BOWDEN'S GONZO DRUG TALE

It is pretty much a given that to like a book by Charles Bowden, you have
to like him as well. In the books of his that I've read, he's right there,
in your face, smiling, scowling, ranting, cajoling. And observing, always
observing - in it up past his eyeballs, in deep, in all the way.

Based in Tucson, Bowden made his bones as a writer in the '80s with a
newspaper, the Tucson Citizen, crafting a style of writing, part Edward
Abbey, part Hunter Thompson, that raised eyebrows and hackles on both sides
of the printing press. But he got the awards. He got away with it.

At the paper, he developed a flat-out gonzo journalism in the heart of the
New West, a style full of booze, drugs, whores, wetbacks, dirty money,
border trash. He was turning himself into a version of Coyote, the American
Indian Trickster - he was learning to talk out of both ends of his
alimentary canal. Brains and Guts.

Down By The River finds Bowden pulling back a little; we can go for pages
without feeling the spittle from one of his rants spraying from out of the
page or having him step on our slow, clumsy, middle-class toes. This does
not, though, keep him from rubbing our noses in It - 'It' being the big,
complex, messy and dangerous world of what Bowden calls "narco-nationalism."

How big? Bowden notes, "Drugs are a business, 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."

How high are those profits? Again, Bowden: "A Mexican study... speculates
that if the drug business vanished, the U.S. economy would shrink 19 to 22
percent, the Mexican 63 percent."

How complex? How messy? To tell this story, Bowden must, as he writes,
sketch out "a theory of the life of truth in Mexico." He decides truth goes
through "three phases: what happened; then, the fantastic tales that erupt
to deal with what happened; and then, always, this final phase in which it
never happened at all."

Down along the Rio Grande, along the 1,800 mile border between Mexico and
the U.S., drugs aren't something you read about in the papers, and they
aren't a nickel bag shared with a couple of friends or a line or two in the
stalls at a dance club. There on the border, drugs are a vast, intricate
web of sometimes invisible, almost unbreakable cables that tie together
high and low, friend and enemy, family and stranger.

Happily, Bowden pulls a very neat (if that word can be used for this dense,
swirling narrative) hat trick: the story he tells revolves around two
families, one about which we learn a great deal and the other which remains
an impenetrable mystery.

The first is the Jordan family, centered in two cities, El Paso in Texas
and, across the river in Mexico, Juarez. Bowden focuses on two brothers,
Bruno and Philip Jordan. Philip is a successful DEA agent; Bruno is dead.
And these two facts are related. Or, applying Bowden's Theory of Truth,
maybe they are aren't. We don't know. Bowden doesn't know. Philip knows on
one page and then on the next he doesn't. It goes on like that for 400+ pages.

The second family is that of Amado Carrillo, his wife and children and the
dozens of relatives that make up the Sinaloa Cartel, and of them almost
nothing is known except that Amado moves Colombian cocaine through Mexico
into the U.S. He moves so much cocaine by plane and helicopter that he is
known as "Lord of the Skies".

One story has it that Carrillo slipped 20 tons of coke across the border
into the U.S. in a single weekend. But then, too, the story is that
Carrillo either barely finished the third grade or that he has a law
degree, that he is Robin Hood or a Robber Baron.

Bowden notes that in a 24-month period in the mid '90s, the Carrillo
operation, according to DEA figures, kills 600 people in Juarez: "On
October 6, 1996, Mayor Galindo of Ciudad Juarez says he can do nothing
about crime because criminal organizations run the city. On October 9,
Mayor Galindo of Juarez says that crime is down in the city." The Theory of
Truth.

By the end of the book, Carrillo is dead. Or not.

The book then, in a way, tells us the story of what Bowden doesn't know
about Philip and Bruno Jordan and Amado Carrillo, but in the process we
learn a great deal, about Philip, about Bruno, about El Paso and Juarez,
about Mexican politics and economics; most of all, though, we learn a lot
about drugs as big business, about an underground economy so pervasive,
that its corrupting reach seems without limit.

How do you get your head around something like the fact that the Mexican
government had to send out a warning to wardens to stop installing hot tubs
in prison cells. Or this: "Caro Quintero is serving forty years in a
Mexican prison. In January 1986, he complains that prison officials have
stolen $700,000 in cash that he was keeping in his cell."

At his best, Bowden can write a little like van Gogh painted: a thick, dark
impasto of short, violent phrases that make up a narrative of constant,
seething movement where just as you think you're lost for good in the
welter of names, places, dates and deeds, in the constant taking back of
what was just stated, Bowden clears a little space, where, if only for a
moment, something, even if it is disagreeable, makes sense: "This unwritten
history takes place down by the river, on the fabled banks where two
nations meet. 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."

This book is, I think, an important chapter in that unwritten history.