Charles Bowden dies at 69; writer chronicled border drug violence

Charles Bowden, a chronicler of the Southwest who started as a nature writer but became known for his gritty yet lyrical nonfiction narratives of drug violence and hopelessness on the U.S.-Mexico border, has died. He was 69.

Bowden, who had been complaining of fatigue for several weeks, died during a nap Saturday afternoon at his home in Las Cruces, N.M., his friend Ray Carroll said. The cause of death has yet to be determined.

While his early books were compared to those of the iconoclastic environmental writer Edward Abbey, a friend of his, Bowden was more famous for his unsparing descriptions of life and death on the border.

“Probably more than any other U.S. author, he has revealed the intricacies of the violence haunting Ciudad Juarez,” the Texas Tribune said in 2010. “He’s swatted at flies swarming fresh bloodstains and reported from a house where bodies were drenched in acid before burial…”

Bowden’s Mexican saga started innocuously in 1995, when he read a brief news account from El Paso about a 13-year-old who was illegally in the U.S. using an Uzi to fatally shoot a 27-year-old suit salesman. It was only the latest in a lengthy torrent of similar news items — and, for that reason, it struck Bowden hard.

“My God,” he recalled in an interview years later, “we’re killing people like it was Vietnam and nobody’s doing anything.”

In 2002, Bowden released “Down by the River,” a complex tale of drugs and despair that lay behind the news brief about the salesman’s death seven years earlier.

Other books on border turmoil followed.

In “Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields,” Bowden wrote of two Mexicos:

“There is the one reported by the U.S. press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war against the evil forces of the drug world.… This Mexico has newspapers, courts, the laws and is seen by the U.S. government as a sister republic. It does not exist.”

Bowden’s other Mexico was a brutal free-for-all “where the line between government and the drug world has never existed.”

In 2011, he and New Mexico State University research librarian Molly Molloy co-edited “El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin,” the story of a contrite hit man. It also appeared as the documentary film “El Sicario: Room 164”

When “El Sicario’’ was screened at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, about 50 critics walked out, Bowden told the Santa Fean magazine.

“People left when he began describing how he’d boil people alive,” Bowden said. “Apparently people can’t handle Mexican reality.”

His other books include “Killing the Hidden Waters” (1977) ; “Blue Desert” (1986); and “Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America” (1995), a road story that weaves together the tales of convicted swindler Charles Keating and dying Native American man Robert Sundance.

Over the years, critics were impressed by Bowden’s writing, but some also felt it could be over the top.

At times, “he sounds like Walt Whitman in a very bad mood,” David Kipen wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002.

Writing in the Washington Monthly in 2010, Andres Martinez said that Bowden, while excelling as “Juarez’s chronicler of death,” presented a distorted view of the city.

“There are plenty of civil society groups, businesspeople, politicians and even security units that are clean and trying to do what is right,” Martinez wrote, “even if they are currently overwhelmed and outgunned.”

Born in Joliet, Ill., on July 20, 1945, Bowden spent his boyhood in Chicago. At 12, his family moved to Tucson for his asthmatic sister’s health.

Bowden graduated from the University of Arizona and received a master’s degree in American intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin. He taught history briefly at the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle.

In the early 1980s, he was down on his luck back in Tucson. Lying about his experience, he became a crime reporter on the now-defunct Tucson Citizen newspaper. In 1984, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.

Bowden was married twice.

Five years ago, he moved from Tucson to Las Cruces to live with Molly Molloy, his co-editor on “El Sicario” and founder of a website — https://www.fronteralist.org — that tracks violent deaths in Juarez.

In addition to Molloy, his survivors include his son, Jesse.

steve.chawkins@latimes.com

Twitter: @schawkins

Times staff writer Kurtis Lee contributed to this report.