JUAREZ IS DYING, PROMINENT JOURNALIST WARNS

EL PASO -- Charles Bowden paints Juarez as a potential
corpse.

"You can look out your office window and just watch one of the major
cities of Mexico die," he said in a recent phone interview from
Albuquerque.

Bowden, an award-winning Arizona author and one of the region's most
prominent freelance journalists, documents the Mexican border city's
ever-escalating violence and its repercussions in a recently published book,
"Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields."

Bowden also wrote "Down by the River," the acclaimed 2002 narrative
describing the multibillion-dollar drug industry along the border,
related corruption in Mexico and the United States, and one El Paso
family's entanglement.

Bowden was drinking coffee with photographer Julian Cardona, a Mexican
friend, around the time violence of historic proportions first
exploded in Juarez in January 2008. A record 43 people were murdered
that month in Juarez.

"The number of killings shocked people," Bowden said. "I realized I
didn't know what was going on and that everything that I knew about
Juarez was irrelevant now. So Julian and I dove in."

Bowden and Cardona also worked together on "Juarez: The Laboratory of Our
Future," a 1998 critically acclaimed collection of essays and photographs
depicting the border's escalating drug and gang culture and the hopelessness
of poverty.

In "Murder City," Bowden set out to understand the violence escalating
in Juarez in 2008. The story trapped him.

"The press was saying it's a cartel war. I thought, 'What kind of a
cartel war is it when all the people getting killed are poor nobodies
from poor barrios?' " he said.

Bowden contends the violence in Juarez -- murders, mass extortions and
kidnappings -- is so out of control that it is not easily explained
even in a city where selling drugs is a multibillion-dollar industry.

"I don't think you can put the genie back in the bottle easily," he
said. "These people killing in Juarez don't get arrested, and it's
become a way of life."

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of "The Devil's Highway," applauds Bowden
in the book blurbs for plunging into the bloodshed that has
transformed Juarez, a poster child for free trade 10 years ago, into a
city abandoned by an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 of its richest
residents who have fled to El Paso and elsewhere in search of a haven.

"There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn
your hands. Crawling with ghosts and demons, dripping blood, howling with
rage and terror, it's go-for-broke apocalyptic prophecy," Urrea writes.
"Forget Baghdad, forget Kandahar: Hell is only 50 yards away from your back
porch, and Bowden is going to make you look or die trying."

In the book, Bowden interviews a hit man and gets riveting insight
into the business of killing people.

He also recounts the story of an attractive young woman who came to
Juarez to party and ended up getting raped by the police and people
engaged in the drug industry. Eventually, she was dumped at an insane
asylum in the desert.

"Part of the book is to get past these numbers, to make you hear those
flies buzzing over that puddle of blood in that room where they
executed nine people having a prayer meeting," Bowden said. Witnesses
told Bowden that soldiers stood idle in the vicinity of the execution
and did nothing to stop it.

El Paso poet Bobby Byrd, co-owner of Cinco Puntos Press, describes
Bowden as a writer concerned about the negative effects of
globalization and militarization of the U.S. side of the border on
Mexican cities like Juarez.

"Charles wants to change the way people feel about the border and
about Juarez," Byrd said. "What's happened in Juarez is a result of
these very greedy economic policies like NAFTA."

Byrd suggests that Juarez has become a metaphor, an emblem of the
future of the U.S.-Mexico border, for Bowden.

"He's probably one of the best craftsmen of language writing today,"
Byrd said.

Bowden's book says various groups in Juarez -- gangs, the army, city,
state and federal police -- are killing people in Juarez because of
the enormous profits attached to drug sales.

He also predicts that violence in Juarez is not going to stop
soon.

He points out that Juarez, a city that once boasted it had the lowest
unemployment rate in Mexico, is now a city with 25 percent of its
houses abandoned, and a city where 40 percent of the businesses have
closed, a city that has lost 100,000 maquiladora jobs. Compounding the
problem: 150,000 to 200,000 drug addicts and 300 to 500 gangs.

Bowden suggests that the United States must do more to alleviate
problems in Mexico or risk an even greater influx of Mexican
immigrants fleeing destitute conditions.

"Mexican people are not al-Qaida. This is preposterous rhetoric which
leads to lunatics like the Minutemen," he said. "I expect better of my
government. I expect it to be honest and say the War on Drugs after 40
years is a failure. I expect it to say NAFTA after 16 years has
created mass migration of the Mexican poor. I expect them to take
seriously allegations against the Mexican army and say maybe we
shouldn't give them half a billion dollars a year so they can go kill
more Mexicans."

Bowden has not been to Juarez in months.

"I needed a break. I get depressed," he said. "I'm not a
ghoul."

He tells others that Juarez and Mexico deserve a chance to solve their
own problems without political stunts or failed policies on both sides
of the border.

"We're not talking about some sort of monster across the river," he
said. "We're talking about what happens to people when they're not
given any chances in life."