desierto. (charles bowden)

“He is old enough to pre-date the modern border. Until about 1930 it was a line on a map, not on the earth, and Don Pedro remembers cattle drives from the valley up to Tubac in Arizona. The same kind of border the Yaquis knew and crossed in their endless comings and goings for refuge and guns and bullets. For these people at some level it is all a piece of ground and the ground is absolutely connected.”

Bowden’s book is an account of a land that transcends the border humans have imposed on it. This land is the territory that exists between the hills of Sinaloa, the wastelands of Texas and the coastal reaches of Southern California. Within this territory live Mexicans, North Americans, and the indigenous people whose forefathers predated the arrival of either. It is also the home to coyotes and lions. It is a territory whose modern economy is dominated by the exploitation of the desert and the narcotics industry. Bowden’s book, reporting back from the front line in the nineties, is the godfather to Cormac McCarthy and the stepson of Edward Abbey, whose influence he acknowledges in the opening pages. Thereafter it’s a ride of remarkable brilliance through the highways and byways of the territory. Bowden hangs out with the Sari fishermen, the Sinaloa narcos, and the gringo entrepreneurs who get swallowed by the savings and loans scandal that prefigured the crash of 2008. All of this against the backdrop of the desert, that immutable space which contextualises all human actions and puts them in its cruel shade. Bowden possessed the unusual capacity for a gringo, firstly of having curiosity for the Mexican and native cultures, and secondly of being able to gain their trust sufficiently to write about these worlds with the authority of a quasi insider. His voice, little known, is that of a poet-journalist who understood a land which can never be understood within the conventions of human power, no matter how much that power seeks to scar its landscape.

Nb. I remember in Michoacán when the elder of the community, Don Esteban, told us how when he was younger he would head to the US and there was no demarcated border. For generations the border wasn’t even an idea. Then it became an idea, but nothing more. Now it is a frontline. However, the land and nature, Bowden suggests, know no border and his remarkable book offers a glimpse of this alternative geography.

el sicario (charles bowden & molly molloy)

Sicario is the story told in his own words of a Mexican man who worked for a major Cartel in the nineties before finding god and fleeing, aware that his life would be in constant jeopardy. The writers Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy met with the man along with filmmaker, Gianfranco Rosi, who recorded the interviews and later released a documentary. To those with a passing knowledge of the Mexican cartel world, which is also, as the book makes clear, the Mexican political world, the book’s material will be depressingly familiar. The account goes a long way towards confirming the way in which the police, military and political structures are effectively owned by the Cartels, each of which is a shark in shark filled waters, constantly in danger of being attacked itself.

Bowden writes an introduction to the book which gives a description of the man, commenting on his very ordinariness, his invisibility. This introduction suggests how easy it is for elements of this narco-terror to assimilate into society. It also provokes the frightening thought that these people, this violence, might already by present in your society or mine. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The book also brought back memories of the insidious suggestion of the infiltration of this violence into daily life which we encountered in Michoacan. Both from the exaggerated police presence and also from the anecdotal evidence which constantly came our way, even though we were only there for ten days.

Ps: this is the other side of the coin to Don Winslow’s Power of the Dog, the more downbeat, working version of that writer’s more glamorised account of similar territory. 

murder city [charles bowden]

Murder City

Bowden's book charts events in and around Ciudad Juarez 2008-2009. He grapples with a violence which escalates, from his point of view, into something which is beyond rational explanation. The book is a fierce, quasi-poetic attempt to go beyond the figures and the standard explanations. In many ways, it is a sister-work to the section of 2666 About the Crimes. Like Bolaño, Bowden makes an attempt to de-render literature speechless in the face of the barbarity of the border zone. Both writers insist on documenting the remorseless appetite of the violence, which seems to become almost an entity in its own right, whilst at the same time insisting on the fact that it is something done by and affecting humans, people who in another life might have lived 'ordinary' lives. 

Unlike 2666, Murder City is a work of non-fiction. Bowden seeks out characters and tells their story, from the born-again assassin to the journalist on the run. This journalistic strain goes hand-in-hand with the writer's agonising attempts to find a kind of sense in these stories. In the end he seems to suggest that he sees Ciudad Juarez as a Hobbesian vision of the future, where the daily concerns of modern capitalism are blown away by the anarchic whirlwind of survival and fear. What's the point of fretting about your future when a random act of violence could destroy it at any moment? Ciudad Juarez comes to represent a model of anti-progress, the antithesis of the American dream.  

The book also cuts to the quick about the way in which Mexico has become a narco-state; at the same time debunking the myth of the war on drugs. As Bowden points out, this isn't a war on drugs, rather, it's a war for the drugs trade and its enormous wealth. The army and the police and the state are just as much players in this war as the narcos themselves. Escalante's film Heli depicted this cruel world where the good guys just don't exist. Events in Ayotzinapa only serve to rubber stamp the depiction of Mexico Bowden's anguished book presents. Murder City should be required reading for anyone who wants to begin to get a grip on the hydra-violence which permits the combined forces of evil to not only perpetrate its grotesque crimes, but also do so with a sense of complete impunity.