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

  “I see,” he said, and we were quiet awhile longer. The breeze blew more tiny sandstorms down the shore. The cries of the gulls came in and out with the waves. History and politics and economics all seemed very far away.

  “Yep,” Sky said eventually. “The rest of the world could end out there, and these guys would just carry on.”

  Before the weekend was over, we were reminded twice that what struck us as Guajira’s Edenic seclusion from the outside world was a bit less romantic for its full-time inhabitants. First, Bernie drove us to a barren hillside about ten miles outside of town, where several dozen wind turbines stretched their gleaming blades across the sky. The wind farm had sprouted a few years earlier, he explained, a joint project of Colombia’s government-owned energy utility and a German company (which Bernie simply called “gringo”). Initially, many of the Wayuu were skeptical, since other attempts at resource development—like the Cerrejón coal mine to the south—had resulted in multinational companies displacing Wayuu villages. But in a region where most of the population has only sporadic access to electricity, the prospect of cheap power was appealing. So the tribe sold the land, and afterward, the mayor of Cabo erected a stretch of utility poles between the town and the newly built transfer station.

  Sky, Bernie, and I picked our way through the rocks that littered the base of the giant towers, serenaded by the eerie whoosh of the turbines and the bleating of obliviously wandering goats. Near a fenced-in jungle of transformers, a crude wooden mast was the last in the long line of utility poles, reaching like a row of thin dominoes back in the direction of Cabo. There were no lines hanging from the poles, however. A public-private Wayuu utility company had been slow to get off the ground, and while villages in La Guajira carried on without power, the electricity from the new project was all being sent in the opposite direction, to the grid in Medellín. Those empty poles were a testament to the Wayuu’s frustrated efforts at altering the very circumstances that Sky and I found so idyllic.

  That evening, in the truck bed again, we jostled back toward the paved road in Uribia. We were taking a detour to visit a coastal lagoon, a place where Bernie said great flocks of flamingos sometimes gathered in the summer. Without the beer cases, Sky and I leaned up against our backpacks, our bandanas pressed to our faces to keep out the dust. Up front, Bernie was characteristically chipper, blasting a vallenato tape with his windows down and occasionally singing along.

  “Esta bien?” he yelled back, and we waved.

  We hadn’t seen another vehicle all day when a red pickup suddenly materialized behind us, emerging from the scrub in its own cloud of dust. It was closing in fast, and Bernie pulled off the rut we’d been following to let it pass. Except that it didn’t pass. The truck was a smallish Toyota with three men in the bed and two riding in the cab, and as it pulled up alongside us, it slowed to an idle.

  The other driver was dressed like the Marlboro Man and had the cigarette to match. He motioned for Bernie to roll down his passenger-side window, and from the driver’s seat, Bernie leaned over to comply. The man said something laconic in Guajiro, unsmiling, and over the drum of the engines, we couldn’t hear Bernie’s response. A few feet away, the men in the truck bed were all young Wayuu. One of them had a machete at his side, and all three slouched in various stages of recline around a large and indistinct mound, covered by a blue plastic tarp.

  Contrabandistas, I thought. Probably moving goods to Maicao from some illicit port up the coast. Sky and I nodded a respectful hello.

  Were the smugglers dangerous? I had never thought to ask. In Thompson’s story, mainland Colombians described Guajira as “known to be populated by killers and thieves and men given over to lives of crime and violence.” I assumed this was hyperbole, but suddenly I found myself wondering whether we were seeing anything on the flats that we weren’t supposed to. In 2004, a nearby Wayuu village was massacred by paramilitary forces intent on wiping out witnesses to a narcotrafficking operation. Some victims were beheaded, while others were burned alive. The paras were disbanded now, but just the week before, a half dozen customs agents were injured by petrol bombs during a skirmish with gasoline smugglers on the road to Maicao. But surely, I figured, most contrabandistas were happy to let bystanders look the other way, right?

  Other than the machete, the men seemed to be unarmed, although for all I knew they were former paras, with assault rifles hidden beneath that tarp. Even if Bernie hit the gas, I thought, his beater could never outrun them. The men in the back of the truck nodded back at us impassively. Exhaust from the two engines left a gauzy haze in the air between us.

  Sky said nothing. I said nothing. Bernie and the other driver chatted tensely. High above us, some kind of bird of prey was making lazy circles in the cloudless sky, and one of the men tilted his head back to stare, squinting hard against the sunlight. When he looked down again, he caught my gaze and smiled thinly, adjusting his lean body against the truck bed’s steel rim.

  I noticed then that the men in the back of the truck were ankle-deep in muddy water, which sloshed around their feet as the vehicle idled and shook. The smiling one nodded at me conspiratorially and slid back the tarp just a little, and immediately I realized that these were smugglers of a different kind. Concealed underneath was a giant sea turtle, probably a loggerhead, dead or very close to it. These men were poachers.

  I breathed a sigh that was one part relief and one part disappointment. After a few minutes of chitchat with Bernie, the other driver hit the gas, and the Toyota drove off harmlessly. Later, as the three of us gazed at a flock of flamingos preening in the lagoon, Bernie said that the driver was his cousin. He and his fellow poachers were likely on their way to somebody’s kitchen, where the turtle could be butchered while still fresh, then packaged for sale in the markets of Uribia and Maicao. Bernie explained this nonchalantly, and it was clear he saw little difference between the sea turtle and the lobsters we’d purchased from some Wayuu fisherman two nights before. A pound or two of meat from an endangered loggerhead fetches around five American dollars in Guajira, and a single animal can yield more than a hundred pounds of meat. The market for turtle meat in the cities was robust, Bernie said, and the Wayuu fishermen poor. With the high price tag, it’s easy to understand why they wouldn’t be deterred by Colombia’s endangered-species laws, which, after all, have next to no enforcement on the remote peninsula. In a place like Guajira, everything is a commodity.

  The flamingos staggered by on their twiggy legs, and I asked Bernie whether the Wayuu ever hunted or ate the birds. He shook his head vigorously.

  “No, no,” he said, “está prohibido.”

  But wasn’t it also prohibido, I asked, to capture and kill the sea turtles? He thought about that for a while. As we stood there, a family of the gangly, blushing birds tucked their legs underneath them and took off. Finally, Bernie smiled in resignation. I guess so, he said, but the flamingos don’t taste as good.

  As we drove on into Uribia, it occurred to me that Guajira probably illustrates the complex give-and-take between traditional lifestyles and modern consumer culture as well as any place I’d ever been. It’s a relationship that’s often oversimplified, presented merely as a clash or a co-opting, a scenario in which a proud and isolated population is tragically infiltrated by the trappings of the industrialized West. The reality, of course, is less neat. In Maicao, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single indigenous Wayuu household with a flat-screen TV, and yet the city’s economy depends largely on a black market supplying the country with these and other luxury items. In Manaure, the Wayuu cling to their traditional methods of salt harvesting in the name of preserving jobs, even while crossing their fingers for the kind of economic growth that accompanies industrialization. And while ecotourism is starting to bring the region some welcome economic development, few Wayuu would think twice about poaching an endangered sea turtle to sell for meat in the villages. In Guajira, as around the world, the relationship between traditional and dominant cultures
is a messy and not-always-logical mixture of adoption and rejection, adaptation and exploitation.

  Thompson seemed to have understood this, and while he sometimes came off sounding less than culturally sensitive, his account of three days among the Rolex-wearing, Scotch-drinking Wayuu dispels any notion of the romantic, noble savage. Then as now, he suggested, native Guajirans were happy to embrace some aspects of the “civilized” world while emphatically rebuffing those they had no use for. The peninsula functions according to the same principle today, with some light tourism and a lingering paramilitary presence thrown into the mix.

  Thompson’s no-bullshit take on Guajira is actually a fitting precursor to the kind of pull-no-punches realism he would call upon in the rest of his South American reporting. For a traveler more naïve, this shattered mythology of native peoples’ primeval innocence might have been jarring—a disenchanting start to a long trip, especially for someone who’d gone off in search of an unspoiled frontier. On the contrary, though, Thompson seemed to find it refreshing. “A week ago I came over from Aruba,” he later wrote to a friend, “… and spent three days with allegedly savage and fearsome indians. As it turned out, they were the best people I’ve met.”

  Back in Uribia, we parted ways with the gracious Bernie José, thanking him earnestly for his services and hospitality. On a dusty, quiet street, the three of us leaned against the truck bed and shared one final round of handshakes and Scotch.

  It was late when a cab dropped us off at a cheap beachside hostel back in Riohacha. Sky dialed up Alex from the puerta-a-puerta, and the two of them headed out for a night of drinks and girl-watching. I stayed in with my journal and the dregs of the Scotch bottle. I was already too tired for the nightlife, and there was a lot of South America still to go. The room was stuffy, so I lay outside in a hammock, listening to the waves as they lapped against the shore. From time to time I heard the sounds of the revelers downtown, snippets of cumbia music and machismo that drifted past like flecks of seawater on the wind.

  When I finished the bottle around midnight, I thought of Thompson’s closing lines from “A Footloose American in a Smugglers’ Den.” Arriving in Barranquilla, an exhausted Thompson finds that, as far as the city-dwellers are concerned, Guajira might as well be the moon. “I had the feeling that nobody really believed I had been there,” he wrote. “When I tried to talk about Guajira, people would smile sympathetically and change the subject.

  “And then we would have another beer, because Scotch is so expensive in Barranquilla that only the rich can afford it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  After the Time of Cholera

  The crew is primitive and vicious-looking and the captain is an old river toad who can’t understand why I’m here and doesn’t much care for it.

  —Personal correspondence, May 26, 1962

  I

  The Magdalena River stretches across Colombia’s populous Andean region like a wide brown scar, arrowhead-jagged and steeped in symbolism. Like a scar, it’s distinguished by its breadth and its permanence, and like a scar, it evokes a messy tangle of concepts: history, pride, damage.

  But looking down from an auto bridge back in dumpy old Barranquilla, it just looks kind of muddy and lazy. Sky and I stared at the dung-colored water from a long cable-stayed bridge on the outskirts of town. At its delta, the Magdalena teems with plant life, verdant little bundles torn from the marshlands upstream during high water, and we watched them drifting in great green clumps to where the river meets the sea. Beneath our feet, the Pumarejo Bridge is Colombia’s longest at 5,000 feet—longer than the main span of San Francisco’s Golden Gate. It could have been one of the country’s architectural landmarks, but like the rest of Barranquilla, it is a monolithic and oppressive study in gray, a featureless expanse with even its cables entombed in concrete.

  In a sense, the capricious Magdalena is to blame for Barranquilla’s tired industrial character. For much of its history, the port city was actually Colombia’s foremost trade capital, one of the continent’s shining jewels. In the early 1900s, it was a model Latin American metro: modern, cosmopolitan, and enjoying some of the highest standards of living in South America. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, the Colombian government restored and upgraded an old colonial aqueduct called the Canal del Dique. Starting eighty miles upstream, the canal diverted much of the Magdalena’s flow from its natural mouth to the neighboring coastal city of Cartagena. With a newer, straighter route to the sea, the locus of commerce shifted, and Barranquilla’s star faded in direct proportion to its neighbor’s success. Today, historic Cartagena is known not only as the largest container port in Colombia, but also as the Caribbean’s capital of culture, art, and tourism. Barranquilla is its ugly stepsister—gritty, crowded, and largely forgotten.

  But Barranquilla is still the origin point for one of the world’s great river trips, from the Magadalena’s mouth to the historic terminus of Girardot, near Bogotá, a route once traveled by grand passenger steamboats and immortalized in the writings of Colombian favorite son Gabriel García Márquez. If you’ve heard of the Magdalena at all, it may well be through Márquez’s novels and stories, in which travel on the river is a recurring theme. It’s a fitting setting for the country’s beloved Nobel laureate, since the story of the thousand-mile Magdalena is intimately intertwined with the story of Colombia itself.

  For four hundred years following Spanish conquest, the Magdalena was the Giving Tree of hydrological features. With its tributaries, it irrigated one of the New World’s richest agricultural basins. Cattlemen cleared its forested banks. Bricks made from river sand paved the country’s colonial streets, and its currents carried barges of Colombian gold to finance the Spanish empire. For goods and passengers, the Magdalena was a watery superhighway, the primary travel corridor between the coast and the inland capital of Bogotá, Colombia’s living artery.

  By the time Thompson set out upon the Magdalena, however, the steamboats were only a memory. The last remnant of the fleet had burned to the waterline the year before, and passenger travel on the river had all but vanished. The reasons for this are eloquently explained in Márquez’s 1985 opus Love in the Time of Cholera, a fifty-year love story in which the deteriorating Magdalena serves as a metaphor for the unrequited love of the book’s aging protagonist. When Florentino Ariza, the moony owner of a riverboat company, notices changes along his beloved waterway, one of his captains explains to him the river’s ironic undoing: For a half century, Colombians logged the Magdalena’s banks in order to fuel their wood-burning ships. Over time, this led to catastrophic deforestation, which, in turn, caused such erosion and sedimentation that the river was no longer navigable for the large steamboats.

  So the best Thompson could do in May of 1962 was to barter with a shipping company for passage aboard a small tugboat: in exchange for ten promotional photos of the ship, he rode on a tug pushing seven barges of beer upstream, into the Colombian interior. Bogotá was his goal, and although a bus ride or short flight would have saved him a full week on the river, Thompson’s itinerary was dictated by simple thrift.

  “I am down to 10 US dollars,” he wrote from the boat, “but have developed a theory which will go down as Thompson’s Law of Travel Economics. To wit: full speed ahead and damn the cost; it will all come out in the wash.”

  Thompson didn’t write for the Observer about his Magdalena journey. In fact, his trip into the geographical and cultural heart of Colombia seemed to hold little romance for him. “There is a definite sense of the Congo here,” he wrote in a testy letter on day one. “The fucking bugs are on me in force. I can barely stand it. My balls for a sleeping pill.”

  Márquez, not surprisingly, evokes the river with more affection. In his memoirs, he writes that “the only reason I would want to be a boy again is to enjoy the voyage once more.” At the end of Cholera, he ties his characters’ destinies to it, closing the book with a moment of magical realism that finds Ariza and his love unwilling to abandon their country�
�s cherished river, resolved to float in an abandoned steamboat forever. For centuries, the relationship between the Colombian people and the Magdalena was one of near-complete dependence. As Sky and I set out to follow Thompson’s course upriver—decades after Márquez’s eloquent eulogy—I wondered: What was the relationship between the river and its people today?

  There are easier ways to see the Magdalena River valley than by boat. Much of the region spent the second half of the twentieth century basically frozen in time, cut off by the end of the steamship era and then rendered off-limits by the drug-trafficking and paramilitary activity that followed. In the last decade, however, many Magdalena River towns have become accessible for the first time by modern paved roads. Buses now reach villages that, a generation ago, were effectively off the map. But wherever possible, I wanted to travel on the river itself, and in the absence of commercial passenger boats, this amounted to fluvial hitchhiking, a gamble that Sky and I could meet and negotiate passage with private boatmen along the way.

  At the outset, this proved difficult. From the Pumarejo Bridge, we could see the looming cranes of a shipping terminal, but the only river traffic was a pair of wooden canoes just below us, shuttling straw bales from one bank to the other, presumably to avoid the bridge toll. Barranquilla sits at the crossroads of northern Colombia’s highway system, its streets jam-packed with colorful and exhaust-spewing “chicken buses” offering cheap fares to villages upstream. Boat travel in the region is essentially an anachronism. So our hope was either to hire a sympathetic local fisherman or, like Thompson, to talk our way aboard a commercial barge. And we’d been told that the area around the bridge was our best bet for doing either.

  Our taxi driver took us down a dirt road in the shadow of the bridge’s concrete piers, where a village of tightly clustered lean-tos had sprouted. Their corrugated steel roofs trembled with traffic noise from above, and in the road, a small child used a switch to beat a bewildered-looking mule.