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

by Brian Kevin

  Absorbing the news of your homeland while traveling abroad is like watching a car accident from a hot air balloon. On the one hand, the perspective is disorienting. You miss the vivid details that make rubbernecking so deeply satisfying, and your vantage point depends entirely on the prevailing winds. On the other hand, the picture you get is wider in scope. You’re undistracted by noise, heat, and light, and your bird’s-eye view imparts a kind of clarity and serenity that drivers and passengers on the ground can’t touch.

  Back in 2000, I watched from Scotland with increasing dissociation as the United States spent thirty-six days trying to hash out who had just won the presidency. News sources in the UK covered the event with very little sensationalism, even less partisanship, and just the slightest dusting of sarcastic faux-amazement—a subtle tone that seemed to say, “What will those crazy Yanks do next?” My interest gradually shifted from impassioned to detached. I watched the story unfold as if I were watching the movie that I knew would inevitably be made from it. Which is not to say that I was disinterested—far from it. I still couldn’t wait to see how things played out, but the election’s outcome felt less like something to pull for than something to puzzle over, to analyze in the way that a film critic breaks down a movie in search of its themes. I learned some things I had never known about the Electoral College and the judicial process, and when the crisis ended with a result other than the one I’d first hoped for, I came back to the United States feeling a kind of enlightened disengagement that it would have been easy to mistake for cynicism. It was like I’d taken some kind of existentialist civics class; I felt a deeper understanding of the political forces that had brought about the whole fiasco, even while those forces had lost their gravity for me, even as they’d come to seem trivial and untethered.

  I don’t mean to say that watching from Scotland allowed me to take a more objective view of the election. It didn’t. What it did was to expose the myth that there ever was such a thing as an objective view for me to take. It was a radical unmooring, a slow-burn realization that everyone is watching everything from somewhere, that there is simply no alternative to perspective.

  I imagine a similar process playing out for Thompson toward the end of 1962. In his “Anti-Gringo Winds” piece, he declared that “objectivity is the first casualty of culture shock,” and for a writer who so famously scorned objectivity in his later work, this amounts to a pretty ringing endorsement of travel. It’s a backward way of saying that radical perspectivism is the first benefit of leaving home, and I wondered how much of Thompson’s enthusiastic embrace of subjective journalism was informed by his perspective-jarring experiences in South America. It must have been surreal to watch the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold from the sunny, carefree environs of Copacabana. I looked up at the blond lady and her parrot and imagined them replaced by the grim black-and-white footage of missile silos, the shots of battleships lined up in the Atlantic, and behind it all a lilting bossa nova soundtrack, the clink of kissing bottles, the warm beach breezes rustling the palms.

  “All things considered,” Thompson wrote in Kingdom of Fear, “Rio was pretty close to the best place in the world to be lost and stranded forever when the World finally shut down.”

  V

  Of course, the world didn’t shut down, and Thompson and his friends went right on living the expat life in South America’s burgeoning expat capital. I went back to the Orgasmo for an occasional beer over the next few days, which I mostly spent interviewing modern-day expatriates around town, trying to tease out the common threads in their experience. I was curious to know how the lifestyle has evolved since Thompson, his girlfriend, and Bob Bone passed through fifty years ago. I met a wayward Texan drawn by Brazil’s burgeoning oil industry, an American concert cellist who’d once worked as a reporter for the Brazil Herald in the 1970s, and a pair of gorgeous thirtysomething chapter hostesses for a networking organization of young internationals. All of them agreed that certain places in the world simply have a magnetic pull, and that Rio is one of them.

  “Rio and Brazil are like quicksand,” said the cellist, a former New Yorker named Harold. He’d come to play in the Brazilian Symphony in 1973, started moonlighting as a journalist shortly thereafter, married a Brazilian in ’77, and simply never left. These days, his only strong connection to New York is his accent. Brazil allowed Harold to live out ambitions that would have been unlikely at home. Growing up, he’d dreamed of playing in the New York Philharmonic or writing for the New York Times, and at best, his odds were long. But in Rio, he’d not only played with the national orchestra, he’d been a staffer at one of the national papers of record (for English-speakers, anyway). He remembered the Brazil Herald newsroom as a “beer-on-the-table kind of place,” a haven for both eccentric vagabonds and serious writers. Thanks in part to his connections there, he’d met visiting diplomats and even royalty. As an American abroad, Harold explained, he’d rubbed shoulders with “a different strata of people” than he ever would have met back home. He had access to better doctors in Rio, his money went farther, and he was more likely to know the right people in a pinch.

  “The life I have here,” he said, “I could never give up.”

  For the Texan, though, one of the main draws of Rio was that the social rift between locals and foreigners seemed comparatively narrow. He’d worked for years in Southeast Asia and grown tired of his conspicuous (and privileged) outsider status. In Brazil, he said over beers one night, the income gap was less pronounced than in Asia or even the Andes, and having pale skin didn’t immediately confer prestige. Gringos and Cariocas were on more equal footing, he explained, in part because of their shared passion for what he simply called “the Brazil lifestyle.”

  “There’s definitely a kind of mysticism about a vida boa,” the girls from the expat organization told me the next night. “People from abroad just have this idea that ‘in Brazil, I will find the good life.’ ”

  One of the networking hostesses was Portuguese and the other a Brazilian who’d spent time living in England. The Texan was right, they said. The barriers between Brazilians and expats are definitely porous, but they also cautioned that the seemingly uninhibited Cariocas can actually be quite hard to get to know. Rio’s exuberant beachgoers might warmly invite a stranger to join their volleyball game, but they have a reputation for being guarded when it comes to close friendships. For an outsider, the girls explained, Rio can be weirdly alienating in that way. One cliché holds that residents are a lot like their famous Christ the Redeemer statue: their arms are wide open, but they never close in an embrace.

  What everyone agreed about is that Brazil right now is a land of opportunity, a place where an outsider with some ambition can write his or her own ticket. The Texan called it “a country that’s on the way up,” and not one of my correspondents failed to mention Brazil’s role as host of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics—widely viewed as validation of the country’s increasing global prominence. Thompson had called Brazil a “semi-dormant nation,” but it is dormant no more. Socially, politically, and economically, the country has come a long way since the currency crisis and the fall of Jango. The military government that replaced him stayed in power until 1985—staunchly anti-communist, but increasingly oppressive, violent, and indifferent to human rights. Even after its transition back to democracy, Brazil struggled well into the ’90s with corruption, inflation, and debt.

  Ironically, it wasn’t until the country pivoted back to the left that it morphed into a global powerhouse. Under labor hero Luiz Inácio da Silva, elected in 2002, Brazil made huge strides against poverty and became the world’s eighth-largest economy. “Lula” is a former head of the steelworkers’ union, once jailed for leading strikes in the 1970s. His generous social spending helped create a new Brazilian middle class, and his tight regulation of banks minimized fallout from the global recession. This prompted big-time foreign investment, much of it in the country’s booming oil industry. Brazil today still struggles wit
h corruption and the cost of living, but economically it’s riding high, and current president Dilma Rousseff is Lula’s handpicked successor, a former Marxist agitator herself who was also jailed and tortured by the military regime.

  As an indication of the country’s rapid progress, everyone I spoke with referenced the ongoing “pacification” of the favelas—Rio’s famously crowded and violent hillside slums. Since 2008, heavily armed squadrons of military and police have been systematically invading the city’s most plagued neighborhoods, seizing weapons, expelling gangs and militias, arresting drug lords, and establishing a permanent police presence in areas that have long been essentially lawless. With dozens of favelas now patrolled for the first time in decades, murders and robberies have decreased, and basic services are reaching many areas that were formerly off-limits. The pacification campaign arguably reached its pinnacle in November of 2010, when the Brazilian military took control of a sector called Complexo do Alemão, the city’s largest network of favelas and one of its most impregnable. When I was in Rio, the Brazilian Army had only just relinquished control of the area to civilian police.

  I went to Complexo do Alemão on an overcast day during my last week in town. Since the moment I’d stepped off the plane in Barranquilla, the experience of profound poverty had been such a common thread across South America, I had almost become desensitized to it. Notably, I’m not sure you can say the same thing about Thompson. His vivid and affected descriptions of the “fear & rot in the streets” color his writing right up through his final dispatches from the continent. The favelas would have been conspicuous during his time in Rio, having swelled considerably over the previous decade as country-dwellers flocked to the city seeking jobs in the ballooning industrial sector. In 1950, there were 58 favelas on Rio’s hilly outskirts. By 1962, there were about 150, and one in every ten Cariocas lived somewhere in the city’s sloping shantytowns.

  In an effort to stem the tide of squatters, the Alliance for Progress funded vast residential developments on the city’s outskirts, but in many cases, these simply devolved into new slums. Just months before Thompson’s visit, thousands of favela dwellers had been “resettled” out of Rio’s affluent south and into new, Alliance-funded developments on the city’s western edge. By the time I showed up, neighborhoods like “Vila Aliança” and “Vila Kennedy” were among the most brutally violent on the continent, high on the list for future pacification.

  There are close to 1,000 favelas in Rio today, tightly packed pop-up communities that house a third of the city’s population. Some 400,000 people live in Complexo do Alemão alone, a network of adjacent favelas filling up neighboring hillsides in the city’s Zona Norte. Each one is set progressively farther from Rio’s main roads and transit corridors, and until pacification, it took residents hours just to reach the city proper. Then, in 2011, the city unveiled an aerial tramway that links Complexo do Alemão to Rio’s train system, soaring above the district’s chaotic tangle of single-lane roads and M. C. Escher staircases. I bought my ticket at the connecting station and climbed into a tram car alone.

  From the air, Complexo do Alemão is actually pretty breathtaking, a geometric chaos of rectangles upon rectangles. The colorful, flat-roofed houses are stacked on top of one another like matchboxes, and they look about as sturdy. I stared out the windows at the narrow streets and footpaths that spidered through the neighborhoods and marveled that these seemed to be the only undeveloped patches for miles. There were no green spaces and no parking lots—just an uninterrupted slag pile of housing. At first glance, Complexo do Alemão doesn’t necessarily look any poorer or more dangerous than similar slums in Bogotá, Lima, or La Paz, but the sheer density of the place set my head spinning.

  I got off at the last tram stop, but I didn’t wander far. The visible presence of policemen toting M-16s was in some ways reassuring, but I worried about getting lost on the nonsensically snaking streets. I walked down a long and steep staircase, through a claustrophobic corridor of houses. Most of them were brick and about the size of a train car; others were tiled on the outside like bathroom walls or slapped together with a polychrome of scrap wood. Laundry lines stretched across the rooftops like prayer flags in some jumbled Tibetan monastery. Occasionally, an alleyway stretched between the houses, and I waved to the kids I saw playing there, barefoot and clutching naked dolls.

  The stairway ended at a dirt road lined with trash piles and graffitied storefronts, where I picked a direction at random and started walking. The street was empty, but from inside the darkened bodegas, unsmiling men looked out at me with vacant eyes. Their gazes betrayed nothing—not curiosity or irritation or welcome. It was uncomfortable, and I looked away. I thought sadly of T. S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Hollow Men,” about the “eyes I dare not meet in dreams.” The street kept winding along, silent except for the occasional mongrel dog rifling through the trash. On either side was a row of slab-concrete houses behind crumbling brick walls. I followed the road, curving this way and that for all of ten minutes, just long enough to get confused about which direction I’d come from. Then I turned around and retraced my steps.

  Heading back up the long stairway to the tram, I slowed up behind a young girl and her father, who were trudging toward the station with agonizing slowness. The girl seemed to have some severe physical handicaps—muscular dystrophy, I guessed—and her father watched her silently from behind as she made her way up, one gasping step at a time. Of course, medical facilities in Complexo do Alemão are sparse to nonexistent, and I couldn’t imagine how this girl managed to navigate the crumbling cubist landscape of the favela each day. When her father heard me coming up behind, he gently tugged on his daughter’s sleeve. I thanked them quietly as I walked past, and I ascended the rest of the staircase feeling the weight of their misfortune.

  It is a testament to Thompson’s moral core that the misery of places like Rio’s favelas seemed to weigh on him as well. As I rode the slow tram back over the clutter of Complexo do Alemão, I felt that just maybe I had finally zeroed in on the foremost way in which South America changed Thompson’s outlook on things. In the early months of 1963, having lost his Brazil Herald gig, Thompson saw his initial affluence fade, and his enthusiasm for Rio faded with it. His later articles and letters from Brazil give a vague sense that something in him is about to crack. In a letter from early April, Thompson warned his editor at the Observer that he was starting to come undone:

  It’s the goddamn awful reality of life down here. I can’t shrug it off. I can’t avoid it.… Christ, I have to live like the rest of these poor bastards—harassed, badgered & put upon from morning till night for no good reason at all. I wouldn’t blame them if they revolted against just about everything—and in the name of whatever party or Ism that supplied the means of revolt.

  I find this passage to be one of the most poignant in all of Thompson’s writing. Not only because it shows the genuine vulnerability of a young writer who was once so eager to “sink his teeth” into South America. And not only because it illustrates an empathy for society’s castaways that would stick with Thompson in the years to come. It also contains the sad, implicit admission that struggle and revolt are nothing more than cathartic rituals for the “harassed, badgered & put upon” masses: a kind of pressure-release valve that masquerades as ideology and fosters little change. As Thompson watched, again and again, the Sisyphean struggles of the South American underclass, he felt inside of him a growing tension, a vague and nameless friction between political idealism and tragicomic nihilism. Before long, that tension that would manifest itself as something called “gonzo journalism.”

  In a year of South American travel, Thompson had seen the left revolt against the right, the right revolt against the left, the powerful putting down the people, and the people dispensing with the powerful. And yet everywhere, he still encountered the same urban beggars, the same starving miners, the same illiterate Indians and destitute campesinos. If Thompson’s year abroad showed him why the
United States would never be “what it could have been, or at least tried to be,” maybe it’s because he looked homeward and saw just how much of the American project in the twentieth century had become the unchallenged domain of parties, movements, and isms—and he had come to suspect their futility. The goal of the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy had said, was to “lift people up from poverty, ignorance, and despair,” but in South America, Thompson saw how the Alliance’s pro-growth, anti-communist aims left it hopelessly mired in empty isms and fruitless uprisings. From where he stood in Rio, the poverty and ignorance and despair seemed entrenched in ways that none of these mechanisms could touch.

  A year after returning to the States, Thompson wrote a book review in the Observer, noting that “the difficulties thus far confronting the Alliance for Progress should be a good indication of how easily a fine and noble idea can get bogged down in unforeseen realities.” It’s exactly the kind of language he would later adopt to describe both the counterculture and the American Dream. This dichotomy—of noble illusions versus grim realities—would become a recurring theme in much of Thompson’s work. In the end, he couldn’t buy into the supposed “good life” of the South American expat, but for years after leaving the continent, the lessons he learned there still continued to shape his work. In 1970, in a campaign ad from his quixotic run for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, Thompson might have been channeling the frustrated hopes of the Indians, miners, and campesinos when he wrote:

  The twisted realities of the world we are trying to live in have somehow combined to make us feel like freaks. We argue, we protest, we petition—but nothing changes.