The Power of the Dog (2005)

Don Winslow’s 2005 novel The Power of the Dog is an ambitious and sprawling account of America’s involvement in the Drug Wars from the 1980s to the early 2000s. The product of years of research by Winslow, the novel charts with painstaking detail both the structure and the operating procedures of the drug trade, as well as its multiple points of contact with corrupt members of law enforcement and politics in both Mexico and the United States, from the lowest to the very highest levels. In doing so, Winslow of necessity also recaps American foreign policy in Central America over the same period, including the arming of the Contras in Nicaragua, its involvement in Guatemala’s brutal civil war, and its attempts to limit the influence of FARC in Colombia, all of which Winslow portrays as parts of a larger American effort to control the spread of Communism during this period. If this sounds overwhelming, it is, not only because Winslow is trying to cover so much ground in Power, but also because his descriptions of the brutality with which the Drug Wars were fought on both sides are explicit and unrelenting. Winslow does a couple of things to make the impact of the novel a little more manageable for his readers. First, through using a core group of protagonists, he attempts to personalize/put a human face on the complex geopolitics of this time and place. In some ways, this inevitably oversimplifies his subject matter, but it may be necessary to keep his readers with him. Second, and on a related point, Winslow finishes the novel with some sense of closure, and even of hope. Although, on the one hand, Winslow’s DEA protagonist, Art Keller, admits that the drug trade has not even been dented by his career-defining efforts, on the other hand, the main villain is in jail, other villains are dead, and some of the ‘good’ have even survived and may be happy. To Winslow’s credit, this resolution feels deliberately contrived. After all, one of the distinctions that has been most comprehensively destroyed by this novel is that between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ between ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’; given this fact, bare life may seem like a victory, but it’s inevitably a hollow one.