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.