{"id":2332,"date":"2014-07-24T09:45:44","date_gmt":"2014-07-24T13:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2332"},"modified":"2023-07-29T10:55:13","modified_gmt":"2023-07-29T14:55:13","slug":"down-by-the-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2332","title":{"rendered":"*****Down by the River"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"drugs,<\/a>

U.S. Border Patrol agents on the Rio Grande (photo: c1.staticflickr)<\/p><\/div>\n

By Charles Bowden<\/strong>. Investigative reporter Bowden has produced a number of excellent nonfiction books, and this 2002 book<\/a> about the porous U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez and the heavy traffic in drugs and violence spanning the Rio Grande there–was highly regarded from the start<\/a>. Since it\u2019s a dozen years old, as I read, I couldn\u2019t help hoping the situation has improved. Ample recent evidence here<\/a>, here,<\/a> and here<\/a>, suggests it has not, and ongoing drug-related violence throughout the Central American region is a principal reason its children are fleeing here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The rivalry, lack of cooperation, and mutual undermining of DEA, FBI, and CIA agents in their interactions with the corrupt Mexican hierarchy clouded any comprehensive understanding of the problem and precluded any effective action. When one of these government agencies would get the goods on a bad guy, another would put on the brakes, maybe because the man was one of their thousands of snitches–an always shaky investigational strategy, as any TV watcher knows–or maybe for some other reason. The Mexican drug lords outflanked the clueless American agents at every turn, playing one against the other.<\/p>\n

Bowden had no idea it would take eight years to sieve the truth from the slurry of lies and to assemble the fragments of this accounting from hints, scattered news reports, reportorial digging, and conversations with people afraid to talk. He doesn\u2019t discuss the risks to himself, but they had to be industrial grade. He frames the whole convoluted, vague, and hopelessly tangled mess with the story of the death of one 26-year-old El Paso man, Bruno Jordan. Jordan\u2019s family lives close to a border bridge, dangerous Ciudad Juarez crowded up to the Rio Grande\u2019s opposite bank. Jordan was shot down in a K-Mart parking lot in what the police claimed was a car-jacking by a 13-year-old boy, and what his family believes was a hit. Bruno had nothing to do with drugs, but his older brother headed the DEA\u2019s El Paso Intelligence Center and, in the course of his career, had rubbed a great many of the vindictive and ultra-violent narcotraficantes<\/em> the wrong way.<\/p>\n

The cupidity and corruption of Mexico\u2019s elected leaders, the federal police, the army, and every \u201cget tough on drugs\u201d task force they set up is old news now, but the extent of it is nonetheless shocking. According to a source Bowden cites, when Vincente Fox became president, one of his cabinet members said, \u201cAll of our phones, faxes and e-mails are monitored by the narcos. We are surrounded by enemies. We cannot attack corruption unless Washington ends its indifference to wrongdoing by the Mexican elite.\u201d But Washington ignored it, for political reasons of its own, and instead, for decades, has touted the phony War on Drugs.<\/p>\n

\"confiscated<\/a>

Confiscated drug money (photo: wikimedia.org)<\/p><\/div>\n

While the people live in poverty and terror, the drug czars live in multimillion-dollar mansions, protected by gun-toting federales. One provincial governor cracked down on the drug lords who live in luxury and some safety in his prisons (operating their networks unimpeded, of course), by decreeing they could no longer have Jacuzzis in their cells. At the time of Bowden\u2019s writing, Northern Mexico was essentially a lawless region where the amounts of money are so huge that anyone can be bought. According to the DEA, in 1995 Amado Carrillo Fuentes\u2019s Juarez-based cartel alone was generating approximately $200 million every week.<\/em>) With cash flow like that, the Mexican government couldn\u2019t afford to shut it down if it wanted to. \u201cUnsuspecting\u201d U.S. and European banks launder perhaps $.5 to $1 trillion dollars a year of this dirty money. Have an account at Citibank<\/a>?<\/p>\n

U.S. law enforcement and border officials may not be corrupt individuals, but everyone they must deal with is likely to be, or might be, today, or another day. In a 2013 interview<\/a> Bowden talked about the continued violence and murder<\/a> in Mexico, spawned by Americans\u2019 drug habits, and how this violence is routinely ignored by politicians, bankers, and others who wink-wink don\u2019t ask where the money comes from, calling it \u201cthe willful ignorance of the US press covering Mexico. The Mexican press is terrorized. The U.S. press does not like to challenge power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Author Charles Bowden died August 30, 2014<\/a>, at his Las Cruces, New Mexico, home.<\/p>\n

Mother Jones encomium<\/a> and other excellent links.
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