by Steve Hely
He had come to San Pedro a bit of a hippie, he said. “Then I started my business. Once I had a business, immediately I stopped being a hippie.”
I asked him if he’d ever been to Paraguay. My time here in South America was running out, and one country I could now see I wouldn’t have time to visit was Paraguay. In Paraguay, in the eighteenth century, Jesuits tried to create a utopian society that lived by the principles of their order, out in the jungle. They did not succeed, but the ruins of their old missions are still there, overgrown. Landlocked Paraguay has had a sad history. During the pointless and catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s, ten-year-old boys were sent to battle with farm tools. It is said in some books that half the population of Paraguay died in this war, and almost seven out of every ten men. This seems inconceivable. I’ve tried to research it, but there just aren’t great records on the historical population of Paraguay. Who can say? All I can say is it sounds like a sad place.
“Yes, I’ve been there,” said Juan. “Go to Paraguay if you want to see animals.” On the savannas and dry forests of the Chaco of Paraguay, there are all kinds of jaguars and tapirs and deer and anteaters and giant otters.
“What about people?”
Juan shook his head. “Paraguay for animals.”
The sun was starting to set. So we mounted up and rode back to town in the low orange light. There was a girl at my hotel who I thought could perhaps be Juan’s next girlfriend. She was cute and small and smart. She told me she’d studied for a semester at Ole Miss.
“Wow, what was that like?”
She smiled and rolled her eyes and said, “Long story.”
Juan came inside to see if she was there, but she must’ve been off that night. He shrugged, we shook hands, and he left.
I hope they’ve met by now. If I’m being really optimistic, I hope they invite me to their wedding.
Aliens of the Atacama
There are some strange and enormous artworks in the Atacama Desert. One, the Mano de Desierto, is a thirty-six-foot hand emerging from the sand off the highway, south of Antofagasta. It was built in 1992 by Chilean sculptor Mario Irarrázabal.
Another is the Atacama Giant, a geoglyph about 400 feet long, carved into a sloping hillside. It shows a square-bodied, spike-headed creature like a bad guy from a 1980s video game, and was believed to have been carved sometime after AD 1000. It’s suggested that watching how the moon aligns with his head could tell farmers when to plant their crops. This seems crazy to me. There’re easier ways to figure out what time of year it is than carving a 400-foot giant into the rock and sand.
No, I think the message of both these works could be a much simpler one: a natural human desire to try to express the feeling you get in the Atacama. Namely: It’s fucking weird out here.
In reading up on the Atacama on the ol’ Internet, I came across stories and photos of the “Atacama Humanoid.” This is a skeleton, six inches long, allegedly found in a bag in a ghost town somewhere in the Atacama. With an elongated, ovalish head and oval eye sockets, it looks, frankly, like an alien. Like the versions of aliens I used to see re-created on Unsolved Mysteries and TV conspiracy documentaries when I was a kid.
(I was very into TV conspiracy documentaries when I was a kid. If Fox 25 advertised an alien autopsy, you can be damn sure I was setting the VCR.)
Professor Garry Nolan, who studies immunology and microbiology at Stanford’s Baxter Laboratory (and also has a great photogenic look for a scientist), inspected this skeleton and determined, to his satisfaction, that it was human. A child, probably an indigenous Atacameño child, born with all kinds of birth defects. How his or her skeleton ended up in a bag in a ghost town, and now in a private collection somewhere, is a story perhaps less startling than an alien appearance, but no less poignant and strange.
You can still find online many alien conspiracy buffs clinging to the Atacama Humanoid. They scoff at how the so-called scientific community always tries to shut down dissent and keep the truth hidden from us. The conspiracy buff’s attitude is appealing to me. In a way, it’s optimistic. An insistence that the world can’t possibly be as familiar and clumsy as it appears to be, that someone out there is keeping from us powerful secrets that could change everything.
With its moistureless air and almost no artificial light, the Atacama Desert is one of the greatest places in the world to see stars. The nights I was there fell around the full moon, the worst time of all for stargazing. Still, from the dirt roads out of town, I could look up and see the sky thick with scoopfuls of distant stars, thousands at a glance.
There are places in the world—Iceland, Death Valley, the Atacama—that feel like another planet. They make you feel like you’re stranded on some mysterious planet somewhere in the vast enormity of space.
Or, rather: They remind you that you’re stranded on some mysterious planet somewhere in the vast enormity of space.
Because, of course, you are.
At least all of us are stranded here together.
Che Guevara
In 1951, Ernesto Guevara was a twenty-three-year-old medical student in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His buddy, Alberto Granado, had a motorcycle they called La Poderosa. The two of them were drinking yerba maté tea and talking.
“Along the roads of our daydream we reached remote countries, navigated tropical seas and traveled all through Asia,” says Guevara in his memoir The Motorcycle Diaries. “And suddenly, slipping in as if part of our fantasy, the question arose:
“‘Why don’t we go to North America?’
“‘North America? But how?’
“‘On La Poderosa, man.’
“The trip was decided just like that, and it never erred from the basic principle laid down in that moment: improvisation.”
I hear that. The two of them set off on a nine-month motorcycle journey, across the pampas of Argentina, over the Chilean border, to Valparaiso, Santiago, up north through the Atacama and the Andes, to Iquique, to Bolivia and Lake Titicaca, over into Peru, to Cusco and to Macchu Pichu, and on to Colombia. Almost a reverse of the trip I’d taken.
In my own fantasies for a while I’d thought about going Guevara style, riding a motorcycle across Latin America. So I learned how to ride a motorcycle. Quickly, I decided it wasn’t my nature to ride motorcycles, and what’s more, it seemed like there could be nothing more douchey and poseur-y than trying to redo what Che did.
It would feel wrong, though, to put down a book about the southern half of the Western Hemisphere without saying something about Che Guevara, whose image and ideas are everywhere.
The nickname Che came from the way Argentines talked: a bit like if Argentines started calling an American guy bro. If you’ve heard of Che Guevara the revolutionary, you might be surprised like I was when you read The Motorcycle Diaries. It’s not mostly a radical political document. It’s a travel book. Che spends much more time talking about schemes he and his buddy pulled to steal wine, or get free meals, than he does about overthrowing governments. For a while their goal is to get to Easter Island, which intrigues them, but they don’t quite make it. Che talks about the diarrhea he had, and the problems of taking along a little dog on their motorcycle. A constant obsession is how they’re going to get more yerba maté. Che’s father was a yerba maté farmer for a while. The stuff’s highly caffeinated, and Che appears totally addicted to it.
In the legend of Che, the sight of workers struggling in the American-owned copper mine at Chuquicamata, the struggles of poor Communists in the Chilean desert, the hard lives of the indigenous people of Peru and Bolivia, and the sufferings of the sick they helped while volunteering for a week at a leper colony in the Amazon inspired him to take up a life of revolution. “What needs to be done,” he says, “is to get rid of the uncomfortable ‘Yankee-friend.’”
He went back to Argentina, finished his medical degree, but then he was off again. He wa
s in Guatemala when the American-backed coup toppled the socialist Jacobo Arbenz. He wrote his relatives and told them he’d become a Communist. In Mexico City, Che befriended the Castro brothers. He was with them when they sailed to Cuba on the Granma, a small yacht crammed with eighty-two revolutionaries.
Only maybe twenty of them survived the next year. The Granma is now encased in a glass box in Havana, a monument to the revolution. When Fidel Castro took over Cuba, three years after they landed, he made Che minister of industry and president of the National Bank. This last job, Che used to say, he got when he misunderstood Castro asking for an economista as asking for a comunista.
Smarter people than me have spent years of their lives trying to figure out Che Guevara. Oliver Stone and Steven Soderbergh and Walter Salles all tried to make movies about him, with different amounts of success. Mandy Patinkin plays him, a dreamlike version of him, in the musical Evita.
Che did, absolutely, send people to be executed by firing squad. Jon Lee Anderson, who has more knowledge about Latin America in one cell in his brain than I ever will, and who wrote a 672-page biography of him, says that Che’s executions were never once of “an innocent.” Che also encouraged relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union, and he helped bring to Cuba the Soviet missiles that sparked the Cuban missile crisis.
Che visited the United States in 1964. At the UN, he gave a fiery speech calling out the United States for its racism. He appeared on Face the Nation, too. You can see a clip of it on YouTube. Che smokes a big cigar, he takes his time, and he has crazy swagger. You can see that the besuited journalists have no idea what to do with this guy.
What happened between Castro and Che in Cuba might never be sorted out. But Che left. Che went on to try to start a revolution in the Congo. Then it was on to Bolivia.
On October 13, 1967, Special Assistant for National Security Affairs Walt Rostow sent President Lyndon Johnson a very brief memo with an attached file, still classified. “This removes any doubt that ‘Che’ Guevara is dead,” it reads. He’d been captured and killed by Bolivian troops, with help from the CIA. Supposedly his last words were “Shoot me, you coward! You are only going to kill a man!”
After the motorcycle trip, Alberto Granado went back to Argentina and finished his studies. When the Cuban Revolution prevailed, he accepted an invitation from his old friend and helped train doctors there. He continued his research in genetics, and he died in Havana in 2011. “He was not compromising,” Granado told the BBC about his old friend in 2005. “It wasn’t easy unless you shared his vision and believed in it.”
Now he’s on a million T-shirts. You won’t go far in Latin America without seeing Che’s face. I’ve read as much as I could about Che, but I can’t say I’ve come close to figuring him out. On his main point, that the United States was extracting all kinds of wealth from Central and South America without much of it trickling down to the people there, he was absolutely right. He also believed in violent revolution, which I myself, as a Yankee-friend, am not too psyched about.
But I will say this: He was a very good, and sometimes very funny, travel writer.
If I were as full of life and energy as Che, I would’ve taken a motorcycle from the Atacama to Santiago. But I had an appointment to meet my friend Fabrizio in Santiago, and I couldn’t be late. So instead, I slept on a short flight.
The Museum of Memory
When the jets from your own air force are bombing your own presidential palace, your country is having a bad day. On September 11, 1973, that happened in Santiago, Chile. By the end of the day, Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, went on the radio.
Allende had become the president after a messy election in 1970 in which he won the most votes but not a majority. He was “left leaning,” which is to say he pushed for things like more spending on housing, free milk for kids, improved relations with the USSR and Castro’s Cuba, and nationalizing copper mines. His style of economics and foreign policy was not exactly in line with what US president Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wanted, and so they conspired to destabilize his power. You can hear them talking about it on White House recordings. Strikes and political disputes turned into a national crisis. Now, General Augusto Pinochet of the Chilean army was commanding tanks and troops in the capital.
On the radio, Allende said, “At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country.” Then he either shot himself or was shot.
Immediately after the coup, thousands of Chileans were rounded up in the national stadium. In the years that followed, Chileans who protested the dictatorship of Pinochet were electrocuted or shot or thrown out of helicopters or taken to secret concentration camps in abandoned nitrate mines. Some of Pinochet’s guys were blown up or assassinated by opposition groups.
There were all kinds of opposition to Pinochet: unions and journalists and indigenous people and miners and intellectuals. They fought with each other plenty. But in 1988, they managed to unite themselves enough to rally a majority of the country to vote no in a referendum on the military dictatorship. Pinochet stuck around as a senator for life, making the case until his death that hey, maybe I was tough but you guys needed me. When he died at ninety-one, he was wrapped up in all kinds of legal cases involving torture, kidnapping, murder, and possibly having his army build a lab to make “black cocaine,” a mixture of cocaine and various chemicals.
This isn’t ancient history. Almost all of this happened in my lifetime. There are coworkers and friends, maybe even married couples in Chile, who voted on opposite sides of the No referendum. There are families that were destroyed and neighbors who betrayed each other during the military junta who are still neighbors today.
The story of all this is told at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. It’s an incredibly cool building, designed by a Brazilian architectural team. The afternoon I was there, a bunch of seventh graders were on a tour. To me they seemed to be spending most of their time bouncing toward and away from each other in patterns that no doubt told stories of growing crushes and explosive friendships and awkward affections. But some of them watched the videos.
In the videos, you could hear people tell about being kidnapped and sexually assaulted and tortured, of losing sons and sisters and parents. You could learn about the so-called Operation Television Withdrawal, where the exhumed bodies of executed dissidents were thrown from airplanes into the ocean. You could hear about La Cueca Solo, where one person alone would do a traditional Chilean dance as a kind of protest over the fate of her partner, who’d been disappeared. You could watch news footage of the huge celebrations in the streets after the No vote.
Much of what happened in this time is murky or rumored or lost in secret or destroyed documents. The Museum of Memory felt extra powerful to me because it seemed to make no judgments. Mostly, it just showed things—an electrified bed, an underground newspaper, a poster—and played images of people saying, This is what I saw. This happened to me.
Quite a place. My friend Fabrizio had told me this was the one thing I had to see in Santiago. Now I’d done it and I was relieved I was free to party and joke around with a strong candidate and my personal choice for Funniest Guy in Chile.
The Funniest Guy in Chile
When Fabrizio Copano was a boy living in Los Angeles—Los Angeles, Chile—he heard about an American TV show called Seinfeld. To watch the show, he had to download it over a modem. An episode took two days to download. Imagine the crushing frustrations this boy experienced when the Internet went down or his mom knocked out the modem plug with her vacuum at, like, hour thirty-one.
On Seinfeld, Fabrizio saw a man standing with a microphone telling jokes. This didn’t really exist in Chile. He decided he wanted to try it. So he went to tango clubs and asked them if he could stand up with a microphone for a few minutes and tell jokes.
To the owners of the tango clubs, this seemed ridiculous, but he was
a cute fourteen-year-old kid, they said okay, so he started doing it. The tango club patrons were amused by this. More and more came.
“They liked that it was a New York thing. It sounded sophisticated. Soon magazines were writing about it and saying this is something they do in New York,” Fabrizio said. That’s how he brought stand-up comedy to Chile.
Now Fabrizio is twenty-seven and he has a popular late-night talk show on Chilean TV.
“It’s hard because I run out of celebrities. There are only like eleven celebrities in Chile. I just interview them over and over again.”
I met Fabrizio when he was in Los Angeles, California, seeking help for a movie idea where he would play a boy seismologist who discovers a conspiracy by the rich people in Chile to cause earthquakes so that Chile can separate from South America and go to Europe. This movie got made and came out and was an enormous hit and now Fabrizio is even more famous.
In Chile, anyway. In the US, nobody knew who he was. I took him to Universal Studios, because he wanted to see the Simpsons ride, which is indeed great. I really liked him and thought he was funny.
“Hey, Fabrizio, what do your parents do?” I asked him on the Universal Studios escalator.
“They are architects.”
“What kind of architects?”
“Bad ones.”
When he left, I told him I’d visit him in Santiago someday. You know Americans, we are always promising to visit Santiago. But I went and did it.
“Was I supposed to bring you weed? An American stand-up told me it is always polite to bring comedy people weed when they visit.”
That was said by Paloma Sales, a friend of Fabrizio’s and another Chilean comedian, who met us out for dinner. Very gracious and nice, a lovely person, Paloma. Her stand-up is incredibly filthy.
