DOWN BY THE RIVER

By Charles Bowden (Simon & Schuster, $27)

Relying heavily on American and Mexican news accounts and various dicey
personal forays into the dark alleys of the Mexican drug industry,
journalist Charles Bowden tries to sketch the big picture of the
multibillion-dollar drug business that binds the United States and Mexico
in a destructive embrace.

In this account, the drug business in Mexico is all-pervasive. Few modern
Mexicans of prominence - from former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to
industrialist Jorge Hank Rhon - escape the web of insinuation. American
institutions from the CIA to Citibank are tainted here, too.

"The official history is about the corruption of Mexico. The unwritten
history, or the one that is almost instantly erased, is about the
corruption of both nations,'' Bowden writes. He puts U.S. drug efforts
under the microscope, and finds them fragmented, half-hearted and subject
to the whims of politics.

Bowden spent seven years reporting this book, and he is very much a part of
it. He writes alternately with cynicism and compassion, but always as a
clear-eyed outsider.

At the end, few of your easy assumptions about the War on Drugs will remain
intact.