The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)

by Don Winslow

One of the masked men shakes his head then tells him the story: AUC went to the village yesterday, shot the young men and raped the women. Then they locked most of the survivors inside the village’s barn, set it on fire and made the rest watch and listen. Then they took these people to a bridge over the Putumayo, beheaded them with chain saws and threw their heads and bodies in the river to drift downstream as a warning to the villages below. “We came to you,” Javier says, “because we thought that if you could see the truth, you would go home and tell it. The people in America—if they knew the truth . . . they would not send their money and their soldiers to do this.” “What do you mean, our soldiers?” Art asks. “The AUC here,” the masked man says, “were trained by your Special Forces.” The man gestures to the corpses and says, in perfect English, “Your tax dollars at work.”