The Cartel

Don Winslow’s 2015 thriller The Cartel is the second novel in the series Power of the Dog, a plot-driven, extremely violent, meticulously researched take on the last ten years of the Mexican-American drug war. The novel spans the years 2004-2014, which in real life saw some eighty thousand people killed as a result of this vicious, ongoing, and seemingly unsolvable conflict. Winslow peppers his novel with only very slightly fictionalized versions of real-life atrocities, so much so, that even readers who otherwise praise the book report being “often sickened and brought to tears by the violence and horrific scenes of murder and torture.” Many characters are brutalized before being killed in almost unimaginable ways, as they find themselves churned through a plot that “depicts people with a complete lack of humanity and compassion” but only because “this is based on the facts of what people have suffered.”

The novel opens in 2004, and the anti-hero of the series, DEA super-agent Art Keller has had enough of the life that caused him to lose the woman he loved. For the past thirty years, he has been pursuing a blood feud against Adán Barrera, the head of El Federación, an alliance between the most powerful narcotics cartels in the world—and loosely based on real-life crime lord Joaquin Guzman, the former head of the Sinaloan cartel. Besides his professional stake in shutting Barrera’s operation down, Keller has a personal vendetta as well: Barrera savagely executed Keller’s partner. However, at the end of the previous novel, Power of the Dog, Keller seemed to have finally won by putting Barerra behind bars. When The Cartel begins, Keller has quit the DEA and is instead tending bees at a monastery in order to have some peace.

Nevertheless, this imprisonment doesn’t last. Barrera is extradited to Mexico where he, like Guzman, promptly escapes and gets back to business. While he was gone, El Federación’s alliances have collapsed into an all-out war between the various groups, so he has to build his Sonoran cartel all over again.



Keller comes out of retirement once again to go after Barrera; in the meantime, a new drug power is rising in Mexico—the even more brutal, nihilistic, and senselessly violent Zetas. Founded by ex-military commander Heriberto Ochoa, who is based on the real-life sadistic monster Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, Zeta leaders train their employees like soldiers, employing tactics like decapitations, dismemberment, and burning people alive in order to terrorize rivals, the government, the police, and the country’s citizens. Not only that, they glory in the outsized violence, gleeful at the horror it inspires in normal people.

According to fans, one of Winslow’s strengths as an author is creating memorable characters—something particularly impressive considering most of them are killed almost as quickly as they are introduced. In this novel, standout side characters include eleven-year-old Chuy, whose initiation into cartel life includes shooting a man in the head with an AR-15, and whose just barely pubescent world is quickly rife with drugs, decapitating tied up hostages, and having sex with cartel groupies. We also meet Juarez journalist Pablo Mora, who loves his country and city and refuses to leave no matter how much danger his reporting incurs; eventually, Pablo sacrifices himself willingly to save his son from the Zetas. Winslow also includes portrayals of many heroic women—ordinary citizens who risk their safety and lives for the chance to stand up to the cartels. Their bravery mitigates the book’s nonstop violence.

Obsessed with vengeance, Keller spends ten years trying to bring Barrera down once again, in a quest that takes him from Mexico to Guatemala, to Washington, DC, and to European cities like Berlin and Barcelona. As he loses more and more of his humanity and value system, it is not clear whether Keller is motivated by the desire for justice or something much darker.



The long time frame means that the plot is full of twists and turns, but to some critics, these feel repetitive. Allied groups end up betraying each other, and meetings between top leaders of competing cartels sometimes go south right away, or other times create peace treaties that don’t hold. No matter what, the situation always devolves into war, mayhem, and massacres.

In the end, Keller makes a series of decisions that show that he has turned from an anti-hero with a healthy disrespect for authority into a cold-blooded murderer who can’t imagine any other way to handle the situation he finds himself in. After briefly being forced to work together with Barrera to bring down the threat of the Zetas, Keller executes Barrera rather than arresting him. His possible redemption comes in the third novel in this series, The Border, which explores the newest threat created by the power vacuum left when both Barrera and Ochoa are gone—the flow of heroin and other opiates.