HOW DRUGS CORRUPTED EVERYBODY - DOWN BY THE RIVER

"Every book ever written about the U.S.-Mexico border is a lie," Charles
Bowden told me 10 years before he started the research for "Down by the
River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family" (Simon & Schuster, 2002, 433 pp.,
$27). Now there is one book that's true.

Here's what it's like to read it: Bowden invites you in and sits you down
and pours you a whiskey on ice and tells you a story. Drug traffickers and
murderers have taken over the Mexican government, at all levels, from the
street cops to the presidential palace. Tortured corpses litter the streets
along the U.S. border -- 600 murders in one city, 200 in another, within a
short period of time. And the U.S. government? They know all about it. They
know how many hundred millions the president of Mexico has siphoned off from
the tons of cocaine that disappear up noses in the United States. But the
cops on this side are dirty too, and even if one is not, if a tough and
reasonably honest cop wants to avenge, say, the murder of his brother, the
good cop will be jacked around, threatened by his bosses in Washington, D.C.
U.S. politicians don't want to rock the boat, because they are in the boat.

You listen to all this and it's incredible, but Bowden talks so calmly, so
convincingly, and he backs everything up with names and dates, places and
smells. Then you look at the glass of whiskey he handed you and you see it
is not whiskey, it's blood. You see blood draining out the bottom of the
glass. Then it is whiskey again and there is no blood on the floor. But a
moment ago it was blood. And Bowden keeps talking softly, convincingly,
clearly, backing everything up. And you believe him. Now you could really
use a drink. But not that one. Not the one you are holding in your hand.

On Jan. 20, 1995, a young man who sold suits for a living was murdered in a
parking lot in El Paso, Texas. The man's brother, Phil Jordan, was a
high-ranking DEA agent, so high-ranking he was about to take over the El
Paso Intelligence Center, the computerized brain of the so-called war on
drugs. A 13-year-old Mexican kid was convicted of killing Bruno Jordan.
Almost certainly the kid was working for Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the cartel
leader who bought presidents as easily as he bought the commercial airliners
he filled with tons of cocaine.

Phil Jordan had put together an indictment against Carrillo in the United
States. Almost certainly, Carrillo killed Jordan's brother just to show him
he could.

Then for some strange reason the Mexican consulate takes a great interest in
the young assassin. Tens of thousands of dollars are funneled to a U.S.
lawyer who gets the kid off. Jordan's bosses tell him to forget it. When he
doesn't forget, his career unravels. Or perhaps it is unraveled for him.

By the time Phil Jordan's career is over, his life in ruins, and the punk
assassin is back in Ciudad Juarez, working his way up in the cartel, Bowden
has run down a lot of information about the drug business.

* Drugs bring Mexico, conservatively, $30 billion in U.S. dollars a year --
more than its three leading official sources of foreign exchange combined.

* In the 1990s U.S. banks laundered about $300 billion a year in drug
money. That's just about the amount of the annual U.S. trade deficit. So
drug money helps keep the U.S. economy afloat.

* According to a study by Mexico's internal security agency, CISEN (Centro
de Investigacion y Seguridad Nacional), if the drug business vanished, the
U.S. economy would shrink by about 20 percent and Mexico's by 63 percent.

* As the Mexican economy imploded in the 1980s, President Miguel de la
Madrid Hurtado cut a deal with Carrillo and other cartel leaders: If they
kept their narcodollars in Mexican banks to keep the economy from
collapsing, the government would make accommodations for them. So drug money
helped rescue Mexico.

* Then Mexican President Carlos Salinas and his brother, Raul, decided to
take the money for themselves.

* The U.S. government knew all this, and let it go, for reasons of state.
In fact, Washington dabbles in the odd ton of cocaine and marijuana too, for
reasons of state. Washington calls off its drug dogs when they get too close
to the Mexican presidency -- or to U.S. political interests -- and even
makes public apologies to Mexico when our drug agents turn up a teaspoon of
the tons of evidence that links mass murderers like Carrillo to the Mexican
presidency.

The main thing about the drug war, Bowden says, is that there is no drug
war. There are skirmishes. Not only does the United States government refuse
to fight the war -- except in the newspapers --- it may not even be in the
U.S.' economic interest to fight it.

"Drugs are a business," Bowden writes, "one of the largest on the surface of
the earth, and this business exists for two reasons: the products are so
very, very good and the profits are so very, very high. Nothing that creates
hundreds of billions of dollars of income annually and is desired by
millions of people will be stopped by any nation on this earth."

"Down by the River" is a heartbreaking, frightening story, courageously
reported and wonderfully told.