Contrabando : Confessions of a Drug-Smuggling Texas Cowboy

Rating:
Summary: Live to tell the tale
Review: In Contrabando, Don Henry Ford tells the story of his 10 years as a marijuana smuggler on the Texas-Coahuila border. He recounts a period of his life that reveals the prehistory of the border drug trade. As a freelancer, Ford brushed up against the likes of Pablo Acosta and Amado Carrillo, but in contrast to their star power, he remained in the shadows.

This book does not pussyfoot around the hard facts of the drug business and the economic ruin that forces so many into it, in both Mexico and the United States. Some will say that the things in this book can't be true, but that is because they don't go there. Some people DO go there, but Don Henry Ford is the only one to come back to write about it.

And he can really write! Like earth smells--beans frying in lard over a wood fire, coffee under crystal stars, green-sweet stickiness as he pinches seed heads on a crop, dank ruin as storms strip $600,000 of ripe cotton from its stalks, the hard rush of ozone and adrenalin as he pulls his daughters from an angry river in flood, blood-in-the-mouth fear in a dealer's motel room or a Mexican cave or a federal prison cell. And the warmth of caring for people and horses and making things grow. He's a writer who lives and breathes grit and blood and life itself.

And it's hard to argue with a witness like Don Henry Ford, a man who spent years enmeshed in the dark entrails of the business. And lived to tell the tale.