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

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.

William Langewiesche is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly
and the author, most recently, of ''American Ground: Unbuilding the World
Trade Center.''