stone. Winslow and Salerno currently have several film projects in process.
In addition to his novels, Winslow has published fourteen short stories in anthologies and magazines such as Esquire, The LA Times Magazine and Playboy. He has written columns for The Huffington Post as well a number of foreign newspapers.
Winslow lives in southern California with his wife of thirty years.
********UNQUOTE********
