The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America

by Brian Kevin

  Sipping a beer in the café and trying not to ogle the ice-cream models, I thought, not for the first time, of how much the young Thompson reminded me of Sky, and I realized how much I was going to miss the rakish photographer when he was gone.

  When Sky emerged eventually from the hospital’s creepy rotating doors, he had a paper mask stretched across his face.

  That’s it, I thought. So much for the Thompson Trail. They’re going to quarantine us with the legislature, for sure.

  But Sky, it turned out, did not have the swine flu. After a long wait and an hour of poking and prodding, the doctors had diagnosed him with a workaday respiratory infection. They shot him up with penicillin, tied a mask on him, and sent him on his way. His total fee for the consultation, a blood test, and the drugs? About $30. Slightly less than the cost of our bus tickets from Girardot.

  But there were, as they say in the medical community, complications. That night, we had a date planned with three of the lovely belles of Bogotá. One was a friend of a friend, a born bogotana and commercial filmmaker who, like me, had once spent a summer working in Yellowstone National Park. We’d arranged to have a drink, and she’d invited friends—because you don’t, I suppose, go to a bar alone with two strange foreign men. Sky took an afternoon nap at the hostel, and by the disco hour, his penicillin seemed to be working its magic.

  We met the girls at a dim Italian bar down the street. They were a smart and curious bunch, all in their thirties and fluent in English, and the conversation flowed easily. We talked first about politics (I was learning that Colombians love to talk politics, especially with Americans), then about places we’d traveled, then about security and violence across Colombia.

  We were actually just delving into the topic of Colombian sexuality when Sky started looking uncharacteristically ill at ease. The girls (all three beautiful) were describing the pressure they’d felt even as teenagers to take seriously the prospect of plastic surgery. It was pitched, they said, as a sort of career option—an investment for Colombian women in their future success and security. I was fascinated and a little appalled. Sky, meanwhile, just looked distracted. He started tugging at his collar and rolling his neck, like his clothes had suddenly become too tight. We were on the verge of ordering another round when he leaned over and muttered to me.

  “I’m sorry, dude,” he said. “Stay and have fun, but I have to go back to the hostel.”

  “Why?” I asked, surprised. “Come on, we’ve earned a night off, and I think everyone’s having a good time.”

  “It’s not that,” he said, now clearly wincing. “I think I’m allergic to whatever kind of shot they gave me back at the hospital.”

  The doctors had indeed asked him about this. He’d mentioned it to me on the taxi ride back to the hostel. Bleary as he had been, he could only remember that, yes, he was allergic to some kind of antibiotic, but he couldn’t recall whether it was penicillin or something else. He had guessed “something else.” It was penicillin.

  So we bid our dates a hasty good night, and I followed Sky back to the hostel out of a sense of moral obligation. For the next several hours, he writhed and itched on the couch in the common room. I tried plying him with the celebratory champagne that we hadn’t drunk in Girardot, but he wouldn’t take any, and for all I know, alcohol and antibiotic allergies don’t mix anyway. So I fed him a handful of over-the-counter allergy pills from my first-aid kit, and eventually they knocked him out.

  When Sky left for the airport the next day, he was a shell of a man, groggy and exhausted, but at least his skin was no longer on fire. We waited outside for a taxi as squads of young bogotanos whizzed by on motor scooters, and we kept our good-byes businesslike. I thanked him sincerely for everything—for tagging along on an adventurous impulse, for his superior Spanish and his sense of humor, for dragging me out to bars in Honda when I’d rather have stayed inside with Ivan and his duck. He gave me some parting advice about choosing the right buses, promised to keep in touch, and reminded me that the girls in Cali—my next stop—were among the most beautiful in the world. When the cab pulled up, we shook hands. Then he was in it and away.

  A few hours later, I got an e-mail, sent from his laptop. “I am in the Bogotá airport in some state,” it said, “… a sleep-deprived, caffeinated soft reality. I felt compelled to write you. I want you to know that this trip was an incredible experience for me, and the experiences we had I will cherish for a long time.

  “Your friend and fellow wonk, Sky.”

  II

  Hunter Thompson did not much care for Bogotá. The place seemed dull and sterile, bereft of that crackling, sultry tension he’d felt along the coast. He complained of “a sexual deadness in the air that makes me feel I might be locked up for looking at women on the street.” Everyone around him wore a coat and tie, he groused, and they seemed always to be on some kind of official business. He hated his hotel, an Art Deco monster called the Imperial that looked out across the street at Colombia’s presidential palace. It had no hot water, the staff hassled him about his casual attire, and the block was surrounded by churches with constantly ringing bells—“a mad clanging every five or ten minutes.” To top it off, he was suffering through his first case of dysentery, a malady that would make anyone grumpy. His perpetual digestive troubles would actually become a running theme (no pun intended) in all of his letters from South America.

  The pale yellow building that used to be the Imperial Hotel sits on a corner of two cobblestone streets in the heart of Bogotá’s government district. It’s a three-story building that went up in 1928, with arched doorways and rounded corners, and today it houses the offices of the Ministry of Culture. Since the presidential palace is just across the road, the whole block is gated and patrolled by armed soldiers, scrutinizing pedestrians and checking bags. It’s off-limits to cars, and the sidewalk is closed as well, deemed too close to the palace and lined with more grim-looking soldiers. People walking past the Imperial Hotel today are no longer wearing coats and ties, but it’s still a pretty joyless stretch of the city.

  One block north of the former Imperial, the Plaza Bolívar is the center of Bogotá’s historic district, a windswept concrete square where the pigeons tend to outnumber the people. I strolled through on my first afternoon alone in Bogotá, after scouting out Thompson’s old hotel. A few dozen government workers were loitering there on their lunch break. A couple of old men played chess on a blanket, and one lonely harlequin mime was halfheartedly shaking balloon animals at passing families. Like much of Bogotá, the Plaza Bolívar is regal but none too colorful. It’s paved with slate-gray tiles and crowded with dusty gray pigeons. On all sides are imposing, historic buildings—the Justice Palace, the Senate chambers, Bogotá’s City Hall, and the towering Catedral Primada—and each one of these is its own mottle of grays, browns, and beiges. Stately and impressive, yes, but uniformly drab.

  So my eyes were drawn immediately to a scatter of neon splashes on the cathedral facade. It’s a breathtaking building, a two-hundred-year-old neoclassical relic designed by a Spanish mason-turned-monk named Domingo de Petrés. Petrés is to grandiose churches in Colombia what Frank Lloyd Wright is to weird rich people’s houses in the United States. He’s responsible for dozens of landmarks all around the country, but the Catedral Primada is his masterwork, an ornate stone structure with pedestaled statues and a pair of symmetrical 140-foot towers. There’s an exquisite grace to the swoop of the stone between the towers and the upper facade. It’s a stirring sight really, especially to a guy who grew up attending boxy Protestant churches with all the architectural flair of suburban post offices. The Catedral Primada is striking and imposing at the same time, looming over the square like a beautiful but austere librarian—you can almost hear it whispering sshhh! to pedestrians in the plaza.

  So the festive, hypercolor paint splotches were pretty conspicuous. There were at least thirty of them, spaced out at irregular intervals from the front doorway to the feet of a stone Virgin perc
hed fifty feet above. On the steps out front, a young military police officer stood at attention, his orders apparently to hold a large gun and scowl. In my politest gringo stutter, I asked him what was up with the paint stains.

  “Ah, señor,” he said, and his scowl gave way to a kindly look of surprise, “how long have you been in Bogotá?”

  Not long, I admitted.

  “Well, these marks are from paintball guns,” he said, briefly shouldering his assault rifle in a rather alarming pantomime. “You see, the students gathered here in the square to protest, oh, several months ago. There were many, many people. And some of them, well”—he shrugged and smiled, gesturing back at the cathedral—“some of them get excited.”

  That turns out to be an understatement. Months earlier, student protestors had effectively brought Bogotá to a standstill, organizing weeks of massive demonstrations that brought as many as 30,000 people into Bolívar Square. The issue at hand was a set of proposed education reforms that many saw as opening the door to the privatization of Colombia’s university system. As it is, only about a third of Colombia’s college-age population is enrolled (compared with more than two-thirds in the United States), and protestors feared that more private-sector involvement in higher ed would raise education costs while weakening standards. More than 500,000 students and some educators boycotted classes for over a month, effectively halting the Colombian academic year. Roadblocks by students and sympathizers stopped traffic all across the capital, and solidarity strikes by taxi drivers worsened the gridlock. And yes, as the soldier explained, there was quite a bit of vandalism. Mostly your garden-variety graffiti, the kind that already covers every blank surface in Bogotá, but also the paintball guns. He wasn’t sure whether the stains could be removed.

  “Did things get violent?” I asked.

  Mostly no, he said. Here and there the police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowds, but only after protestors started throwing rocks. For the most part, the police just stood by and watched. “Over there and over there,” he said, pointing to the steps of the Justice Palace and the Senate building, on either side of the square. Turning around, I tried to imagine 30,000 people crammed into the sleepy plaza. A pair of Japanese tourists was quietly tossing corn kernels to the pigeons nearby. The chess players had assembled a small audience of geriatric onlookers. It was hard to envision a mob scene, but there was no denying the fluorescent scars it had left on the cathedral.

  “So what happened?” I asked. “Where is everyone now?”

  “Back in school,” the soldier said. I heard a trace of condescension in his voice, perhaps because college enrollment in Colombia allows young men to avoid their otherwise compulsory military service. “The students won, you see. The government backed down.” Then the whiff of condescension descended on me. “Colombia is a country where the government listens to its people.”

  Over the next couple of days, I noticed fading protest graffiti all over town: EDUCACIÓN POR TODOS! (with an anarchist’s circle-and-slash around the A). ESTUDIANTES RESISTE! On the bus one afternoon, I passed the headquarters of the national oil company, Ecopetrol, itself the site of recent protests. It looked positively tie-dyed, speckled with paintball bursts in every imaginable hue. In Colombia, I figured, this must be a fairly common form of civil disobedience.

  Of course, large-scale strikes and protests are hardly a new phenomenon in Bogotá. They were, in fact, keeping Thompson awake in his drafty room at the Imperial fifty years back. On June 6, 1962, Thompson looked out his hotel window to see a horde of students demonstrating outside the presidential palace. They were striking in solidarity with students in Barranquilla, who’d been agitating for weeks in favor of university autonomy and the right to form student councils. Student leaders had been expelled, prompting street riots in the coastal city that left several hospitalized. Thompson read in the paper about tense standoffs there between protestors and law enforcement.

  “[Yesterday] in Barranquilla,” he wrote, “the army tackled a student protest march with clubs and gas, and it was only because the students fled that nobody was shot.”

  In Bogotá, the demonstration outside Thompson’s window became a mob, with protestors throwing rocks at the archbishop’s palace and various newspaper offices before police managed to disperse the crowd. Several unions around town were also striking in support of the students, and within a week, workers from a pair of unrelated textile and retail strikes would take to the streets as well.

  “One strike after another,” Thompson wrote, after several days in the capital. “Students, busmen, bondsmen—forever striking, and it is all I can do to wander around in the mobs and get photos that nobody will ever use.”

  For all his griping, that quote actually reveals Thompson as a pretty ballsy young reporter. Colombian street protests in 1962 were no joke, seeing as you didn’t have to look back far for instances where police were as likely to use rifles as tear gas. At the time, Colombia was just emerging from a bloody decade and a half known as La Violencia, a period of savage conflict between those who identified with the country’s Liberal and Conservative parties. Between 1948 and 1964, more than 200,000 Colombians were killed, mostly (and most gruesomely) by death squads in the little-policed countryside, but also during mob skirmishes and massacres in the cities. Troops opened fire and killed ten students during one protest in 1954. Two years later, at a bullfight in Bogotá, government forces killed eight spectators and wounded a hundred others who had jeered at then-dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. In 1957, the military killed another fifty protestors during the nationwide strikes that eventually drove Pinilla from office.

  None of which deterred Thompson from heading into the fray, although it wasn’t without anxiety. While he knew that Colombia had been a few years without a major urban massacre, this left open the possibility that the country was simply overdue.

  “The cops are what give me the creeps,” he wrote. “To look at them in the jackboots is bad enough, but to see photos of them firing wildly into mobs of students is a bit unreal. Running them into corners and piling up bodies three deep—this has happened often enough to make me feel nervous even standing near a demonstration.”

  The kids shooting paintball guns at the Catedral Primada are the direct ideological descendants of the student protestors outside Thompson’s hotel. Both groups trace their lineage back to the undisputed patriarch of Colombian civil disobedience, a fiery reformist politician named Jorge Gaitán. Gaitán was shot three times in broad daylight on a bustling Bogotá sidewalk in 1948, and his assassination birthed Colombia’s tradition of populist street protest—along with La Violencia, the FARC, and arguably even the very specter of Castroite communism that attracted Thompson to South America.

  The perky English-speaking guide at Bogotá’s Gaitán House Museum thinks that Jorge Gaitán was amazing. She mentioned this three or four times as she walked me through the former education and labor minister’s historic home, an unassuming white-stucco colonial in a university neighborhood. It was simply amazing, she said, how one man’s oratory could bring together Colombia’s peasants and urban working classes to oppose the country’s powerful oligarchy. It was also amazing how a young lawyer could stand up to big, international businesses after a campesino massacre on a plantation owned by a US banana grower. She read me one of Gaitán’s most famous quotes, often deployed during his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns: “The people are superior to their leaders.” Wasn’t that an amazing thing to say?

  As the college-age docent guided me from room to room, she cooed over various artifacts and extolled Gaitán’s contributions to Colombian people. As a national minister and mayor of Bogotá, he’d launched literacy initiatives and school-lunch programs. He’d organized government giveaways of shoes and clothing. And while he was known as a champion of the common people, Gaitán was an educated man who’d studied in Europe. We strolled through his library of more than 3,500 multilingual texts. He was also a health nut, a jogge
r before there really were joggers, and when we walked into his former study, my young guide proudly pointed to one of those old unexplainable vibrating-belt exercise machines, tucked into a corner. So amazing, she sighed.

  When Gaitán was shot by an unstable drifter during his second campaign for president, it touched off three days of rioting in Bogotá and violent clashes throughout the countryside. The urban unrest morphed into strikes and protests under the banner of gaitanismo. The rural violence didn’t let up for fifteen years, and some might say it never has. Needless to say, Gaitán has since been pretty well lionized in the Colombian national consciousness. The ruling Conservative Party declared his home a national monument within weeks of the assassination (kind of a backhanded honor, actually, since it meant that his family had to move out). His name is attached to all kinds of infrastructure around Bogotá, and in 2001, he attained the ultimate form of national immortality: he made the currency.

  “Do you have a thousand-peso bill?” my guide chirped as we stepped into the courtyard. I handed one over, thinking it was my admission fee, but she just held it out in front of me.