Charles Bowden’s Final Story (about Kiki Camarena's death) Took 16 Years to Write

Published by DD Republished from Matter  and some material from obituary in the Tuscon Sentinel

Some of our newer readers may not be familiar with Charles  Bowden's name or his work.  Bowden was a dogged investigative reporter and brilliant storyteller with a passion for the truth.
 

When he got a hold of a story, he wouldn't let it go,  A finalist for a 1984 Pulitzer Prize, he won numerous other awards and the respect of reporters everywhere with his gritty yet painstaking work.  He was one of a kind.

Described by some as a "lone voice crying in the wilderness", he was the first American to speak and write about the femicide killings in Juarez and from that point on was relentlessly writing about the drug trade on both sides of the border for more than 20 years until his death in August 2014. 

Among Bowden's two-dozen-odd books were "Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields" (2010); Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez" (2010); "Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family" (2004); "Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future" (2009); and "Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future" (1998), with an introduction by Noam Chomsky and Eduardo Galean.

In addition to his 26 books, Bowden wrote hundreds and hundreds of magazine articles, and was a contributing editor for GQ, Harpers, Esquire, and Mother Jones.

Many have wondered how he was able to investigate and report in such depth on what was happening in Mexico while so many journalist and reporters were being killed for their reporting.  He had a lot of death threats (because of his work).  Publicly he shrugged off those threats and told interviewers "Those people are just trying to intimidate me and shut me up.  If they wanted me dead they wouldn't use threats, they would use bullets.  But he was not careless. 

He had a lot of dangerous liaisons with people in dangerous places." said his then live-in partner while he was living in Tuscon.  "we had guns in every single room - he was careful to never let anyone know where he was," she said. "The DEA told us there were three contracts on his life. There was a gun under his desk, even one in the bathroom."

The unsolved murder of a DEA agent  Enrique Camarena  haunted the celebrated reporter for decades—and he finally completed his investigation in August 2014, just before he died.  The "Blood on the Corn" investigation was his final story — a report on a web of corruption and killing involving the DEA, CIA, drug cartels and high officials of the Mexican government. 

            Charles Bowden                     Molly Molloy                       

His co-author of that epic story, Molly Molloy, tells us in the following story why it took so long (16 years) and meant so much.

I have not posted "Blood on the Corn" simply because it is in  three parts and is very long.  The editor on the website where the story was posted estimates the reading time of the whole story at a little over an hour.  In my opinion you are a fast reader if you can read it in that estimated  time.  I have posted an except from the first part of "Blood on the Corn" following Ms. Molloy's story and depending on our  reader's reactions I may publish the entire story in 3 separate posts.  .  

Molly Molloy's story and the except from "Blood on the Corn" on next page

  Chuck Bowden’s Final Story Took 16 Years to Write

photo by Molly Molloy

By Molly Molloy

Charles Bowden wrote this story for 16 years.

In 1996, he read Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series for the San Jose Mercury News about the CIA-drug trafficking partnership to finance an illegal war in Nicaragua. When mainstream media and Webb’s own paper attacked the story, Bowden wrote a profile of the discredited reporter for Esquire in 1998, aptly titled “The Pariah.”

Chuck re-examined Webb’s sources and found new ones — including retired DEA agent Hector Berrellez. Hector told him of his own discovery of the CIA-drug world links during his investigation of the 1985 murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena and that Webb had written the truth. Bowden independently verified everything in Webb’s series, and he came to admire the reporter’s hard-nosed dedication to writing the truth even when it cost him his reputation and career.

When Chuck and I met a few years later, he learned I had spent time in Nicaragua during the contra war, and I learned of his connection to Gary Webb. In 1996, journalism on the internet, where Webb’s story really took off, was brand new. But the story of drug sales to support the Nicaraguan contras wasn’t new at all. I had worked at a newspaper in Managua in the 1980s that reported on Oliver North and the CIA-supplied mercenary contra army that killed thousands of Nicaraguan civilians. Webb’s series “broke an old story,” as Chuck wrote, but it was one that most Americans had never heard.

The media backlash around Webb’s reporting destroyed his career. Depression swallowed him up and Webb shot himself in December 2004. Chuck wrote to me when he heard:

“i can’t deal with e mails at the moment. … i just learned gary webb killed himself friday night. i don’t want to talk or communicate with anyone on earth right now. i am beyond pain and into some other country.”

He was heartbroken and angry and that wound never healed. He could have written more. He knew more as far back as 1998 that would have backed up Webb’s allegations about the CIA and contras and drugs, but his government sources would not go on the record.

Then in 2006, it seemed they might. Chuck wrote to me on December 21, 2006:

“i gotta decide whether to return one more time to the drug world.
yeah, i know. but i’ve got my dead to consider.”

Chuck did go into that world again and talked to Berrellez and to a shadowy CIA operative named Lawrence Harrison, the White Tower. Still, no one would go on the record about the CIA-contra connections with the Mexican traffickers of the Guadalajara cartel. In 2009, Lawrence Harrison wrote, “I felt so bad about Gary Webb because … after his firing he begged me to tell him something that would help him out…”

It was not until late in 2013, when the Mexican government prematurely released trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero—a main figure in Camarena’s torture and murder — that Berrellez decided to speak out. Berrellez provided access to eyewitnesses, corrupt Mexican cops, who saw and heard a Cuban CIA operative interrogating the dying agent.

 But who would believe these witnesses — men who were involved in torturing and killing Americans on orders from their druglord bosses? Chuck and I traveled to California this year to hear their stories. We saw the stress in their faces and bodies as they went back into those rooms where they knew their own lives could be forfeit. They knew when they took the chance to testify in an American courtroom that if they lied they would be sent back. And that in Mexico they would be killed.

Caro Quintero is now free. Rumor has it that Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, another trafficker involved in the murder, may soon be released as well.

Enrique Camarena is dead now 29 years. Gary Webb is dead 10 years. Charles Bowden died August 30, 2014 — a few days after finishing the first draft of this story. He said in a video shot in 2005:

“Look you have a gift. Life is precious, and eventually you die. All you are going to have to show for it is your work, and whether you did a good job or not.”

“I know when something’s done…When I finish, my hands get cold, I think I’m dying…there’s nothing left.”

On that day, August 30, I left for work. I held his hands in mine and they were like ice.  (DD When Ms. Mollow returned home at lunch she found Bowden dead in his bed.  Ironically considering the dangerous life he had led and all the death threats he had received, he died peacefully in his sleep)

The story begun in 1998 was finally over. From now on, he was going to write about birds … and the river.

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Excerpts From Blood on the Corn  

 

In 1985, a murky alliance of drug lords and government officials tortured and killed a DEA agent named Enrique Camarena. In a three-part series, legendary journalist Charles Bowden finally digs into the terrible mystery behind a hero’s murder.

By Charles Bowden and Molly MolloyIllustrations by Matt Rota

 Chapter One

The Murder of a DEA Agent

He curls up in the oxblood leather chair and stares off to the side. He is speaking softly as faces and screams rise up from the past. He seems gone now to some other place. His eyes are way off in Sinaloa, Mexico. The firefight has taken hours, later they will calculate that 20 thousand rounds are fired.

A man goes down.

He crawls to him.

He is safe now, a man speaking softly about the time when the guns fired. He is in a nice house now. Out the window, the horses feed beside the Shetland pony he keeps for the grandkids. When someone jumps too fast from one corpse in his past to another, he says, “Whoa, pony, whoa.” The big thoroughbred is 17 hands high, the brown body glistens with sheets of muscle. Sometimes, when the nights are bad, he walks down to the paddock

“Did you know they sleep standing up? They really do.”

But the cries and screams don’t go away. The trials do not go away. The man in the dark leather chair is suddenly crawling to the Mexican federal police officer. The raid on a drug ranch with the cooperation of Mexican federal police turned up a ton of coke and tons of marijuana, but now three federales are wounded. There is blood on the corn leaves. He stares at the red blood and remembers his mother’s warning. When she was 15, her own mother had cast her from the house for being with child and she lived with the gypsies in Mexico. They taught her to see the future in palms, read the cards, to stare into a crystal ball. So she tells her son who is now a DEA agent in Mexico that she sees danger, there is blood on the corn in the fields. That’s all she can say.

And he remembers it as he crawls to get the wounded Mexican federal cop.

 Things string together in a way that is hard to see at first. When the firefight ends — because the Mexican army finally comes after a three-hour delay — Hector Berrellez is alive. He manages to pull the federal policeman to safety and has him flown up to a hospital in San Diego. A man named Guillermo González Calderoni, a Mexican federal police comandante who works at the beck and call of the elite and does their killings, is impressed by these actions and befriends Berrellez. The fight is celebrated by Berrellez’s agency, the DEA, and soon he is in Washington having a medal pinned on him by the attorney general. Berrellez continues his tour in Mexico and that leads to threats against his life and his family’s lives and so they are all pulled out and brought back to the U.S.

His higher-ups in Washington think of Berrellez when a high-profile murder investigation of a DEA agent named Enrique Camarena seems to stall, and put him in charge. After all, he had been in that firefight, he’d shown in his work that he knew Mexico — why else would he get death threats? And when his hard work on the Camarena investigation leads him back from Mexico to D.C., he gets a real warning, one he could not dismiss: that he’d better back off because his own government was behind this particular killing.

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*DD:  You can read the entire 3 part story at Medium.com or if you would like to see it posted here on BB, leave your comment.