Charles Bowden, who has died aged 69, was a writer and journalist, a leading light of the genre in US and Latin American literature that is coming to be known as "border writing", about the frontier, both porous and harsh, that cuts through the desert to divide Mexico and America.
He once told me: "My great pleasure is to go into the wilderness, get myself lost under the big sky out there, and I've written books full of words trying to capture that feeling and describe that landscape." But despite his glorious lyrical invocations of the desert around him, Bowden is best known for seeing Mexico's drug war coming to the borderlands before anyone else, and writing four books about the carnage in Ciudad Juárez that has since engulfed all Mexico.
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