Pubdate: Mon, 23 Dec 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: William Langewiesche
Note: William Langewiesche is a national correspondent for The Atlantic 
Monthly and the author, most recently, of "American Ground: Unbuilding the 
World Trade Center."

DOWN BY THE RIVER: THE SHADOW WORLD OF CROSS-BORDER DRUG TRAFFICKING

Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family.

By Charles Bowden.

433 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $27.

The river in "Down by the River" is the Rio Grande, a sewage-laden stream 
that, like the border itself, serves as much to join the two nations of 
Mexico and the United States as to divide them. In El Paso, where the river 
first becomes the international boundary, the pollution is so severe, so 
out of control, that it is essentially ignored. There is no mystery about 
the source: the waste comes almost entirely from the river's south side, 
from Ciudad Juarez, a typical Mexican border city that over the past decade 
has swollen with several million of the desperately poor, drawn north to 
answer some of the baser needs of the United States markets.

Juarez is said to be a boomtown. But assembly-line jobs in the factories 
there currently pay about $4 a day, which is not nearly enough to live on 
in the new economy; the annual turnover of the workforce runs as high as 
200 percent; huge shantytowns sprawl across the low hills of the desert; 
children live wildly in the streets, struggling to help their families 
survive; and malnutrition, disease and criminality are rampant. The plain 
truth is that for ordinary Mexicans, of whom 80 percent live in poverty, 
according the World Bank, the country's formalistic emergence into 
"democracy" and "free trade" has been a failure. The misery they suffer is 
not the fault of the United States -- or even necessarily of global 
capitalism. But it would be dishonest to pretend that El Paso residents, 
for instance, are just the hapless victims of a tough and dirty 
neighborhood -- or that the rest of us who live farther away have little to 
do with the varied forms of poison that flow in our direction through 
Mexico's ditches.

Charles Bowden is a serious writer with a reputation for thoughtful 
narrative and a devoted following that on the basis of this book deserves 
to grow much larger. The subject he has chosen here is not transborder 
sewage or industrial waste, but a more insidious form of pollution -- the 
huge and illicit trade in narcotics that feeds in equal proportions on the 
hungers and expediencies of many Americans and the dishonesty and cynicism 
of successive Mexican governments. At the core is the story of an 
apparently simple street crime -- the shooting of an innocent man named 
Lionel Bruno Jordan, on the evening of Jan. 20, 1995, in the parking lot of 
an El Paso Kmart. At 27, Bruno Jordan was the youngest son of a large and 
respected El Paso family, an easy-going bachelor who sold suits at a Men's 
Wearhouse, planned to attend law school and had no connection to the drug 
trade. He was shot twice in the upper body, without warning, and as he 
staggered away, the pickup truck he had been driving was stolen. He was 
taken to the hospital, where he remained conscious. His family gathered. 
Typically, Bowden's description of what then took place seems perfectly 
matched to the event:

"The bullet wounds in Bruno at first seem manageable. No major organs seem 
damaged, the vital signs are good. But the initial diagnosis is deceptive. 
The two rounds entered the body and then wandered at high velocity, 
shredding him inside. The 9 millimeter is a favored round in the drug 
business. The cartridges are small, so a clip in even a pistol can hold a 
dozen or more. The high velocity means a small bullet can wreak enormous 
havoc. As the staff fusses over Bruno Jordan, he is slowly bleeding to 
death. He dies in surgery at 9:45 p.m."

That's it -- one quick paragraph in the present tense, without elaboration, 
as sudden and irreversible as death itself. By then the shooter had been 
arrested. He was one of the street kids from across the river, a boy who 
had just turned 13. He was typically tough. He confessed to the killing, 
but refused to elaborate, was convicted and went off without a whimper to 
serve time. The American justice system treated the affair as a carjacking 
case, unusual and tragic, but the consequence of the neighborhood, an 
essentially simple crime.

And so it would seem to have been, except for one peculiar coincidence: the 
dead man's oldest brother happened to be Phillip (born Felipe) Jordan, a 
high-ranking official of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, who had 
spent decades busting drug traffickers along the border, and had recently 
come home to head the D.E.A.'s secretive El Paso Intelligence Center -- 
known as EPIC -- a high-security facility that serves as the government's 
central brain in its war on drugs.

Phil Jordan had plenty of sworn enemies just across the Rio Grande, most 
notably an elusive man named Amado Carrillo, head of the hugely powerful 
Juarez cartel, which is said to employ tens of thousands of people, and is 
suspected of reaching into the highest levels of the Mexican government. 
Carrillo serves as the evil genius of this story, a stand-in for the entire 
Mexican drug trade, and in that sense the oddly necessary companion of Phil 
Jordan, the D.E.A. and the United States itself. Was it possible that 
Carrillo or someone like him had murdered the innocent Bruno as a carefully 
tailored message, meant not merely to punish Phil Jordan and tear his 
family apart but to taunt him privately and mock his inability to respond? 
Jordan clearly suspected so, and he set out at all costs to uncover the 
truth. Bowden takes it from there.

His devotion to the subject is evident on every page. He took significant 
risks, immersing himself for seven years in a shadow world of outlaws, 
betrayal and violent death -- to the extent that at one point, apparently, 
a price was put on his head by Mexican drug traffickers. In the 
introduction, Bowden, who writes frequently about dreams here, calls that 
shadow world a "nightmare" and this book its "archaeology." The result is 
certainly much more than a crime story: it is a mature, deeply felt 
exploration of the hidden connections binding two very different parts of 
North America, as well as of the ties that bind a family. The narrative is 
masterly. It moves out from Bruno's murder in successive waves, surging, 
receding, sometimes swirling back in time, but generally flowing forward. 
One gets the sense of Bowden as a fiercely independent writer, saying 
exactly what he believes and ignoring the conventional classifications of 
the nonfiction trade.

Is "Down by the River" an expose, a history, a biography, a memoir, an 
adventure story, a philosophical musing? It is all of those things, 
reportage on the highest level, and it moves between the categories without 
hesitation or apology. It is a sort of poetry, too. When Bowden lets loose, 
he writes as if in a fever. This, for instance, is a single sentence about 
the uncontrollable memories of another Jordan brother, a professional 
singer named Tony, who in his Mexican wanderings had become aware of the 
savageries of the shadow world:

"Everyone has seen such storms, veritable warlocks that threaten our 
immortal souls, that rip down the walls of the flimsy homes and slobber 
against the panes of glass, gales that threaten all the dreams of safe 
homes and pleasant gardens, patios filled with partygoers, a band striking 
up and then the show tunes that bring such a cargo of fine memories and 
nights of love, a storm that takes everything before it, that snuffs out 
the barbecue, blows the band off its stand, kills the sound system, uproots 
the big tree that gives such generous shade, a storm that erases a world 
once seen as sure and solid, and at that moment everyone is left with just 
the hope implied by the white light cascading down from the circular 
fluorescent bulb, a light like the one light splashing down in the kitchen 
of the Jordan family home on Frutas Street, like the one in Tony's mind 
flowing across the reassuring old wooden table where the man lies strapped 
and looks upward, his eyes burning as they stare, reach past the glare of 
the light into the blackness waiting in the place called forever."

Who else writes like that? Is the process instinctive or calculated? 
Whatever his method, the images and rhythms are beautifully chosen. Indeed, 
how better could anyone convey the textures of the shadow world? Bowden 
calls himself a reporter, and in a pure sense of the word he really is one. 
He is also an authentic talent. Even at his most stylistically extreme, he 
does not seem strained or self-indulgent. If his writing in "Down by the 
River" is sometimes elliptical, the story he is getting at is elliptical 
too. From the start it is clear that his protagonist, Phil Jordan, is 
essentially just trying to "fix" the wrong that was done to his family. But 
how do you "fix" a murder? In no sense does it detract from the ending of 
the book, or the tension that runs throughout it, to reveal that almost 
nothing here will submit to solution.
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