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

by Brian Kevin

  “So this,” she said, pointing to the slick-haired, suited gentleman on the bill’s front side, “is Jorge Gaitán, the hero of the people!” I squinted. He looked like a kindly young guy, his lips turned up in the slightest twinge of a smile, the kind of congeniality you don’t much see on currency portraits. She flipped it over to show me the reverse—Gaitán again, this time pictured with one arm raised before a flag-toting crowd.

  “This is a very famous image,” she said.

  Then, as an afterthought, she moved her finger to a tiny mustachioed face in the crowd, tucked squarely into Gaitán’s right armpit.

  “And that,” she added, “is Fidel Castro.”

  Castro, it turns out, was a university student in Havana in 1948 who’d come to Bogotá with a coalition of lefty undergrads to protest an inter-American conference being held there. Candidate Gaitán was supposed to meet with him on the very afternoon of his assassination. During the riots that followed, Castro and his companions stole arms from an overrun police station and joined the raids on various government ministries and right-leaning newspapers. He eventually fled to his embassy and was flown back to Cuba, but Castro has since written that Gaitán’s assassination provoked his transformation from a mere student rabble-rouser into a “true leftist radical.”

  Gaitán’s legacy is an entrenched antagonism between the Colombian common man and the perceived elites, and it’s this that keeps the strikers and protestors coming back to Plaza Bolívar year after year. It isn’t a uniquely Colombian tension, of course. In fact, much of Latin America soon adopted Gaitán’s pejorative use of the term la oligarquía, which once simply meant “the rule of the few,” but which Gaitán helped imbue with its modern significance—a closed-off, self-perpetuating community of both wealth and political power. What’s impressive about Colombia is both the intensity and staying power of this us-versus-them sentiment. To get a sense of Gaitán’s legacy, think of the hue and cry that surrounded Occupy Wall Street. Then imagine that instead of lasting six months, it stretched on for sixty years.

  Gaitán is buried in his own courtyard, and my peppy guide sobered up somewhat while showing me his tomb. Dirt from all corners of Colombia had been gathered to sow over the grave, then dampened with water from the Magdalena. The stone inscription read: JORGE ELIÉCER GAITÁN, 1903–∞.

  III

  In an early letter from the Magdalena, Thompson mentioned having made the social page of the newspaper in Barranquilla, where (not unlike Honda) a visit from a virtually uncredentialed foreign journalist was apparently still a big enough deal in 1962 to warrant some coverage. The only archive I could find of Barranquilla’s El Heraldo was at the National Library in Bogotá. The day I decided to go there turned out to be what the bogotanos call Dia Sin Carro.

  Bogotá, of course, isn’t all gloomy architecture and street violence. On the contrary, it’s a fun city with great public parks, tasty street food, and what I would later come to appreciate as the only decent beer in all the Andes. It’s also a town with a penchant for ambitious and offbeat social experiments. In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, a pair of progressive-minded mayors earned worldwide recognition for a handful of oddball initiatives that put mimes on the streets to shame bad drivers and banned men from appearing in public a few nights each year. To mitigate traffic, they grounded drivers on alternating days with a kind of license-plate lottery. If your plate ends in an 8, for example, you’re not allowed to drive on Mondays or Thursdays in Bogotá. If it ends with a 6, then you’re busing it on Mondays and Wednesdays. And if it happens to be the first Thursday of February, then all across Bogotá it’s Dia Sin Carro (or Car-Free Day), and ain’t nobody driving anywhere.

  Or that’s how it was pitched to me, anyway. So I rented a cheap ten-speed the day before my trip to the National Library, and I was looking forward to cruising there in a Tour de France–style peloton. It turns out, however, that there are many exceptions to Dia Sin Carro. When I wheeled my bike out of the hostel the next morning, I was immediately confronted by the sights, sounds, and smells of the zillion or so taxis, buses, government vehicles, and colectivo microbuses that all still managed to fill the streets.

  OK, I thought, so only private cars are banned—surely this still relieves some of the traffic pressure. So I strapped on a rented helmet about as sturdy as a Tupperware bowl and pedaled out into the fray.

  To say that Dia Sin Carro relieves some of the traffic pressure in Bogotá is like saying that Tylenol relieves some of the pain from a pencil jammed into your eye. It’s a start. The cobblestone streets of the colonial Candelaria District weren’t so bad, but the broad avenues of El Centro were a calliope of car horns and backfiring buses. I was the only bike on the road for ten blocks in any direction, hemmed in against the curb by a demonic fleet of taxis and more wildly swerving VWs than the parking lot after a Grateful Dead show. The painted lines indicating traffic lanes in Bogotá have as much authority as No Smoking signs on the moon, and the traffic laws are about as stringently enforced. It’s the law of the jungle out there, and a guy on a rickety ten-speed is a hobbling wildebeest. By the time I pulled up to the library, I was white-knuckled and panting from my fifteen-block ride.

  Colombia’s national library is an imposing Art Deco building on the edge of the city’s oldest park. Like every other public building in the country, it goes in big for armed security, and the strict visitor protocols seem more geared toward the protection of knowledge than the diffusion of it. This might be a sensible policy, given Bogotá’s off-and-on history of wanton destruction, but navigating the library’s byzantine security process can be challenging for a foreigner. At the registration desk, a brisk attendant issued me a photo ID, then ran me through some ground rules. I could bring in my laptop, but not its case. I could take a pen, but no notebooks. I would have to relinquish my English-Spanish dictionary, but my camera was OK. Except for its case. No cases of any kind. And after much thought, it was decided that I could bring in some papers from my folder, but only the ones I really, really needed.

  Eventually, the attendant pointed me toward the periodicals room, where a librarian from the archives set me up with a hand-bound, two-foot-tall book—every edition of El Heraldo from the second quarter of 1962. The cover was disintegrating at the corners and opened stiffly. “Todos originales,” the librarian said. Microfiche apparently never caught on in Colombia. I turned the crisp beige pages with the utmost care.

  There’s something transportive about paging through an old newspaper, a tangible reminder that the events of history were once the events of the day. I inhaled deeply; the pine-cone musk of newsprint only gets stronger with age. First, I leafed through a few articles about the student riots in Barranquilla (“the unfortunate events of last night …”), then a reprint of Kennedy’s congratulatory message to Leon Valencia, Colombia’s president-elect and Thompson’s profile subject. I skimmed the entertainment pages. The season’s biggest movie seems to have been a Raymond Burr romance called Desire in the Dust, renamed Echoes of the Past in Spanish. I scanned an article about some very early nuclear-disarmament talks in Geneva, then another about Kennedy sending his first major troop deployment to Southeast Asia. Echoes of the past indeed, I thought.

  On the “De Sociedad” page of the May 26 issue—beneath a paragraph about a perfume-industry banquet and next to a photo of a froggy-looking but impeccably dressed toddler—I found a small column with the simple headline PERIODISTA NORTEAMERICANO. The text is straightforward:

  Found in the city for a few days is the American journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, who is touring South America. Mr. Thompson writes for the newspaper company “Herald Tribune” and is touring several countries, about which he has been writing a series of articles.

  Thompson, who is also a photographer, visited La Guajira. He arrived in Barranquilla and intends to continue in the afternoon, bound for Bogotá, where he will remain for several weeks and then continue to Lima, Peru. We welcome se�
�or Thompson, wishing him the best impressions during his visit to our country.

  Best impressions? In my head, I played back Thompson’s litany of complaints: the mosquitoes on the Magdalena, the cold water at the Imperial, the strikes, the church bells, the dysentery. By the time he was gearing up to leave Bogotá, I’m not sure that “the best impressions” were among Thompson’s souvenirs. The blurb mentions the New York Herald Tribune, for which he’d written a few stories from the Caribbean years before. That the National Observer goes unmentioned is a reminder that Thompson was only a freelancer—he had no guarantee that anyone at all would be buying his articles. He mentions selling two short items to the New Orleans Times-Picayune for $20. It took the Observer weeks to pay up for his first two pieces from Colombia, the Guajiran travelogue and the Valencia profile, and until they did, Thompson had virtually no money coming in. It occurred to me that one reason for his bleak outlook on Bogotá might have been the looming threat of utter destitution.

  All the same, I smiled to read the Heraldo item. How many other researchers had plumbed the Colombian archives to dig up this piece of Thompsonalia? Not many, I thought. Maybe none. So I felt pretty good about myself as I wheeled my ten-speed back into the war zone of downtown traffic. For weeks, I’d been following a route parallel to Thompson’s, but there in that fluorescent-lit reading room, my fingers smudged with fifty-year-old ink, I felt for the first time like our paths had crossed.

  IV

  “There is a hell of a problem here in Colombia with what they call the Rural Violence,” Thompson wrote to an editor from Cali. “This means that out in the countryside, there are a good many people who pass the time of day whacking off their neighbor’s [sic] heads with machetes.… I came over the mountains in a taxi from Bogota, right through the center of the bad area, and people here have yet to get over it.”

  The sun-soaked metro of Santiago de Cali is quite a taxi ride from Bogotá, three hundred miles west of the capital and across two of the three mountain “fingers” that Colombians (and geologists) call cordilleras. It’s also a full mile lower than Bogotá, at the edge of a broad valley carved out by the Cauca River. Fertile and ringed with mountains, the Valle del Cauca is a longtime producer of industrial-scale cash crops like sugarcane, soy, and cotton. Then, in the 1970s, farmers there went all-in on the cashiest crop of them all: coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine. The subsequent rise and fall of the Cali Cartel brought money and glamour like caleños had never seen. It also brought horrific violence, which, as Thompson suggested, they’d already seen quite a bit of.

  With regard to what motivated people to dismember their neighbors: Thompson happened to be passing through Colombia at a pivotal moment, just as the partisan chaos of La Violencia was coalescing into the orchestrated guerrilla campaigns that would plague the country for the next fifty years. Ever since Gaitán’s assassination, rural bandits had been wreaking havoc on the countryside, taking advantage of the political freefall to settle old scores, seize land, and generally rule by brutal intimidation. Trying (unsuccessfully) to pitch a story to a men’s magazine, Thompson described in gruesome detail the photos he’d seen of rural atrocities: dead pregnant women, their fetuses ripped out and replaced by cats; victims with their throats slashed and tongues pulled out through the wound, a maneuver known as the “Colombian necktie.” Thompson called the photos “the goriest goddamn things I’ve ever seen.”

  The violence subsided a bit in 1958, when the Liberal and Conservative parties signed a power-sharing agreement after a decade at odds—a big reason why Thompson could write about Colombia’s political stability four years later. But he also theorized in his pitch letter that the remaining bandits could represent “the nucleus for a guerrilla army,” and in this he was proven all too correct. Rather than dispersing, some bandits decamped to semiautonomous mountain hideaways, many of them encircling the Valle del Cauca. These enclaves attracted political dissidents from the cities, and gradually the leftist ideology motivating urban strikers and students blended with the militancy of the rural outlaws. The FARC was born in 1964 when the Colombian military attacked one such outpost, near Cali. The rebels there, once a disorganized peasant mob, became radicalized, a socialist militia bent on government overthrow, and similar outfits emerged throughout the ’60s and ’70s.

  These days, the FARC is the only real guerrilla bloc left in Colombia, and decades after insinuating itself into the narcotics trade, there isn’t much ideology left, just a fanatical devotion to drug profits. The Valle del Cauca is one of the FARC’s last strongholds, but even there, in post-Uribe Colombia, the group is pretty marginalized. On my own overnight ride into Cali, the biggest danger in the mountains was that my climate-controlled coach might lose its 3G wireless signal.

  Cali today is no more dangerous than Bogotá, but it didn’t take me long to realize that the two cities are profoundly different. For starters, Cali is hot. Never mind the 3,200-foot elevation—the city is just a few ticks north of the equator and every bit as sweltering as Barranquilla and the coast. With a year-round growing season, it’s grassy and colorful where Bogotá is stony and muted. The day I arrived, I took a long walk through breezy palms lining the pedestrian trail downtown. The path led to Parque Jorge Isaacs, where flirty couples lounged beneath giant gothic banyan trees. Farther along was another small park with a few dozen colorful cat statues, any of which would have seemed out of place among the marble heroes and classical busts of Bogotá. There was still plenty of traffic, of course, but the café diners at their canopied tables seemed noticeably unhurried, sipping beer and not coffee in the early afternoon, and even among the steel towers of the business district, people walked languidly, stopping here and there to chat.

  Sky was right about the women, too. They were indeed stunning, absurdly voluptuous and dressed to beat the heat—which is to say, minimally. Cali is famous for both its nightlife (it’s the self-proclaimed salsa capital of the world) and its enthusiastic embrace of cosmetic surgery (with more plastic surgeons per capita than anywhere else in Colombia). So it’s maybe no surprise that Thompson found there the ambient sexual energy he’d been missing in Bogotá. “Walking the streets here can drive a man up the wall in ten minutes,” he wrote admiringly. Cali, he noted, was famous even then for its beautiful women, although the city’s obsession with silicone probably owes much to the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that prevailed during the heyday of the Cali Cartel. Laundered money from that era also fueled (and is perhaps still fueling) a building boom, so what Cali lacks in charming colonial architecture it makes up for with an impressive skyline. Today’s central Cali is a thick forest of luxury high-rises, more than you’d expect in a city of 2.4 million, and from anywhere on the streets of downtown I could crane my neck to spot a half dozen rooftop oases, impossibly distant and ringed with palms.

  If high-mountain Bogotá is the love child of Denver and DC, then Cali is Miami’s less trashy, landlocked stepsister. Thompson called it the “Valhalla of Colombia, which in turn is the Valhalla of South America.” He loved the city, the encroaching rural violence notwithstanding. Whether it was the sunshine, the women, or perhaps an Observer paycheck finally putting some pesos in his pocket, Cali seemed to restore Thompson’s enthusiasm for the trip. The caleño poet Ricardo Nieto might have been speaking for him a few decades earlier, when he wrote the memorable line “I would rather have a hangover in Cali than a party in Bogotá.”

  One muggy afternoon in Cali, Thompson watched as a wealthy British expatriate drove golf balls off the terrace of his downtown penthouse apartment. Sipping a tall gin and tonic, the tubby Brit chatted nonchalantly with Thompson and a dozen other guests, pausing every so often for a swing, then relaxing his stance as the white orbs rose and fell, landing somewhere among the sheet-metal roofs of the impoverished neighborhood below.

  So begins “Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border,” Thompson’s Observer piece that arguably made the most waves. It’s the only one of his stories
that mentions Cali, written and published in the summer of 1963, after Thompson had returned to the United States. In about two thousand words, Thompson outlines a process of gradual disillusionment, cynicism, and finally hostile superiority that he saw playing out among many North American businessmen, bureaucrats, and NGO types in South America. The story opens on the callous golfing “Britisher,” then shifts its focus to a hypothetical American relief worker named John. How much either character is based on a real-world personage is a mystery, but in Thompson’s telling, John starts out sympathetic and ambitious, eager to make a difference in this part of the world. Soon, however, he finds himself a victim of petty crimes and hassles, perpetrated by the very people he’s working to help. All the while, he hears disparaging remarks about the greedy capitalist gringos, and in a moment of frustration, he retorts with an insult of his own. His relationship with the community deteriorates thereafter, and as John imparts his increasingly caustic views to new recruits, it instigates a downward spiral of resentment and distrust between the locals and the formerly well-meaning Americans.

  What’s more, Thompson continues, the wealthy elite in much of Latin America in 1962 took a pretty dim view of empowering the poor. Too robust a democracy threatened to upset the apple cart for powerful upper-class families—those whom Gaitán would have called la oligarquía—many of whom didn’t imagine they had much in common with the people in the streets. Meanwhile, since even a moderately paid American is wealthy by Latin American standards, a gringo abroad often ends up running with exactly this moneyed crowd. And in an effort to do as the Romans do, many an expatriate “not only tends to ape the wealthy, antidemocratic Latins,” wrote Thompson, “but sometimes beats them at their own game.” In other words, a decent middle-class guy from Montana suddenly finds himself living in a luxury loft, insulated from local hardships and screaming at the maid.