Margins
Down by the River book cover
Down by the River
Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
2002
First Published
4.03
Average Rating
464
Number of Pages

Lionel Bruno Jordan was murdered on January 20, 1995, in an El Paso parking lot, but he keeps coming back as the key to a multibillion-dollar drug industry, two corrupt governments—one called the United States and the other Mexico—and a self-styled War on Drugs that is a fraud. Beneath all the policy statements and bluster of politicians is a real world of lies, pain, and big money. Down by the River is the true narrative of how a murder led one American family into this world and how it all but destroyed them. It is the story of how one Mexican drug leader outfought and outthought the U.S. government, of how major financial institutions were fattened on the drug industry, and how the governments of the U.S. and Mexico buried everything that happened. All this happens down by the river, where the public fictions finally end and the facts read like fiction. This is a remarkable American story about drugs, money, murder, and family.

Avg Rating
4.03
Number of Ratings
598
5 STARS
38%
4 STARS
35%
3 STARS
20%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads

Author

Charles Bowden
Charles Bowden
Author · 21 books

Charles Bowden was an American non-fiction author, journalist and essayist based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His journalism appeared regularly in Harper’s GQ, and other national publications. He was the author of several books of nonfiction, including Down by the River. In more than a dozen groundbreaking books and many articles, Charles Bowden blazed a trail of fire from the deserts of the Southwest to the centers of power where abstract ideas of human nature hold sway—and to the roiling places that give such ideas the lie. He claimed as his turf "our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox (all of them) books about America" (Jim Harrison, on Blood Orchid ).

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