The power of the dog
(Book)

A riveting, sometimes harrowing story set in the shifting nexus of power among the Latin American drug cartels, the American mob, and the U.S. government. Spanning the years from the rise of the Mexican drug Federación in the 1970s to the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s to the vicious drug wars of the 1990s, the action ranges from Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and the halls of Washington to the streets of Tijuana and the deserts of the American Southwest. The players: a DEA agent, a drug lord, a call girl, a hit man, a priest. Caught up in the war on drugs, willingly or not, each is trying to escape the sins of the past while negotiating the treacherous currents of the present. Their seemingly disparate lives — taking shape on one side of the law or the other, or straddling both — slowly converge as they struggle to overcome, in any way possible, the “power of the dog.” From the jungles of Latin America to the vicious netherworld of the California–Mexico border, this is the war on drugs you haven’t seen — its devastation's and deliriums, its alliances and betrayals, its pawns and kings.