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

  “This isn’t poor, you know,” Sky admonished me, reading my expression as we drove by. “Around here, this is probably just another working-class neighborhood.”

  The taxi drove us to a clearing at the river’s edge, where a dozen men were busy unloading the canoes we’d seen from above. Most were in their twenties and thirties, milling around and shouting at one another as they tossed straw bales into the beds of two large pickups. Their canoes had flaking blue paint and visibly splintered hulls. Across the side, in fading white letters, one of them read: ASI ES LA VIDA. Such is life.

  One of the older men wore a jumpsuit with the logo of the nearby shipping terminal, and when we stepped out of the taxi, he walked over and introduced himself as Julio, extending a hand to each of us. Julio stared impassively while Sky explained our search for a boat, then nodded slowly and turned to consult with some of the other men. I noticed that one of the trucks had a Thundercats decal on the windshield, and I wondered which of these serious-looking workers appreciated the cartoon show from my childhood.

  After a moment, Julio turned back to us. Why didn’t we just take a bus? he wanted to know. River travel took longer, he said, and besides, it wasn’t cheap. He was right on this score, of course. Gas would be a big expense. While Colombia is an oil-rich nation, the majority of its petroleum reserves are tapped for export, and domestic oil sales are heavily taxed. The cost of fueling a motorboat to take us upriver would easily buy us a dozen bus tickets. So we tried to explain our interest in the river’s history, our desire to see the Magdalena’s farms and villages as someone might have seen them a century ago. But Julio just furrowed his brow and shook his head, clearly dismissing the river as an object of romance. He stared at us contemplatively while a few of his coworkers snickered.

  It was understandable, I thought, that the Magdalena wouldn’t strike these men as a place of fascination, that the concept might even seem a bit ridiculous. To Julio and his companions, the river was primarily a means of making a living. Sometimes it was an obstacle, something to be crossed with a canoe full of feed. The idea that two gringos would willingly spend a week’s wages just to see the countryside as they couldn’t see it from the road—I wouldn’t blame them if this struck them as absurd. I thought of one of Márquez’s characters, the no-nonsense Fermina Daza, willful heroine of Love in the Time of Cholera, who scoffs at the notion of a pleasure trip along the Magdalena. “If I go,” she insists to her suitor, “it will be because I have decided to and not because the landscape is interesting.”

  After further cajoling, Julio conceded that it might be possible to find a fisherman willing to take us upriver, but he sure didn’t know any. He offered instead to take us to the shipping terminal where he worked. Perhaps there, he said, we could arrange some sort of passage on a commercial freighter. So he joined us in the taxi, guiding our driver through an adjacent shipyard where skinny cattle wandered among the skeletons of old boats, and ten or so minutes later, the four of us piled out at a gated office building still within sight of the bridge. An armed guard at the entrance radioed inside to find out what to do with us.

  The man who came out a few minutes later wore a dark blue suit and spoke the brisk English of an international businessman. Benjamin González introduced himself as the commercial director of the Palermo Port Society, a logistics hub for container ships taking cargo into and out of Colombia, and as he gestured us inside the gates, he offered politely to answer any questions we had about trade along the Magdalena. It was true, he said, that commercial river traffic had suffered over the last several decades, in Barranquilla and elsewhere. River erosion and sedimentation were factors, yes, but so were the backroom politics of federal infrastructure projects. By the 1960s, González explained, Colombian leaders had all but abandoned the Magdalena River as a lost cause. Instead, the government funneled money into railroads, road construction, and commercial trucking, shifting resources away from river restoration. Pressure from the American railroad and auto industries probably helped influence this policy, González said, and only recently had some Colombian politicians started advocating for river rehab, citing low emissions and the comparatively low cost of freight shipping.

  Rather graciously, considering our out-of-the-blue arrival, González invited Sky and me into a gleaming SUV for a tour of the port. As we drove, he continued to fire off factoids about cargo on the Magdalena River. What everyone agrees on, he said, is that the “roads only” policy is a difficult one to reverse. The Pumarejo Bridge is itself a monument to the pro-asphalt mind-set. It was built without a drawbridge in the 1970s, and as such, it severely limits the size of ships entering the river from the Caribbean. González ticked off the river’s major imports—mostly raw industrial materials—and noted its primary exports, petroleum and palm oil. The latter is actually responsible for much of Colombia’s ongoing deforestation, since primary rain forest in the middle Magdalena is often cleared to make room for palm plantations.

  Unfortunately, González also dismissed out of hand the possibility of hitching a ride aboard a commercial freighter. Such things, he explained courteously, are simply not done anymore.

  We cruised in the SUV past sky-high cranes and piles of empty pallets while the shipping exec continued to fire off statistics. When I asked González whether there was any future for Magdalena passenger transport, the buttoned-down businessman turned surprisingly wistful.

  “I have thought about it a lot, in a romantic way,” he said with a sigh. As a child, González remembered listening to his grandmother’s stories about her honeymoon cruise along the river. For the moneyed class, a riverboat trip could be a pretty genteel affair, and González remembered his grandmother’s descriptions of chamber musicians on the deck, grand dinners in the ship’s dining room, and a visit to the historic river town of Mompós, with its colonial architecture and cobblestone streets. Could that sort of thing happen again? Sure, González said, if someone could make a profit, but he wasn’t optimistic.

  When we finished our tour, Julio and the taxi driver were waiting for us at the gate. González pulled over the SUV, then looked at us and sighed once more. “I have always wanted to see Mompós,” he said. Then he gave us his card and thanked us for our interest in Colombian commerce.

  We had struck out on two scores. On our way back to the bridge, we stopped at a roadside bodega, where Sky and I bought Cokes for Julio and the driver. Painted there, on the side of the building, was a mural of a small boy hanging from the limbs of a bright pink tree. At its base, a grinning tiger crouched at the ready, and a snake wound its way through the salmon-colored branches. Just below the dangling boy, a caiman—a South American crocodile—exposed a row of sharp and gleaming teeth. In wavy, dreamlike letters, the mural’s caption read: Que sera del pobrecito Paco? What will happen to poor little Paco?

  In Colombia, Márquez-style magical realism pops up in these sorts of unexpected places. Admiring the mural, I considered the gap between this cultural fondness for the absurd and the pragmatic mind-set of Julio and the men at the bridge. Was it naïve, I wondered, for us to value river travel for its own sake? Benjamin González didn’t seem to think so. We sipped our Cokes, and I admired the caiman staring hungrily at poor little Paco. It was the only one I was likely to see, since caimans on the Magdalena have been hunted to near-extinction.

  II

  The bus that eventually took Sky and me out of Barranquilla smelled of upholstery cleaner and defeat. At least we’d opted for the motorcoach over the chicken bus, so instead of body odor and barnyard noise, we got plush seatbacks, footrests, and a satellite TV showing a live summit of the Union of South American Nations.

  UNASUR is an intergovernmental economic council—a bit like the European Union, but with more shouting. And at this particular summit, most of that shouting was directed at former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe. More recently, Uribe has been replaced in office by his own former defense minister, but following two stormy terms as chief executive, he continues
to loom large in Colombian politics. In all but the leftiest circles of Colombian political life, he was an exceptionally popular president, thanks to the huge strides his administration made against left-wing guerrillas, particularly the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

  A little backstory: The guerrilla group known universally as the FARC first emerged in the years just after Thompson’s visit. It was founded as a peasant-led, revolutionary socialist army in the late 1960s, and over the next few decades, it came to control much of rural Colombia. Divisions of the FARC clashed violently with both the Army and the right-wing paramilitary groups that were formed to oppose it, but that ultimately came to resemble it. Over time, the group all but abandoned its ideology and committed itself instead to Colombia’s profitable drug trade. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the FARC also supplemented this income with ransom money, carrying out ambushes and high-profile political kidnappings that made headlines around the world.

  All of this earned Colombia its reputation in the late twentieth century as one of the world’s most dangerous countries. When Uribe first came into office in 2002, Colombia was in a state of all-out civil war. It was only following a multiyear military blitzkrieg—heavily subsidized by the United States—that the Colombian Army finally brought the FARC to its knees, pushing remaining cells deep into the jungle on the country’s periphery.

  The improved security situation dramatically boosted Colombia’s economy, and popular support for Uribe soared. In 2006, voters passed a referendum altering the constitution so he could seek a second term. When that was up, Uribe’s handpicked replacement was elected by the largest margin in Colombian history.

  The United States had a hand in all this: Uribe’s success against the FARC was largely the result of a partnership with the United States, which provided helicopters, weapons, training, and close to $8 billion to assist the Colombian military under an initiative called Plan Colombia. And this chummy relationship between Colombia and the United States is nothing new. It dates back, in fact, to the Cold War containment era, and it was the very subject that Thompson tackled in his second South American Observer article, a long profile of then-incoming Colombian president Guillermo León Valencia.

  Thompson’s profile is a little on the dry side—there’s nothing gonzo about his descriptions of Colombia’s then-recent constitutional crisis—but Valencia cut an interesting figure in South American politics because of his eager cooperation with a Kennedy-era policy called the Alliance for Progress. The Alliance, as it was known, was the geopolitical backdrop to every move that Thompson made in South America, and he referenced it extensively in his letters and articles. The program stemmed from a sociological concept known as modernization theory, which held that certain early industrialized nations could “take off” economically if they were catalyzed by timely injections of foreign aid. That growth, in turn, would breed Western-style democracy and stave off communism.

  The Alliance was kind of a carrot-and-stick program, calling for democratic elections, land reform, and competitive market policies in exchange for generous bundles of US assistance. It was the beating heart of the Kennedy administration’s policy in Latin America, and Colombia was its first poster child, exhibiting all of what modernization theorists called the “preconditions for take-off”: functioning elections, an urban entrepreneurial class, and a budding manufacturing sector. Today, we’re more likely to associate Colombia with guerrilla armies or narcoterrorism—and indeed, Thompson would see the country’s violent side soon enough—but in terms of development and the democratic process, he accurately described Colombia in 1962 as “one of the most stable countries in South America.”

  These days, though, Colombia’s enthusiastic partnering with the United States doesn’t always sit well with the lefty administrations in nearby Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, whose relationships with the United States are less than cordial. Hence the entertainment value of the UNASUR broadcast. Politicos in Latin America have a well-deserved reputation for impassioned oratory, and as our bus rolled from village to dusty village, Sky and I listened to leaders from each of these countries passionately decrying Colombia’s cozy relationship with what former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez once branded “el imperio yanqui”—the Yankee Empire. The main point of contention was a then-new agreement expanding the US military’s privileges to operate out of Colombian military bases. The neighbors weren’t thrilled at the prospect of having so many uniformed yanquis just a short flight from their borders, and while Colombian courts eventually struck down that accord, the debate over the US military presence in Colombia is still one of the continent’s most divisive.

  So the broadcast held my attention, giving various politicians a chance to show off some of their eyes-to-the-sky, fist-shaking rhetoric. In South America, political actors tend to be large and loud. Writing about Colombia’s colorful Valencia back in 1962, Thompson noted that the bombastic personalities of South American leaders can be every bit as important as their meaningful deeds. He might have been describing a modern-day summit when he wrote of Colombian politics, “In the end it is an old story, the problem of turning words into accomplishments—and at the same time, dealing with diverse quirks, jealousies, opinions, and prejudices.”

  We finally boarded a boat at a town called Magangué, some 120 miles south, where a rusted pontoon ferry shuttles trucks and passengers to the island of Mompós. The river at Magangué looked a lot like it did at the delta, brown and brackish, but with the Barranquilla skyline replaced by a thick forest canopy. The fat, rectangular ferry plowed the wide channel with a diesel roar and all the grace of a bulldozer. Every fifty yards or so, great egrets stared up at us from the banks, and diving cormorants sometimes surfaced in our wake, choking down tadpoles. Fishermen trolled by in long outboard canoes called jhonsos, nodding somber greetings to one another as they dragged their nets for catfish.

  The island that port executive Benjamin González longed to see is roughly the size of Puerto Rico, although it’s always in flux, changing slightly in size and shape as the silt-heavy Magdalena alters its course. For centuries, its namesake town was one of the country’s most prosperous. Back then, the main branch of the river flowed eastward around the island, passing the town of Mompós along its right bank. Magangué, meanwhile, was just a speck of a town to the west, on the mainland and separated from the island by only a thin backwater channel. High-masted merchant ships docked in Mompós. The gold trade made it rich, its isolation made it fiercely independent, and the combination prompted South American libertador Simón Bolívar to treat the city like his personal ATM. He made eight visits between 1812 and 1830, gathering money and men for his various wars of independence elsewhere on the continent.

  After Bolívar, Mompós prospered for another fifty years or so, until the dwindling streamside forests kicked river sedimentation into high gear at the end of the nineteenth century. The Magdalena’s eastern flow slowed to a trickle, and the river’s main course gradually shifted entirely to the west. Magangué boomed, while Mompós was left stranded, effectively cut off from the outside world. Gold stopped coming to town. Dugout canoes replaced the grand merchant ships. And while the rest of Colombia moved into a new era of industrial modernization and civil war, Mompós stayed behind, its quiet colonial steeples keeping watch over a riverfront where galleons once anchored.

  The Model T was still a few years off when Mompós hit the chronological Pause button, and today its brick-lined streets do not comfortably accommodate cars. So our taxi from the ferry terminal dropped us off at a riverside plaza at the edge of town. Stepping out of the cab was like wandering into a historian’s hazy daydream. A perfectly preserved sixteenth-century church loomed over the square, bright goldenrod, as if the stucco had been laid just last week. Its domed bell tower was a fairy tale of baroque detailing, while the nave was boxy and simple, more like a rural mission than a grand colonial cathedral. Across the plaza, a silent, gray customs house was ringed with stone-arched walkway
s, conjuring images of the town in its commercial heyday. Immense ficus trees stretched their branches over the streets, a living awning that gave the whole scene a dim, phantasmic feel of enclosure.

  “Mompós doesn’t exist,” sighs Márquez’s Simón Bolívar, making his last pilgrimage down the river in the novel The General in His Labyrinth. “Sometimes we dream about it, but it doesn’t exist.”

  We spent the next few days wandering sleepy Mompós, admiring the preserved architecture and chatting up the locals, for whom an encounter with a gringo is still a pretty exotic affair. At its busiest, the pace of life there is languid. The dominant pastimes seem to be playing dominoes and sitting outside in rocking chairs. In fact, as one old-timer explained to me, the rocking chair is such a cultural institution that the local variety has its own nickname: the mecedora Mompósina. He was rocking outside of a drugstore when I stopped to admire an unoccupied mecedora at his side, and he invited me to try it out.

  “Nice, yes?” the old man said, fanning himself with a half-rolled newspaper. And indeed it was—a sturdy red cedar with an easy tilt and a wicker panel on its back, essential for airflow in Mompós’s swampy climate. The old man beamed. Mompósino craftsmen have a reputation around the world, he boasted. Fine furniture, carved statues, filigree jewelry—their handiwork was the best in the country.

  “It must be a town full of artisans,” I said.

  Well, the old-timer joked, it’s easy to excel at such pursuits when you’ve had a lot of time on your hands for the last 150 years.

  We talked awhile, and the old man advanced a theory about historical preservation in Mompós, although it may be one better suited to Márquez’s half-enchanted village. The island rests at the bottom of a deep valley, he explained, making a bowl with his hands. This much is true; it’s known to geographers as the Mompós Depression. Well, because of this, the old man said, the winds that gradually wear down the buildings in other towns never blow here, and the sticky humidity of the breezeless afternoon made this seem pretty believable.