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

  From above, which is the only way you can approach it, the city of La Paz looks like a crack opened up in the earth and every building in the world just fell in. It’s a senseless jumble of a metro, skirting the eastern edge of a wide Andean plateau called the Altiplano, filling in a canyon there like a bucket of LEGOs dumped into a shoebox. Arriving in La Paz by bus means descending 1,500 feet from the canyon’s rim, winding downward in a sort of toilet-bowl swirl. Gaze out the window during your descent and the city seems to glisten, with a zillion metal rooftops reflecting the unfiltered sunlight of the high Andes.

  At 12,000 feet (the surrounding Altiplano is well over 13,000), La Paz is often hailed as the highest capital in the world. Technically, though, it’s only the seat of the Bolivian government, the constitutional capital being some 350 miles away in comparatively sleepy Sucre. No matter. Lonely and oxygen-deprived, La Paz is still South America’s undisputed capital of weird. This is as true today as it was in April of 1963, when the Observer ran Thompson’s account of life there under the headline A NEVER-NEVER LAND HIGH ABOVE THE SEA, devoting a hefty twenty-three column inches to the “excesses, exaggerations, quirks, contradictions, and every manner of oddity and abuse” that he found while wandering its sloping streets.

  Bolivia is eccentric like an old hermit is eccentric, the result of long years of isolation. Sky-high and buttressed from colonial population centers by mountains and veldt-like grasslands, the country once known as “Upper Peru” was subordinated for centuries to Spanish viceroys in far-off Lima and Buenos Aires. On the plus side, the Altiplano is remote enough to have helped shield the country’s indigenous population from some of the devastation wreaked by European diseases. More problematically, though, the modern nation of Bolivia has been landlocked for most of its history, having lost its only ocean corridor to Chile during a disastrous nineteenth-century war over bird poop (then a lucrative fertilizer). Bolivia is so geographically sequestered, even its rainfall doesn’t make it to the sea, instead draining into inland lakes and salt flats, where it simply evaporates over time.

  Some of the results of this isolation include chronic instability, a poor but powerful indigenous majority, and a fragile economy based almost entirely on the extraction of minerals and other natural resources. Bolivia is a part of the world that has never had it easy, and so Thompson’s “Never-Never Land” piece reads a bit like comic relief. The story is a descriptive litany of what he calls “the small problems—the laughs, as it were—in a country where people with responsibility have very few things to laugh about.” Rolling blackouts, for example—a consequence of the nation’s training-wheels infrastructure that darkened dinner parties and routinely trapped elevators between floors. Thompson’s cigarettes wouldn’t stay lit in the thin Bolivian air, and his toothpaste, manufactured at sea level, exploded upon opening. All around town, flatlanders with altitude sickness had an annoying habit of passing out and having to be brought to consciousness by onlookers.

  The streets of La Paz, moreover, were full of oddball would-be revolutionaries in 1962, including a few self-proclaimed and loudmouthed communists who nonetheless retained soft spots for American pop culture. Thompson wrote of a psychic mediator who pestered the embassy, claiming to commune with Kennedy and Khrushchev using brain waves. The sky-high city, he said, fostered a “manic atmosphere” of strikes and street protests, a paranoid circus where “the Americans fear the Communists, the Communists fear the Alliance for Progress, and most people don’t care about any of this as long as the money and aid keeps flowing in.”

  The La Paz that I stepped into fifty years later seemed similarly charged and offbeat. From the bus station, I set out on foot in search of cheap digs, and one of the first sights I came upon was an orderly display of dried llama fetuses, lined up outside a row of small shops. The hollow-eyed camel ids were stacked up in fruit crates, staring dolefully at passersby. That particular retail strip, I later learned, was called the Mercado de las Brujas, the witches’ market, and the pungent cadavers were sold as offerings, meant to be buried in one’s yard as a kind of good-luck ceremony honoring the Quechua and Aymara Earth mother.

  The sidewalks of La Paz had a carnival feel, crowded with shoeshine boys wearing ski masks (to remain anonymous in their low-caste occupation) and grandmotherly vendors in their bowler hats (commonly known as cholitas, from a colonial epithet once considered derogatory and now used with some pride). At a busy intersection up the road from the witches’ market, I came upon another oddity: pairs of costumed zebras that dance and cavort at traffic lights during rush hours, distracting drivers so pedestrians can cross. The city evidently employs about one hundred such plushies, and since their introduction in the early 2000s, they’ve helped alleviate the bottlenecks and road rage that often characterize urban streets in South America.

  I watched a pair of them frolicking out the window when I stopped for breakfast at a small café, an otherwise normal luncheonette that played Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You” on repeat for over an hour. The diner was out of coffee, so the waiter talked me into a Bolivian alternative, a bright-purple corn drink called api, which was sickeningly sweet and thoroughly awful.

  Welcome to Never-Never Land, I thought, and I sipped my purple coffee while Michael Bolton crooned and the zebras formed a chorus line in the intersection.

  When it comes to national holidays celebrating public drug use, Bolivia is light-years ahead of the United States. I had been wandering among the zebras in La Paz for a couple of days when I heard on the radio that President Evo Morales had declared a “National Day of Coca-Leaf Chewing.” Morales is the former head of the country’s coca growers union and South America’s first fully indigenous president. He’s also another Chávez acolyte who, like Correa, considers himself both a “Bolivarian” populist and an antagonist of the United States. That afternoon, he happened to be in Vienna, pushing for the removal of coca leaves from a United Nations schedule of dangerous drugs. Coca, of course, is the raw ingredient for cocaine, of which Bolivia is the world’s number three producer, behind its neighbors Colombia and Peru. It is also popular in the Andes in its raw leaf form, which is chewed or boiled into a tea and appreciated for its mild stimulant effects—boosting energy, suppressing appetite, and relieving altitude sickness, among other things. The radio told me that a couple hundred people had gathered in La Paz to demonstrate in favor of the leafy drug, so I headed downtown to the government plaza to get a glimpse of the demonstrations.

  La Paz’s Plaza Murillo looked more or less like the central plazas of Bogotá, Quito, or Lima, except that in La Paz, the men in expensive-looking suits were actually conversing with the men in ponchos and fedoras rather than just stepping around them on the sidewalk. In front of the presidential palace was a whole weird medley of guards and soldiers, all standing at attention. Mountie-looking guys in bright red coats were stationed next to white-helmeted MPs dressed like ’60s G.I. Joe action figures. Thrown in here and there were a few serious-looking commando types in full camouflage, like Latino extras out of Apocalypse Now. In front of the line of soldiers, a smallish mob had indeed gathered, carrying signs and spilling into the adjacent plaza.

  I skirted the periphery of the crowd, trying to look inconspicuous, but I noticed right away that few if any of the protestors seemed to be chewing coca leaves. When I scanned the placards and listened for snippets of comprehensible Spanish, I realized that this was actually a protest over some kind of public-park cleanup in the slums. It had nothing to do with coca leaves. My face must have registered some confusion as this dawned on me, because one of the olive-uniformed MPs strolled up and asked me kindly whether I needed any help.

  “Are you trying to get inside?” he asked, gesturing at the palace.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Actually, I think I just showed up at the wrong protest.”

  “Ah yes,” he said, and smiled grimly. “Esto es possible aqui.” That can happen here.

  It can happen i
n La Paz because Bolivians love to protest. Or maybe because they have a lot worth protesting about, but more likely it’s a combination of the two. Like very few other countries, Bolivia has an entrenched history of popular rule. In 1962, Thompson called it “a government dependent on Indian support and very literally of, by, and for the people.” What this means on paper is that established political parties are less important or influential than groundswell social movements and their charismatic leaders. Trade unions are a huge voting bloc, career politicians are a minority, and there’s a healthy degree of hostility between “the people” and the wealthy urban elites.

  What it means in practice is that Bolivians are not afraid to ask their government for what they want. Or to demand it with street protests that are loud, lively, and frequent. Or to erect blockades of major highways until they get it. Or to march on the capital and throw out the sitting president if things seem to be taking too long.

  That Bolivia has undergone some thirty different changes of power in the fifty years since Thompson’s visit might suggest flaws in this system. During that time, the country has occasionally been ruled by military juntas and conservative presidents who made no claims to be “men of the people,” but right now, popular rule is enjoying a shining moment in Bolivia. Morales came to power in 2005, riding a wave of strikes and blockades that forced the last elected president out of office. And as an instigator of those strikes, he is keenly aware of what a few hundred angry people with placards can accomplish.

  Of course, none of this is new. Peasant mobs have been raising hell in Bolivia for as long as there’s been a power structure against which to raise hell. South America’s last great indigenous uprising against the Spanish was in Bolivia in 1781, when an army of 40,000 Aymaras laid siege to La Paz for a full six months. Colonial troops converged from both coasts to quell the uprising, but the spirit of indigenous solidarity and class revolt has stuck with Bolivia through the centuries. The country’s modern era of popular rule kicked off in 1952 with what Bolivians call the National Revolution, and it was the fallout from this event that Thompson was still covering a decade later.

  As it turned out, the coca demonstration had actually been held in front of a building called the Museo de la Revolución, which is dedicated to the National Revolution of 1952. By the time I showed up there in the early evening, the protestors had already called it a day. The sun was sinking behind the canyon rim, and the brick-cobbled plaza was empty except for a lone Aymara woman, breaking down a foosball table that she had evidently set up for the event.

  For such a pivotal moment in Bolivian history, the National Revolution is not celebrated with much of a museum. It anchors a hilltop park a couple of miles from downtown, a grim trapezoidal building that looks like nothing so much as the torso of an Imperial Walker from Star Wars. I paid an admission fee of a single boliviano, or about fourteen cents, and the one employee running the place seemed genuinely surprised to see me. He also seemed ill inclined to turn down his boom box, so while I studied the one-room museum’s black-and-white photos of rifle-toting miners and hanged ex-presidents, I was accompanied by the sultry croon of George Michael singing “Freedom! ’90.”

  In a nutshell, 1952 saw a coalition of miners, campesinos, and urban radicals overthrow a government that had long been running the show on behalf of powerful foreign-owned mining interests. Taxes on the country’s tin barons made up the lion’s share of Bolivia’s national revenue, and the government periodically lent out its military to help suppress miners’ strikes and otherwise keep the labor force in line. The miners turned the tables during the revolution, though, when their militias marched on La Paz, joining Bolivia’s outnumbered National Police in a battle against the country’s remaining loyal military forces. The uprising was brief and a lot less bloody than many Latin American revolutions. Around six hundred people were killed in three days of fighting, with many soldiers on the military side simply defecting or refusing to fight.

  With the revolution came the nationalization of Bolivia’s three biggest mining operations, which together had controlled about 80 percent of the industry. The revolutionary government also decreed universal suffrage for women and indigenous Bolivians, and it instituted far-reaching land reforms, breaking up the massive haciendas of wealthy landowners and redistributing plots among peasant farmers. On the walls of the museum, a wraparound mural visually summarized the uprising’s major themes, with fist-raising indigenas and burly industrial workers standing tall over slain conquistadors.

  “Freedom! Freedom!” cried George Michael patriotically. “You’ve got to give for what you take!”

  Bolivia’s new revolutionary government was avowedly anti-Moscow, but such dramatic shifts to the left still made US officials very nervous. By the time Thompson showed up ten years later, the country was struggling economically, and Washington was, in his words, “concerned that Bolivia is one of the most receptive Latin American countries to Communist infiltration.” Thompson, however, didn’t share these concerns. Three months on the continent had made him increasingly skeptical of the motivations of the avowedly capitalist elites, and he was coming to suspect that the communist threat in the Andes was “more a convenient whipping boy than anything else.”

  In La Paz, he befriended a USIS labor attaché named Tom Martin, an eager and hard-charging Bronx native on his first assignment abroad. Martin was connected with labor leaders, diplomats, and other movers and shakers around La Paz, and Thompson spent several evenings in Martin’s living room, swilling bourbon with rabble-rousing mining bosses and other supposed communist agitators.

  One night, Thompson walked into Martin’s looking like Castro himself: unshaven, wearing a green Army-surplus jacket and a worn pair of hiking boots. In an Observer article from 1963, Thompson recalled being accidentally introduced that evening to two self-proclaimed communists as a correspondent for the Observer’s sister publication, the Wall Street Journal. The mistaken identity left the socialists slack-jawed:

  The Bolivians couldn’t understand how I could possibly wear such an outfit and still represent Wall Street. It took several hours before they understood that I was no more from Wall Street than they were from Moscow, and when the evening was over we all understood each other a lot better than we had in the beginning. We didn’t necessarily agree, but at least we could talk like human beings instead of political animals.

  Most professed Reds in Bolivia, Thompson said, were not ideological zealots, but simply “naïve nationalists” who wanted to see more resources devoted to social welfare. One allegedly fearsome and anti-American labor kingpin told Thompson over whiskey that he’d learned English by reading Playboy. Such were the supposed Marxist militants whose actions struck fear into the hearts of US bureaucrats and businessmen—a bunch of blue-collar joes who, yeah, wanted to empower the workers but who had no particular beef with the US way of life. In “Never-Never Land,” Thompson dismissed the Red Menace as “more than anything else … an easy way to frighten the Americans.”

  “There are about as many Communists in Bolivia,” he wrote, “as there are bedrock conservatives—which leaves a lot of middle ground.”

  All of which means that the La Paz of Thompson’s reportage owed a lot of its madcap charm to a kind of Chicken Little hysteria over a threat that wasn’t even really there. Two years before Dr. Strangelove threw open the doors to Cold War satire, Thompson was already coming to see the comic absurdity of a whole planet fueled by paranoia and antagonism. In fact, he writes about La Paz in “Never-Never Land” in much the same way that he would eventually write about the Kentucky Derby or Las Vegas. There’s a kind of budding cynical glee to his descriptions of crazed and frothing protestors, to his retelling of how the altitude had recently struck dead a hyper-fit ex-Marine. You can sense in his prose the excitement of an author who’s beginning to thrive, if only a little bit, on the sheer inanity of it all. In his later work, Thompson wrote himself into the chaos as a character, a sort of whirling dervish of
journalistic mayhem. But even in his reporting from La Paz, there’s no mistaking the author’s sardonic presence, that sense of an embedded observer who’s surveying the Cold War landscape and smirking.

  Sure, Thompson seems to say, this city is home to “almost every kind of madness and affliction that can plague the human body and soul,” but there’s something kind of funny about that, right? It’s the same brand of fatalistic humor that would later characterize Thompson’s gonzo journalism, and frankly, it’s instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever had their luggage fall out of a rickshaw in traffic or who’s ever navigated some backwater bureaucracy in a language they don’t speak. It is the amused, enlightened resignation of a traveler in his fourth fluky month abroad. It is the manic surrender of the waylaid.

  I won’t go so far as to say that Thompson’s travel writing gave birth to the style he became known for, but the young writer’s proto-gonzo take on La Paz resonates with the epiphany of a guy who’s through bitching about the strikes and the bug bites and is instead finally ready to double down and embrace the absurdities of the road. The Red Scare was absurd, Thompson decided. Bolivia’s mobocracy was absurd. It was utterly absurd to be using his tripod as a cane after being semi-paralyzed by insect venom in Cusco. Even the constant panic of hopeless poverty was starting to take on a liberating absurdity.

  “The hotel won’t take my check so I can’t leave,” Thompson wrote from La Paz. “I just sit in the room and ring the bell for more beer. Life has improved immeasurably since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”

  II

  I stayed in La Paz just long enough to catch a few street protests, wander a couple of museums, and buy my first llama fetus. Then I headed 330 miles south to the town of Potosí. This had not been a part of my original itinerary, but on the day I showed up at the station, not a single bus was headed east.