Charles Bowden - Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

Bowden, Charles, 1945-2014

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Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

Author of BLOOD ORCHID

U.S. $27.00

Can. $42.00

Sometimes the dead wont go away.

Lionel Bruno Jordan was murdered on January 20, 1995, in an El Paso parking lot, but he keeps coming back as the skeleton key to a multibillion-dollar drug industry, two corrupt governmentsone called the United States and the other Mexicoand a sellstyled War on Drugs that is a fraud.

Phil Jordan runs DEA intelligence, but when his brother Bruno is killed, he is powerless. Amado Carrillo Fuentes runs the most successful drug business in the history of the world, but when his usefulness to governments ceases, he mysteriously dies in a hospital. Carlos Salinas runs Mexico, but as soon as he leaves office, his brother is jailed for murder and Salinas flees into exile. Sal Martinez, DEA agent and Brunos cousin, does the secret work of the U.S. government in Mexico, but when he seeks revenge for his cousins. murder, he is sentenced to a term in federal prison.

Beneath all the policy statements and bluster of politicians is a real world of lies, pain, and money.

Down by the River is the tale of how a murder led one American family into this world and how it all but destroyed them. Of how one Mexican drug leader outfought and outthought the U.S. government. Of how major financial institutions fattened on the drug industry. And how the governments of the United States and Mexico buried everything that happened.

All this comes together down by the river, a place where the fictions finally end and the facts read like fiction. This is an unforgettable American story about drugs, money, murder, and family.

Also by Charles Bowden

Killing the Hidden Waters

Street Signs Chicago (with Lewis Kreinberg)

Blue Desert

Frog Mountain Blues

(with photographs by Jack W. Dykinga) Mezcal Red Line Desierto

The Sonoran Desert

(with photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)

Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions (with Michael Binstein)

The Secret Forest

(with photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)

Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau (with photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)

Blood Orchid

Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future Blues for Cannibals

Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

Charles Bowden

Simon & Schuster

New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore

SIMON & SCHUSTER Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

Copyright 2002 by Charles Bowden All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

13579 10 8642

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bowden, Charles.

Down by the river / Charles Bowden p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Drug trafficMexican-American Border Region. 2. Narcotics and crime Mexican-American Border Region. 3. HomicideMexican-American Border Region. 4. Narcotics, Control ofGovernment policy Mexican-American Border Region. I. Title HV5825 .D692 2002 363.45'0972Tdc21 2002070633

ISBN 0-684-85343-4

CONTENTS

For Mary Martha Miles

But was it the truth? Nowhere has the truth so short a lifespan...

a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, annihilated by imagination and self-interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves on the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.... The truth no longer existed. Precarious fact, though, had been replaced by irrefutable pain.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

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