William Langewiesche , 'Down by the River': The Shadow World of Cross-Border Drug Trafficking nytimes.com
[ A review of Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family, By Charles Bowden. In which Langewieshe revisits old haunts, with another estimable author. Clip: ]
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.'' |
