It’s devastating news. Charles “Chuck” Bowden died last Saturday evening of an apparent heart problem. The author of Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields; El Sicario; Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family; A Shadow in the City and many other books and articles, he was a true hero in terms of his work in Juárez and the border. Everyone talks about immigration and border issues but Chuck was one of the few who was actually there, again and again, in the most dangerous times and the most deadly places.
In late 2010, after I had begun writing about Juárez, a friend told me to read Murder City, Chuck’s newest book. Coincidentally, Chuck was to come to Santa Fe to lecture at the Lannan. I went to his hotel to meet him and asked if he could introduce me to several people who were prominently featured in the book - Pastor José Antonio Galván, the founder of Vision in Action, a mental asylum in the desert on the west edge of Juárez, and Julián Cardona, the noted photographer from Juárez who, together with Chuck, has done so much to chronicle the tragic recent history of that city.
Chuck immediately put me in touch with both; that was the way he was – always helpful, despite his own very intense writing schedule. Then before my first meeting with Pastor Galván, Chuck wrote about the asylum, saying that “it is like a lens showing one the vast hurts of the city.”
Chuck first discovered the asylum in early February 2008. He and Julián were west of Juárez and, to quote Chuck, “Julían was entranced by the blankets drying on clumps of desert shrubs with the Uffington horse in the background.” The horse was “a project financed by the late Amado Carrillo and near the horse on the same flank of the Sierra Juárez was the Iguana intaglio, the symbol of the Juárez drug cartel and a marker near their private heliport.”
Then Chuck wrote that “a stream of people came over the wall from the building to the east and they flocked around us. Of course, at that moment I knew nothing of them except they seemed crazy.” This building was Vision in Action, the asylum that Galván started almost nineteen years ago and that now provides shelter, safety, care and dignity for some one hundred mental patients – men and women who have been abandoned by their government and who were living on the streets of Juárez, eating garbage and in great danger from the “sicarios” or gunmen and the gangs. And then after five days of searching, they would meet “this figure almost from myth called El Pastor.”
Over time, he and Julián would become friends with these patients, El Cholo who is in the marvelous photo of Julian’s on page 162 of Murder City, Yogi, Becky, Oscar and the many others. This led to years of support for “El Pastor” or José Antonio Galván. Chuck got a grant from a foundation in Italy for a new facility for women patients, set up a show of Pastor’s paintings in Salt Lake City and even helped haul donated beans from Deming. Describing their little caravan, he wrote, “Well, Ricardo is bringing his chariot, El Pastor has a Blazer pulling a trailer, and I stagger with my small pickup.”
Soon they drew me into this circle of supporters - Chuck, Julián and Molly Molloy, the Border and Latin America Specialist at the New Mexico State University library in Las Cruces and partner of Chuck’s. Galván who loves to paint even did a painting of the four of us and called us Angels in the Desert.
It was Chuck who brought Galván’s work to life. In a piece called “Ciudad Juárez/the love story” he wrote:
“This is about a place created by an ex-drug addict (Galván ) and run by crazy people. A man had a vision. He built a place for crazy people. Then the crazy people took over the place he built. So he is essential to the story and the crazy people are the story.
And the story is about love.
Sometimes there is hardly any medicine. There are four people at most to care for one hundred or more people who are crazy. There is seldom money. The only sure drug is love.
I once talked to a killer about the place. El Pastor does not turn people away or ask questions.
The killer told me that he went out to this asylum in the desert and then he met the man running it.
And the killer said, he was crazy too.
This is my friend, El Pastor, the man named José Antonio Galván.
“This is the happiest place in Ciudad Juárez with the happiest people.”
Chuck could find beauty anywhere – in the midst of the horrors of Juárez and with the patients of Pastor Galván but also with the birds and desert wildlife he loved. I remember a message from him of several years ago. He wrote that “I am in Patagonia, AZ surrounded by hummingbirds – my feeders are going a half a gallon or more a day. I believe this is as close to God as I wish to be. There is a great blue heron rookery a mile up the creek. Chuck.”
He was a towering figure, physically as well as in the way he inspired us. Now once again he is surrounded by hummingbirds.
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