The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (44 page)

The text accompanying the image mentions the success of the Peace Corps, then offers a short, blunt assessment of the Latin American development plan that Thompson traveled so many miles to cover: “The Alianza para el Progreso, a massive ten-year economic and social program for Latin America, was less successful and did not live up to expectations.”

Today, historians widely consider the Alliance to have been a flop. It limped along for another decade after Kennedy, doing little to curb poverty and mostly serving to shore up US-friendly, anti-communist governments. In fact, looking back on my time along the Thompson Trail, it’s hard to ignore just how much of South America today seems to represent exactly those scenarios that the US policies of Thompson’s day had been drawn up to prevent. The populist left now has a firm foothold on the continent. The poorest haven’t much improved their lot. And a not-small percentage of the populace still views the United States with a kind of weary, conflicted resentment.

Still, what you don’t find in South America is the resulting nightmare scenario that many in Thompson’s era might have predicted. Had you described to officials in the Kennedy administration, for instance, a Brazil led for twelve years by a popular unionist and a former left-wing militant, they would probably have gone into fits. But far from being a downtrodden socialist dystopia, Brazil has one of the continent’s strongest democracies—and one of the world’s largest and most decidedly capitalist economies.

Despite the slums and the favelas and the hard-luck villages, the South America that I saw only spottily resembled the bleak, dependent purgatory that Thompson often described. What I found instead was a vibrant and endlessly striving continent, proud of its identity and working to meet its own challenges. Is it chaotic? Yes. Drastically unequal? Absolutely. Is it sometimes economically unstable and other times plagued by seemingly overwhelming ideological conflict? Yes and yes again.

But I can think of at least one other sprawling society that fits every one of these descriptions. In fact, it’s ironic to suppose that in many ways, the United States has probably become more like South America in the last fifty years than South America has become like the United States.

Thompson left the continent—fled it, really—with a sense of dark foreboding. But beneath all that frustration and cynicism, he seemed to have retained a few kernels of optimism for both continents. A couple of months in the United States helped to calm him down. Returning to the American West, he later wrote, gave him “a sense of renewing,” and he wrote to his editor that, despite his criticisms of the Alliance, he believed the program’s ideals were still obtainable. The United States and Latin America could still work together to foster peace, fight poverty, and ensure dignity across the
hemisphere, Thompson said, but only if the United States avoided paternalism and self-interest, “only so far as we believe in ourselves, and only as long as we keep proving, over and over again, that we are not as mean and greedy as were our forefathers.”

As for me, I’m hesitant to say whether my time along the Thompson Trail incited any profound personal revelations. It’s fashionable for writers of travel books to declare this kind of thing, and if I’m honest, it’s partly what I’d hoped for when I first packed my rucksack all those months ago. The truth, though, is that I came home pretty much the same guy I was before I left—albeit with bedbugs and a more nuanced understanding of how historical forces and US interests continue to shape life in South America.

The thing is, I think Thompson might have said the same thing. He may have even chided me for confusing personal metamorphosis with simple, hard-knock lessons about the way the world works. After all, if Thompson was a different writer for the time he spent on the continent, it isn’t because he was mystically reborn along the way. He had no moment of transcendental conversion—South America just gave him an education. All along, I’d been thinking of travel as a sweat lodge when I should have been thinking of it as a classroom. Travel doesn’t change who you are. At its best, it just presents you with new information, and how you act on it is up to you. Sure, Thompson could be pretty grandiloquent about suddenly understanding why his own country had failed to live up to its promise, but if South America had simply conferred on him some bleak enlightenment, opening his third eye to the utter pointlessness of it all, Thompson would have spent the next forty-two years sitting cross-legged in an ashram. Or maybe passed out on a barstool.

Instead, he was out there chasing that promise down. Which means that his trip left him just as conflicted and unenlightened as mine. Which means that it left him with hope.

After the museum, I walked a few blocks to the JFK Memorial Plaza, where the city erected a sort of walk-in, symbolic tomb in 1970. It’s an imposing thirty-foot cube made of white concrete columns, surrounding a courtyard the size of a small apartment. I was alone at the plaza, and when I walked inside, the monument’s innards echoed dully with the sound of my footsteps. The only thing in there was a black granite square with the words “John Fitzgerald Kennedy” inscribed in gold. It was low to the ground in the center of the roofless chamber, a sort of ankle-high podium on which someone had strewn half a dozen red roses. A loose breeze swept stray petals around in tiny, aimless swirls. I looked around at the white walls and black altar. The sky above me was the color of old newsprint, and I spent a few long minutes just pacing around the memorial, looking up at it. Then a JFK assassination Segway tour pulled up, and I figured it was time for me to move on.

While researching and writing this book, I sometimes wondered how Thompson’s earliest stories might be different if he were writing them now, at a time when writers have far less liberty to embellish or exaggerate. The mechanisms of journalistic fact-checking have come a long way since 1962, and writers today face scrutiny from media watchdogs that the young Thompson simply never would have confronted. His published correspondence from South America shows him to be a meticulous gatherer of data and a stickler for details. At no point during my research did I come across any serious claims from Thompson’s letters or articles that I found to be outright falsehoods. Still, he does set up some suspiciously perfect scenes (the golfer in the penthouse, for example) that would have been difficult to verify. Here and there, quotes attributed only to anonymous bystanders sound an awful lot like something Thompson himself might have said.

My admiration for Thompson as a writer and reporter runs deep, but it has never been my goal to emulate his writing style. Indeed, who could? Thompson’s confessed fondness—in his later career, anyway—for blending fact with fiction makes for some great storytelling, but it’s not an affection I share. I have, however, relied on some basic time-compression, filtering, and other stock literary techniques in this book, which I’d like to spell out here.

I performed the bulk of my research over a three-year period, during which time I made three trips to South America to travel what I’ve called the Hunter S. Thompson Trail. The first was a five-week trip to Colombia in 2009 and the second a two-week trip to Lima, Peru, in 2011. The majority of the action in the book occurred during the third and longest of these trips, four months in 2012, beginning in Colombia and ending in Rio de Janeiro, but portions of the book took place during the previous trips as well.

In a few instances, I’ve recounted stories in an order other than that in which they occurred. Sometimes I did this to relay segments of my journey in a way that better mimicked the segments of Thompson’s. Other times it was simply for the sake of narrative simplicity. For example, I met Julio and his coworkers near the bridge in Barranquilla, Colombia, before leaving for the Guajira Peninsula, although I don’t describe this encounter until the following chapter. For the most part, however, the events of the book are laid out in broadly chronological order.

All of the book’s dialogue comes from my notes, occasional recorded interviews, and in rare occasions, memory alone. I have made every effort to faithfully translate conversations held in Spanish, although many of the conversations I had during my travels were conducted in English or some kind of weird Spanglish amalgam. I’ve not consciously changed any names or identifying features of the people I met, nor has anyone been combined into composite characters.

I am emphatically not an expert on Latin America, although damn if I’m not pretty fond of those parts that I’ve visited. What I know about the culture, ecology, and history of these places is drawn from many books, articles, and historical documents written by people with more knowledge
than me—although any mistakes are mine alone. I certainly don’t hope to present this book as a comprehensive account of how the Cold War issues of Thompson’s day shaped the places that he visited, although I would be pleased if it serves for some readers as a kind of primer.

When I began writing this book, I lived in western Montana, which I (affectionately) refer to as home throughout. By the time I finished writing it, I had moved to coastal Maine. Where I will be when you read this is anyone’s guess.

B
RIAN
K
EVIN

Damariscotta, Maine

October 23, 2013

Anything good about this book owes to the kindness of a small army of friends, acquaintances, contacts, and correspondents, who somehow lent a hand before, during, or after my travels: Benjamin González; Bernie José; Ivan Romero Herrera; Ricardo Cerquera; Mauricio Gomez; Joshua Barr; Diana Ojeda; Wes Carrington, Lisa Swenarski, Jennifer Lawson, Elizabeth Mayberry, and the staff of the PAS at the American embassy in Quito; Lara Devries and the staff of the Light and Leadership Initiative; Jon Jared and Don Montagne of the South American Explorers Club; Stephanie Smith, Finn Tollefson, and the weird people of the Secret Garden; Dr. Alejandro Argumedo; Bianca Crousillat, Joe Levitan, and the staff of the Sacred Valley Project; Elda Cantú, Julio Villanueva Chang, and the staff of
Etiqueta Negra;
Dario Kenner; Ken Davis; Fathers Steve Judd and Ray Finch of the Maryknoll Mission in Cochabamba; George and Sylvia Ritz, Dr. Laurel Parker, Cessar Fernandez, and the staff of the Andrea Ritz Clinics; Sean Conway; Joe Lochridge; Bob Bone; Bill Williamson; Vera Sardinha and Barbara Butland of Internations in Rio; Adam Parry; Jamil Roberts; Jack Epstein; Rory Feehan; Douglas Brinkley; Matthew Fishbane; Andrew Zimmern; Mark Sundeen; Peter Stark; Karen Chen; Bryan DiSalvatore; Deirdre McNamer; and Judy Blunt.

To anyone I’ve overlooked, please accept this as evidence of nitwittedness and not ingratitude.

I owe far more than thanks to Sky Gilbar and Reid Wilson, who did far more than lend a hand.

My thanks also to Kyle Cassidy of
Wend
, Steve Hawk of
Sierra
, Joe Keohane of
Hemispheres
, Alisa Opar of
Audubon
, and Neely Harris of
Mental Floss
, assignments from whom kept me in bus fare and antibiotic money while on the road.

Thanks as well to the Mesa Refuge (where I wrote the proposal for this book, although I told them I was working on something else) and to the President’s Office at the University of Montana, which helped fund my initial trip to Colombia in 2009.

I’m indebted to Carrie Braman, Lauren Hamlin, Maria Simpson, and Liv LiaBraaten, four swanlike women who offered invaluable feedback on early drafts of the book.

My sincere thanks to John Talbot of the Talbot Fortune Agency for helping make this project a reality. Thanks also to Charlie Conrad for his initial interest and guiding hand.

My editor at Broadway Books, Meagan Stacey, is a phenomenal talent and an extremely patient person. Every page of this book benefits from her insight. Thanks to her and Kim Silverton at Broadway. Rachelle Mandik is a rock star of copyediting.

Finally, this book wouldn’t exist if not for the peerless reportage of that old footloose American Hunter S. Thompson. It’s been a pleasure traveling with you, Hunter.