"Now that we’ve come to the end of Anton’s appearances, it should be
obvious he wasn’t working for the Mexican cartels, nor was he honest with the financier who he returns the money to. His relationship with Carson Wells reveals his connection to the Special Forces, who operated as the armed wing of the CIA during the 1970s.
The main question is why Cormac McCarthy left only these sparse clues which are often easy to overlook, but had he been more explicit in identifying Anton Chigurh as a CIA asset, it’s possible the novel would never have reached its current level of fame.
McCarthy published No Country For Old Men in 2005 at the start of the
current Mexican cartel wars, which began in 2006 and inaugurated the current era of violence, an outcome the CIA favored over communist guerrilla fighters along the border. What was described in No Country For Old Men was just the prelude to what we all live in now, and McCarthy was surely bitter at the CIA’s involvement in running cocaine into the US during the 1980s, fueling the crack epidemic, and the novel is a brutal reminder of what the government did to its own citizens in the name of anti-communism. As McCarthy explained through the voice of Sheriff Bell,
"there’s always been narcotics. But people don’t just up and decide to dope theirselves for no reason. By the millions...I believe that whatever you do in your life it will get back to you. If you live long enough it will...I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and don’t change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that’s what it is...I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it’d be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late."
True to his own word, McCarthy told the truth simple enough, so simple
it’s easy to miss."
https://anarchistnews.org/content/anarchists-guide-no-country-old-men
My reminder for today that we're currently living in a Cormack McCarthy novel.
