Charles Bowden, Teachings of Don Fernando: a life and death in the narcotics trade. findarticles.com
[ This is an excerpt / outtake / preview of Bowden's book, from Harper's, June '02. ]
It's May of 1999. The fresh green of spring licks the sierras, and I've been on the road for over a week with Julian Cardona, a Mexican friend. We've plunged down the eastern slope of the Sierra Madre, a green roll of hills, oak, pine, and narcotraficantes. More than thirty times we are stopped by armed men, some in uniform, some not, and always they ask: Why are you here? Where are you going? Just north of the city of Durango, around midnight, in the rain, the army pulls us over and searches. We are at the turnoff to a town against the mountains that is functionally a gated community for drug merchants. I remember sitting in a Texas prison with a convict as he circled the place on the map and said, "Go there. You won't believe it, they've got shops like on Rodeo Drive."
A contract on Fernando's life has come from this area, and as I drive people are probing Phoenix trying to pick up the old man's scent. About an hour north of Zacatecas, the federal police pull us over at a checkpoint. They tear my truck apart. A crowd gathers, and Julian drifts away, and I am alone.
A fat federale with a .45 thumps me in the chest and asks, "You mad at me?" He does this again and again as the minutes tick past. I think: They want the truck, they will plant something if I turn my back.
I know if I react, I will lose. I know if they have access to a computer, I will lose. There is a list, I've been told, and my name is on that list. Julian is standing at the back of the crowd now, and still he is drifting away. All the while big semis pull over for the check and are automatically waved through to the border with a laugh between the cops and the drivers.
Finally, after half an hour or so, they let us go.
Ten minutes down the road, Julian says, "They will call ahead. We are in trouble."
About this time, a retired D.E.A. agent named Phil Jordan calls my home looking for me. He's a friend, but I have not told him about my trip. When he hears where I am, he explodes to the person who's answered the phone: "Doesn't he know he can't do that anymore? Doesn't he know how fucking dangerous it is? It's not safe for him down there. That's over."
What I think as I drive the eight hundred miles of highway north to the line is this: Julian. He is my friend. But that's how you go down. That is the velvet wrapped around the betrayal when it comes for you.
I take comfort from the fear in Julian's face. And then I stare through the windshield and wonder if the fear is feigned.
. . .
Phil Jordan has flown in from Dallas for Fernando's rosary and funeral. He has come for the burial of the other half of his own identity. He sees the same flock of four hundred mourners I see and knows they do not know. He has felt the blows of Fernando's world. He has a murdered brother, the subject of the book that had dragged me for seven years into the drug world. The case has never been solved. He once talked to Fernando about it, and the old man listened and said, There, there is the traitor. And he pointed to a person close to the core of Jordan's own blood. But the murder is filed away in Jordan's head at the moment and kept safe for a while from his thoughts.
He has come here to close the books on a friend and to keep things wrapped up and tidy. Fernando Terrazas was the partner that made his career, the friend who taught him rules in a world free of rules. He was the liar who was always the honorable man. I would have trusted Fernando with my life without a second's thought.
I look out at the full church, scan the faces of his children and their children. I talk to a son who is now a federal agent, the same son who as a boy found the bullet holes in Fernando's car, and I ask him if he ever saw his father have too much to drink. He thinks and says, yes, once or twice he saw him kind of light up from alcohol. I remember years ago meeting this son in a border bar. He sat with his back to the corner of the room, a black bag with his gun on the table between us. I did not mention his father and he never mentioned such a father existed. This silence is part of that world. Never trust. And yet you wind up trusting, just as the son did when he met me in the bar with his pistol and his back to the wall. The son asks me not to mention where his father lived. When I ask why, he says, "It never stops."
Phil Jordan comes over to the son and asks if he can pin a D.E.A. badge on his father's lapel. The son nods agreement. I watch Jordan delicately pin on the badge, then stand back and look almost with love into Fernando's cold face.
I want to say more. I want to say that Fernando Terrazas was a very fine man. And he was. I want to say, Never forget you are alone, always alone, that there is no backup. And you are. But I want to live somewhere else, someplace safe from the cold truths of Fernando.
Now the old man has been properly filed. Now he has been made safe for all of us. And we can feel comfortable in our worlds and our words. We can forget what we have learned.
Charles Bowden is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. This piece results in part from research he conducted while writing Down by the River (forthcoming from Simon & Schuster). His most recent book is Blues for Cannibals (North Point, February 2002). |
