Drug cartels’ ‘vocabulary of mutilation’

WASHINGTON, DC: Don Winslow, novelist and conscientious objector to America’s longest “war,” was skeptical when he was in Washington on a recent Sunday morning. This was shortly after news broke about the escape, from one of Mexico’s “maximum security” prisons, of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, head of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Guzman reportedly escaped through a five-foot-tall tunnel almost a mile long and built solely for his escape. Asked about this, Winslow, his fork poised over an omelet, dryly said he thinks Guzman might actually have driven away from the prison’s front gate in a Lincoln Town Car. What might seem like cynicism could be Winslow’s realism. Fourteen years ago, Guzman escaped from another “maximum security” prison simply by hiding in a laundry cart. With exquisite understatement, The Wall Street Journal reports that his recent escape raised “new concerns about corruption in Mexican law enforcement.”