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

  No one does complex iconography quite like a Latin American Catholic, and some of the continent’s most beautiful monuments are also masterpieces of esoteric ornamentation. In the center of Quito’s Plaza de la Independencia is a statue honoring the heroes of August 10, 1809, when the city first proclaimed its independence from Spain. Standing atop four pillars is an avenging angel, wielding an ax in one hand and a torch in the other. Halfway down, a perched condor clutches a length of chain. An anchor rests at the statue’s base, partially covered by a drape of cloth, and next to that stands a wounded, roaring lion. The monument is a veritable potpourri of puzzling symbolism. Those bear statues back in Missoula, meanwhile, just represent bears.

  I came into Quito on a Sunday morning after a series of three bus rides from Cali. When I walked to the plaza to check out the architecture, I was expecting a quiet afternoon. The Ecuadorian capital is a devoutly Catholic city, and businesses, vendors, and municipal services tend to shut down for the Sabbath. What’s more, Thompson hadn’t exactly prepped me for a lively town. In one Observer article, he griped about Quito’s “tomb-like dullness.” In a letter, he wrote it off with Bogotá as “a pure, dull hell.” Elsewhere, he suggested that all of Ecuador be “dynamited into the sea.” There’s more, but suffice it to say the Ministry of Tourism won’t be citing his assessment anytime soon.

  So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled into what seemed like a giant, freewheeling street party. Quito’s central plaza, like Bogotá’s, is surrounded by showy cathedrals and grand colonial buildings, and while the streets surrounding it were indeed eerily quiet, the plaza itself was a ragtag carnival of musicians, vendors, dancers, and the occasional shouting evangelist. Families roamed around with ice cream and balloons, and hordes of cyclists whizzed by on a weekend bike route. Jugglers and street performers worked a long line for tours of the presidential palace. On one end of the plaza, a crowd of at least fifty people was dancing and head-bobbing to a white-suited band playing an Ecuadorian folk music called pasillo. The songs were catchy and melodic, horse-trot waltzes heavy on guitar and a mandolinlike string instrument called a charango. I joined the crowd and bobbed my head right along, beginning to suspect that Thompson was a hopeless grouch.

  “Where are you from?” asked a grinning old man next to me, unabashedly. He was dressed for church in a pleated gray suit and fedora, and his wife beside him wore a floral-print dress. When I said that I was from the United States, they seemed delighted.

  “Is this your first visit to Ecuador?” the man asked, leaning in to give me his good ear.

  “It’s my very first morning in Ecuador,” I said, which delighted them even further. The woman beamed and clasped her hands to her chest, like I’d just told her I was expecting my firstborn. The husband draped a comradely arm across my shoulder. Where was I coming from? he wanted to know. How long would I stay in Quito, and what did I most want to do there? I said I most wanted to see the churches and that I was interested in history. I told him I’d probably stay a few days before moving on to the coastal city of Guayaquil.

  “Excellent, excellent!” he said, patting me on the back. Many foreign tourists in Quito, he added, only visit La Mariscal, a neighborhood to the north with shops and nightclubs, but the city had so much more. With his arm still around my shoulder, he swayed the two of us in time to the music, mentioning landmarks I might seek out, while his wife stood by and beamed. I wondered for a moment whether I was friendly enough toward apparent foreigners on the streets of major American cities.

  The old man pointed me across the plaza to the Centro Cultural Metropolitano, a stately stone building where he said I might enjoy a historic photo exhibit. And sure enough, a sandwich board out front advertised a decade-by-decade retrospective of Quito. I ducked inside and headed for the gallery dedicated to the 1960s.

  To tell the truth, things really did look a bit duller back then. Judging from the photos, quiteños seemed to do a lot of marching back in 1962—military marching, marching for suffrage, marching for the Holy Virgin. None of the images showed anything like the noisy fiesta going on outside. In fact, the streets of the old capital seemed entirely filled with sour-faced men wearing fedoras. I reminded myself of Paul Simon’s adage that everything looks worse in black and white, but the exhibit did make midcentury Quito look pretty humdrum, so I figured I’d give Thompson the benefit of the doubt. Besides, by the time he got to Quito, the gas-trointestinally addled journalist was “medically forbidden to touch so much as a single beer,” and I imagine that kind of enforced sobriety could turn even a Bangkok into a Boise.

  Back in 1978, Quito was the first city in the world to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, largely on the strength of its churches, monuments, monasteries, and public buildings, most of which were erected during three hundred years of Spanish rule. The Old Town surrounding the Plaza Grande is Latin America’s largest and best-preserved colonial district. It’s an open-air museum of Spanish and Moorish architecture, along with a decorative style called Quito Baroque, which blends European embellishments and traditional indigenous imagery. The Old Town is a genuinely charming place to walk around, with block after cobblestone block of bright stucco homes and picturesque courtyards. Each street is characterized by a receding horizon of iron balconies, and some of the churches will knock your socks off, so intricately carved, painted, and tiled, you’d need a magnifying glass and about a hundred years to really appreciate all the details.

  Like a lot of places in Latin America, though, Ecuador has kind of a love-hate relationship with its colonial past. On the one hand, Quito alone has spent hundreds of millions of dollars rehabbing its Old Town over the last couple of decades. The capital’s colonial district now attracts some 300,000 annual tourists, and each one comes with pockets full of dollars (literally, since Ecuador uses the US dollar as its official currency). Some 70 percent of Ecuadorians trace at least part of their ancestry to the colonizing Spanish, and the country rightfully derives a lot of pride from its historic churches, rich tradition of European-style art, and various other legacies of cultural hegemony.

  On the other hand, every brick in every building on the Plaza Grande is also the product of hundreds of years of systematic exploitation of indigenous Ecuadorians. The plaza itself is a testament to the absurdly top-heavy concentration of wealth in colonial Latin America. Quiteños are justifiably proud of having raised the New World’s “first cry of independence” from Spain back in 1809, the same event commemorated by the omni-symbolic monument on the plaza, when a cabal of Quito’s city fathers signed a declaration of independence and installed a provisional government (the Spanish Army quickly retook the city and imprisoned or executed the conspirators).

  More recently, since leftist president Rafael Correa came to power in 2007, the very concept of colonialism has become a popular rhetorical punching bag. President Correa was a vocal admirer and a close ally of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and since Chávez’s death, Correa is regularly held up as the new flag-bearer for leftist populism in the Andes. Like his windy socialist mentor, Correa governs on a platform of strident anti-imperialism, decrying Ecuador’s victimization (past and perceived present) at the hands of the advanced industrialized world. In some ways, the term “colonialism” in contemporary Ecuador probably rings a bit like “terrorism” in the United States—it’s something everyone knows they hate, even if they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. And under Correa, the threat of “neocolonialism” has been loudly invoked to justify everything from defaulting on loans to withdrawal from international commissions to the dramatic expulsion of a US ambassador.

  The first time I heard Correa speak was in 2008, about a year into his presidency, in an interview on the American radio program Democracy Now. Tuning in to the unabashedly lefty news show, I was impressed by the US-educated economist and former Ecuadorian finance minister. He came off like a defender of the poor, an environmental advocate, and a thoughtful critic of globalizati
on. I’ve since heard Correa described by more conservative sources as a bully, a provocateur, a consort to terrorists, and a squelcher of the free press. The trouble is, both sides make a pretty convincing case.

  One of Correa’s first moves as president was to push for a constitutional rewrite that, among other things, centralized power and loosened his presidential term limits. This is always an ominous sign. Hard drives seized from a FARC camp inside the Ecuadorian border noted substantial donations to his campaign. He’s drawn serious fire from free-press advocates for bringing a parade of lawsuits against opposition media outlets, creating a government watchdog agency to police the news, and launching an empire of state-run TV, radio, and newspapers that mostly serves to disseminate political propaganda.

  But even while silencing critics at home, Correa’s government has made a show of assisting some high-profile freedom-of-information champions. Ecuador’s London embassy granted asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and later issued travel documents to stateless National Security Administration leaker Edward Snowden—both morally divisive figures in their own right. What’s more, Correa has pushed through a new and innovative constitution that grants legal rights to the environment. He successfully refinanced piles of questionable foreign debt accumulated by previous administrations, a move that even his critics acknowledged as savvy. And on his watch, Ecuador has made undeniable strides against extreme poverty.

  It’s the sort of ambiguous record that almost makes you nostalgic for the superficial moral simplicity of the Cold War. Say what you will about the prickly echoes of McCarthyism whenever one of Thompson’s letters mentions “the Reds”—at least back then, everybody knew who the bad guys were.

  Which is not to imply that Thompson’s Observer reportage sensationalized the communist threat. His stories are actually rather measured and thoughtful at a time when it would have been easy to phone it in by playing up the Red Scare. In most of the articles, Thompson is at least as critical of Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress as of any South American leader or movement. Occasionally, he shows an ahead-of-his time sensitivity to the marginalization of indigenous people, and in his letters he’s genuinely scornful of the kind of cultural imperialism that tends to irk leaders like Correa and Chávez.

  “They have imported ping-pong and the Twist to combat the Red Menace,” he once wrote of the Alliance-motivated diplomats in Bogotá. Many of his letters echo “Anti-Gringo Winds,” exposing and discrediting the lingering colonial attitudes that allow, for example, a nonchalant gringo to peg poor people with golf balls.

  But for all his evenhandedness, Thompson’s articles do tend to focus on the US vision for South America and on the defenders of US interests abroad. “How Democracy Is Nudged Ahead in Ecuador,” his only story from the country, which ran in September 1962, recounts a day in the life around the Guayaquil offices of the United States Information Service. The USIS was a public diplomacy organ that evolved following World War II. Its mission, according to a long-winded memo from President Kennedy, was to use “personal contact, radio broadcasting, libraries, book publication and distribution, press, motion pictures, television, exhibits, [and] English-language instruction” to “encourage constructive public support abroad … and counter hostile attempts to distort or frustrate the objectives and policies of the United States.” So, in a word: propaganda.

  “We don’t like to use that term because of its unfortunate connotation,” a USIS officer in Quito told Thompson. But Thompson uses it anyway, and his story takes a fairly unblinking look at even some of the more cloak-and-dagger aspects of the job. It opens with an angry-looking Ecuadorian storming out of the USIS office, passing Thompson in the hallway:

  “I think that man has troubles,” [USIS chief Fred] Shaffer explained. “He owns a radio station that used to broadcast so much anti-American stuff that we nicknamed it the Voice of Moscow.” He shook his head sadly. “Then he had some bad luck: suddenly all his advertisers quit him and now he’s nearly bankrupt.” He smiled faintly. “And he has the gall to come in here and try to blame it on me—can you imagine such a thing?”

  Thompson goes on to describe the everyday successes and frustrations of the USIS officers charged with promoting America’s image in Ecuador. They’re scrambling to issue a statement about a shipment of powdered milk, donated by an American NGO and discovered on the black market. They’re awaiting results from an election of the national student association, in which they’ve unofficially lent support to an anti-Castro candidate. Behind all this is the day-to-day work of disseminating pro-American news stories to the Ecuadorian media.

  Thompson paints the chaos of the office vividly, with some nice scene-setting lines to boot (“the cabs rolled back and forth like animals looking for meat”). It’s a good article. It is also the kind of thing that would send a leader like Correa into spasms. Ecuador’s president is famous for bleating about “the selling-out, the snobbery, even the neocolonialism” of the media, and Thompson’s story not only covers Ecuadorian issues solely from the perspective of powerful, self-interested outsiders, but also glibly lionizes America’s backroom efforts to silence the Ecuadorian free press.

  Of course, Correa has proven to be a pretty world-class free-press silencer himself, but it’s hard to read “How Democracy Is Nudged” and not feel a smidgen of empathy. After all, ever since the day that Pizarro landed on the continent in 1524, the story of South America has always been the story of other people in South America. Often as not, it’s been told by other people too. And when you get right down to it, this is perhaps the most insidious legacy of colonialism—it takes your own story away from you. So if someone like Correa seems dangerously fixated on imperialism and tyrannical about controlling his own message, part of me has to wonder, can you really blame the guy?

  II

  On the topic of other people in South America, it should be noted that Thompson’s year on the continent predates the phenomenon known today as the Gringo Trail. In its broadest definition, the Gringo Trail consists of any and all sites in Latin America regularly frequented by budget gringo travelers. It’s anchored by classic attractions like Machu Picchu and Iguaçu Falls, and depending on whom you talk to, it may be a pejorative term, something like “the well-beaten path.” Just when the phrase came into use isn’t exactly clear. According to Jack Epstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, a former Peace Corps volunteer who helped popularize the expression with his 1977 guidebook Along the Gringo Trail, the label was probably first tossed around by Latin American backpackers in the late 1960s. A search with Google’s Ngram tool, which diagrams the frequency of words over time as they appear in millions of digitized books, puts the phrase’s print debut sometime in the early 1970s. My own highly unscientific canvassing of a few dozen baby-boomer backpackers tends to support this, and while the trail is amorphous and subject to change, there seems to be some consensus that the classic South American leg is bookended by Quito on one end and Rio de Janeiro on the other, with swings in between through the central Andes, Patagonia, and the Argentine Pampas.

  Backpacking, as we know it today—the style of minimalist, dollars-a-day foreign travel appealing mainly to First World young adults—had yet to really catch on in 1962. There were historical precedents, of course, from the myriad variations on American hoboism to the upper-crust tradition of the European Grand Tour. Modern backpacking has its roots in post-WWII prosperity, which swelled the ranks of young middle-class Americans, Australians, and western Europeans with the means to indulge their wanderlust. Then, according to Israeli sociologist Erik Cohen, the emergence of leisure-friendly airfare in the late 1960s fueled an international backpacking explosion.

  Distinguished sociologists have done more research on grungy hostel-hoppers than you might immediately suspect, and Cohen is the Margaret Mead of the discipline. In his 1973 paper “Nomads from Affluence: Notes on the Phenomenon of Drifter-Tourism,” Cohen examines the motivations of the young travelers he calls “drifters,” and he
offers “a four-fold typology” of the kinds of folks you might meet on the road: the adventurer, the itinerant hippie, the establishment “mass drifter,” and the day-tripping “fellow traveler.” The same year that his “Nomads from Affluence” ran in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, a twenty-seven-year-old expat Brit named Tony Wheeler was self-publishing what would turn out to be the first Lonely Planet guidebook, further fueling backpacking’s momentum. He and his wife had just traveled across Asia, along a route well known to Cohen’s “drifters” as the Hippie Trail. The Gringo Trail was simply the Western Hemisphere’s burgeoning backpacker equivalent, and in the coming decades, guidebooks like Lonely Planet would ensure that it stayed hopping with plenty of “itinerant hippies,” “fellow travelers,” and all the rest.

  Thompson, by contrast, was sort of a proto-backpacker, running with a crowd of what you might call “working drifters”: other reporters, embassy folks, volunteers for President Kennedy’s brand-new Peace Corps. He mentions hanging out with some Ivy League English teachers in Barranquilla and a Fulbright scholar in Bogotá. In a sense, Thompson and his peers were actually blazing the Gringo Trail, and Cohen credits these “young professionals, who seek to combine travel with work in their chosen profession” as one of his four main “antecedents to the modern drifter.”

  If nothing else, Thompson was certainly an antecedent to the poverty aspect of backpacking. Broke again in Quito, he wrote to his Observer editor, “I am traveling at least half on gall. But in the course of these travels I have discovered that gall is not always the best currency, and there are times when I would be far better off with the other kind.” How many subsequent generations of rucksack-toting seekers would stumble across South America adhering to Thompson’s Law of Travel Economics, “Full speed ahead and damn the cost; it will all come out in the wash”?