Reading Up On the Drug War

RUSSELL W. RAMSEY

Maria Jimena Duzan is a journalist with El Espectador (The Spectator) of Bogota, a splendid newspaper aligned generally with the Liberal Party. Her Death Beat, translated from the Spanish in 1994 by Peter Eisner, is simply the best book of our times on crime reporting. With hair follicles tingling, the reader wonders how an attractive, well-educated woman got close enough to the murderous subjects she investigated--Colombia's infamous cartel lords--with her objectivity and her life intact. In 1989, Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leon of the Miami Herald staff produced the still relevant Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellin Cartel, focusing upon druglord Carlos Lehder. Again, the odor of exploding dynamite, the grins of the payoff goons, and the screams of the syndicate's torture victims all come alive, with lots of facts that stand up to later discovery. Max Mermelstein was the evil brain behind the Medellin cartel during that era. He spilled his guts about the infamous Ochoa brothers, Juan David and Fabio, to adventure author Robin Moore, who published the tale in 1990 as The Man Who Made It Snow. Arturo Carrillo Strong was a narcotics agent in the southwestern United States during the 1970s, when hard drugs of Latin American origin were becoming a plague. His memoir, Corrido de Cocaina: Inside Stories of Hard Drugs, Big Money, and Short Lives, appeared in 1990 and gives the reader a chilling longitudinal awareness of the street drug culture in the United States.