The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (23 page)

I didn’t find any statues or plaques commemorating the military’s sacking of the building in 1962, but I did see some shallow divots in the courtyard’s stone walls that I convinced myself were the bullet holes Thompson had described. I ran my fingers around a few of them, trying to look inconspicuous. A bullet hole in brick feels jagged and raw, like a scabbed-over wound that won’t heal. I wondered how many of the students around me could honestly imagine their own military just up and seizing control of the country overnight. The days of the military coup in South America are arguably over, but in Thompson’s day, the prospect of the army simply booting a democratic government was commonplace enough that it didn’t warrant much outcry. The same thing had just happened in Argentina five weeks earlier, and as Thompson noted, the takeover hardly affected day-to-day life in Peru, where most citizens saw the military government as “nothing more than a dress-uniform version of the same power bloc that has held the reins for centuries.”

“Can I help you?”

The dress-shirted attendant had snuck up on me from behind. He was no more than twenty-five, wearing a redstar APRA pin and toting a clipboard under one arm. I explained that I was an American history student who had read about the coup in 1962 and wanted to see the Casa del Pueblo for myself. The young man smiled at me apologetically and pointed toward a bookstand next to the dentist’s office, selling pamphlets about the party’s history.

“That was a very long time ago.” He shrugged. “Perhaps you should try a museum?”

A few weeks before the Keiko/Humala election, a Peruvian newspaper published the results of a poll across nineteen Latin American countries, asking respondents
whether they’d be willing to trade democracy for a military government if their country were somehow in dire straits. If you stacked up those results next to a decade’s worth of economic stats, you would notice a trend. In countries where economic growth has been steady—places like Panama, Uruguay, and Costa Rica—authoritarianism was exceedingly unpopular. Meanwhile, in countries struggling with poverty and stagnation, clear majorities said they would accept some form of military rule.

Peru was the conspicuous outlier in this comparison. Even after a decade of whirligig growth rates on par with India and China, 52 percent of the country answered that they would indeed support a military government. It was democracy’s fourth-poorest showing, behind near-destitute Honduras, Paraguay, and Guatemala. To understand this apparent contradiction is to understand how the country wound up choosing between “cancer and AIDS.”

Sure, the success of mining and other resource-extraction industries sent Peru’s stock market soaring in the 2000s, but only a small segment of the population felt the effects of the boom. The great majority of these beneficiaries were in Lima, home to the country’s investor and entrepreneurial classes. As many as two-thirds of all employable Peruvians, however, work in the “informal economy”—think street vendors, subsistence farmers, and unlicensed taxi drivers—which is a very long way down for the wealth to trickle, especially outside of the capital. Meanwhile, in the country’s far-flung Amazonian reaches, locals have taken to protesting what they see as exploitation of their natural resources while all the money flows steadily toward Lima. Dozens have been killed in periodic violent protests in the Peruvian Amazon since 2009, when a series of strikes and occupations brought much of the country to a standstill.

Of course, this dramatically lopsided balance of wealth and power stretches back well before the current mining boom, even well before APRA. Peru was ground zero for the Spanish conquest of South America, which kicked off in 1535 when Pizarro founded the city of Lima. Class subjugation, for that matter, was already a hallmark of the Inca Empire more than a century before the conquistadors even set sail. Highly stratified societies have been the norm in Peru for longer than any other place in the New World, and in Thompson’s mind, a lot of the country’s modern troubles could be blamed on a deep-seated cultural acceptance of the oppression of the many by the few.

“From the beginning of their history,” he wrote, “the Peruvian people have been conditioned to understand that there are only two kinds of human beings—the Ins and the Outs, with a vast gulf in between.”

For centuries, that gulf has been the dominant force behind Peru’s social and political development, and when the avowed leftist Ollanta Humala emerged from the last election three points ahead, the results were widely interpreted as a long-overdue victory of the Outs over the Ins.

“Cuidado … cuidaaaado … CUIDADO!!!”

The other passengers in my
combi
were screaming in unison as our driver started merging without checking his blind spot. It was morning rush hour on Lima’s Carretera Central, and our jam-packed minivan was about to drift right into its identical twin in the neighboring lane.
Combis
are Lima’s cheap, privately owned alternatives to the city’s drastically overtaxed bus system. They follow established
routes, but without a set schedule, so it’s in their best interest to move as fast as humanly possible, both to maximize their trips and to beat the other
combis
to the next stop. Vans, trucks, and microbuses like these account for some 20 percent of Lima’s mass transit fleet and more than half of the city’s automobile accidents. I watched feebly out the window as we neared, then ricocheted harmlessly off, the neighboring
combi
, my face at one point within kissing distance of a similarly helpless rider in the next van over.

“Animal! Idiota!”
my fellow passengers cried.

Seated next to me, Lara Devries didn’t bat an eyelash. “Stuff like that happens all the time,” she said with a sigh, watching as the other passengers stood up to reshuffle themselves, changing positions in preparation for the next stop. “And now we all play
combi
musical chairs.”

Devries is the willowy twenty-six-year-old executive director of the Light and Leadership Initiative, a nonprofit she founded in 2008 to serve women and children in an east Lima shantytown called Huaycán. Two or three times a week, she makes the death-defying
combi
trip from her apartment in central Lima to the outskirts of the metro, a two-hour odyssey that’s helped her cultivate both nerves of steel and an above-average tolerance for body odor.

“So anyway,” she asked calmly, “what was I saying?”

What she’d been saying, I reminded her, was why a twenty-two-year-old blond-haired, blue-eyed gringa from suburban Chicago had chosen to move by herself to Peru after just one visit, then take up work in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the country.

“Right,” she said, re-cuffing one of the legs of her jeans, then sitting up and shrugging modestly. “I don’t really know what to tell you. I just saw that they needed the help.”

This much is true. Huaycán is one of the poorest areas
in the massively sprawling Lima metro. It didn’t exist at all until the mid-1980s, when the largely rural war against the Shining Path guerrillas prompted an influx of refugees into the cities. The radical Maoist insurgency had evolved in Peru’s mountainous interior, and as they battled the Peruvian military, both groups systematically “cleansed” any villages they suspected of sympathizing with the enemy. By some estimates, a million people were displaced between 1980 and 2000, mostly ethnic indigenous or mestizo families from the highlands, and as many as 200,000 of those migrated into Lima. Communities like Huaycán sprang up seemingly overnight, as
campesino
families staked claims along the city’s uninhabited urban edge. Basic services like water and electricity took decades to follow. And while Huaycán today is more integrated into the city—more like a very poor suburb than a refugee camp—large swaths of the district still lack sewage and drinking water, the education and employment levels are abysmal, and health issues like malnutrition and tuberculosis are fairly common.

Devries was a friend of a friend who had met me for coffee, then invited me to tag along on a visit to her project’s headquarters. At six foot one and extremely fair-featured, she stands out on the streets of Lima like a robot at a Renaissance Fair. She has, I imagine, turned the heads of more than a few
bricheros
—Peruvian slang for local guys who play up their exotic Latino flair to land cute and/or deep-pocketed gringas and, hopefully, a “bridge” to the United States. At an age when many of her peers are still letting Mom and Dad pay the rent, Devries is like some kind of Aryan expat Energizer Bunny, teaching English around town and pursuing a master’s degree in psychology when she isn’t managing volunteers and finances at Light and Leadership.

“Huaycán will give you a different view of poverty,” she’d
told me over coffee. “People think of it in this Third World way, all sparse landscapes and swollen bellies. But some of our kids have cell phones. They have a lot of the trappings, but they still have trouble meeting basic needs, and they have zero in the way of social mobility.”

On our way to Light and Leadership, our roller-coaster
combi
passed through the wealthy district La Molina, within spitting distance of Reid’s American school, and I thought how strange it was that on any given school day, his students and Devries’s are all of twelve miles apart. It took our
combi
over an hour to navigate the gridlock of those twelve miles, which seemed like an appropriate measure of the socioeconomic distance, if not the geographic one.

As we crossed into Huaycán, the first thing I noticed was how the dense rows of cinder-block shanties crowding the hillsides resembled all those old pictures of tiered Inca ruins. All that was missing were the llamas. In every direction, the landscape was brown and brittle, dry and sun-baked in a way that suggested a place not intended for human habitation. The community is actually built within and up the slopes of an alluvial gorge, like a giant skateboarder’s half-pipe. It’s a steep, dry, and dusty bowl of about 200,000 souls, and the word
huaycán
derives from Quechua lingo for the mudslides that still claim lives whenever the desert coast has an uncharacteristically rainy season.

Devries and I hopped out at a busy commercial intersection, the usual chaotic mix of fruit vendors and appliance stores, unmuffled engines and earsplitting boom boxes. The sidewalks were as crowded as your average Manhattan lunch hour, with all manner of merchandise spilling out onto the pavement from beneath dingy and sun-faded awnings. In the road, the dirt bikes and moto-taxis outnumbered the cars, whining and weaving around one another in an insectoid
swarm. The crowd was noticeably browner than in Miraflores or Breña, not a criollo in sight, and as we waded into the throng, it would have been hard to lose track of Devries, a full head taller than most anyone around her and possibly the only blonde for miles.

Painted ads for Keiko and Humala still covered the sides of most buildings. Keiko won Huaycán’s district, as she won virtually every other district in Lima, but here by a much slimmer margin than in the city’s wealthier sectors. She had, in fact, kicked off her campaign here some months before. Huaycán is a pretty compulsory stump-circuit stopover for any Peruvian politician. It’s sort of Peru’s equivalent of a hard-luck Detroit auto factory—you’re not a serious contender until you’ve had your photo-op here. And I could see why. As Devries and I walked away from the main drag, the streets turned to dirt. Every third or fourth building seemed to be crumbling in some conspicuous fashion—top floors boarded up, roofs caved in—and the barrenness of the surrounding hillsides was like a wraparound metaphor for the lack of opportunity. If you’re looking for a classic tableau of urban poverty to stand sympathetically in front of, Huaycán is prime real estate.

We walked to a gated three-story house a few blocks from where the bus dropped us off, easily the most kept-up in the neighborhood. Inside, Devries introduced me to her current crop of volunteers: a British guy, a Finnish girl, and four Americans, all under thirty and all looking a bit ragged. Light and Leadership’s volunteers spend their afternoons and evenings running an exhaustive slate of classes for some 150 adults and school-aged kids. Basic English is a fixture, as is arithmetic. Adult women show up for bimonthly workshops on subjects like nutrition and computer literacy. Huaycán is divided into a scatter of twenty alphabetical
zones, most of them accessible by
combi
, and L&L’s classes are spread across several zones, so when volunteers aren’t leading sessions or working on curricula, they spend a lot of time shuttling from one dusty ridge and clapboard schoolhouse to another. I caught them during their lunch hour and listened quietly as they gorged on pasta and briefed Devries on which
combis
weren’t running and which students hadn’t been showing up for class.

After lunch, I got a tour of the classroom facilities next door, a clean and bright couple of rooms filled with donated books, computers, and art supplies. Everything was locked up behind heavy iron gates, of course, but the space compared favorably to your average Boys & Girls Club back home. About half of L&L’s programs were held there on-site, Devries explained, in the centrally located neighborhood known as Zone D. That afternoon, though, the British volunteer was teaching an English class in Zone R, high atop the half-pipe’s eastern slope and one of the more far-flung parts of Huaycán. So Devries and I walked a few more dusty blocks to catch a microbus and join him.

Light and Leadership is a textbook example of the modern phenomenon known as “voluntourism.” In addition to covering their own airfare and pocket money, all of Devries’s volunteers pay a weekly fee for their food, housing, and basic utilities. They also cook and maintain the house when they’re not teaching or performing administrative duties. A month of volunteering in Huaycán costs each participant a little over $600, which is money that would set you up pretty nicely at one of your more upscale Miraflores B&Bs. The fact that Devries rarely wants for volunteers just shows how many gringos would rather spend their vacation days sweating in a shantytown schoolhouse than freewheeling along the Gringo Trail.