The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (14 page)

The perky English-speaking guide at Bogotá’s Gaitán House Museum thinks that Jorge Gaitán was
amazing
. She mentioned this three or four times as she walked me through the former education and labor minister’s historic home, an unassuming white-stucco colonial in a university neighborhood. It was simply
amazing
, she said, how one man’s oratory could bring together Colombia’s peasants and urban working classes to oppose the country’s powerful oligarchy. It was also
amazing
how a young lawyer could stand up to big, international businesses after a
campesino
massacre on a plantation owned by a US banana grower. She read me one of Gaitán’s most famous quotes, often deployed during his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns: “The people are superior to their leaders.” Wasn’t that an
amazing
thing to say?

As the college-age docent guided me from room to room, she cooed over various artifacts and extolled Gaitán’s contributions to Colombian people. As a national minister and mayor of Bogotá, he’d launched literacy initiatives and school-lunch programs. He’d organized government giveaways of shoes and clothing. And while he was known as a champion of the common people, Gaitán was an educated man who’d studied in Europe. We strolled through his library of more than 3,500 multilingual texts. He was also a health nut, a jogger before there really were joggers, and when we walked into his former study, my young guide proudly pointed to one of those old unexplainable
vibrating-belt exercise machines, tucked into a corner. So
amazing
, she sighed.

When Gaitán was shot by an unstable drifter during his second campaign for president, it touched off three days of rioting in Bogotá and violent clashes throughout the countryside. The urban unrest morphed into strikes and protests under the banner of
gaitanismo
. The rural violence didn’t let up for fifteen years, and some might say it never has. Needless to say, Gaitán has since been pretty well lionized in the Colombian national consciousness. The ruling Conservative Party declared his home a national monument within weeks of the assassination (kind of a backhanded honor, actually, since it meant that his family had to move out). His name is attached to all kinds of infrastructure around Bogotá, and in 2001, he attained the ultimate form of national immortality: he made the currency.

“Do you have a thousand-peso bill?” my guide chirped as we stepped into the courtyard. I handed one over, thinking it was my admission fee, but she just held it out in front of me.

“So this,” she said, pointing to the slick-haired, suited gentleman on the bill’s front side, “is Jorge Gaitán, the hero of the people!” I squinted. He looked like a kindly young guy, his lips turned up in the slightest twinge of a smile, the kind of congeniality you don’t much see on currency portraits. She flipped it over to show me the reverse—Gaitán again, this time pictured with one arm raised before a flag-toting crowd.

“This is a very famous image,” she said.

Then, as an afterthought, she moved her finger to a tiny mustachioed face in the crowd, tucked squarely into Gaitán’s right armpit.

“And that,” she added, “is Fidel Castro.”

Castro, it turns out, was a university student in Havana in 1948 who’d come to Bogotá with a coalition of lefty undergrads to protest an inter-American conference being held there. Candidate Gaitán was supposed to meet with him on the very afternoon of his assassination. During the riots that followed, Castro and his companions stole arms from an overrun police station and joined the raids on various government ministries and right-leaning newspapers. He eventually fled to his embassy and was flown back to Cuba, but Castro has since written that Gaitán’s assassination provoked his transformation from a mere student rabble-rouser into a “true leftist radical.”

Gaitán’s legacy is an entrenched antagonism between the Colombian common man and the perceived elites, and it’s this that keeps the strikers and protestors coming back to Plaza Bolívar year after year. It isn’t a uniquely Colombian tension, of course. In fact, much of Latin America soon adopted Gaitán’s pejorative use of the term
la oligarquía
, which once simply meant “the rule of the few,” but which Gaitán helped imbue with its modern significance—a closed-off, self-perpetuating community of both wealth and political power. What’s impressive about Colombia is both the intensity and staying power of this us-versus-them sentiment. To get a sense of Gaitán’s legacy, think of the hue and cry that surrounded Occupy Wall Street. Then imagine that instead of lasting six months, it stretched on for sixty years.

Gaitán is buried in his own courtyard, and my peppy guide sobered up somewhat while showing me his tomb. Dirt from all corners of Colombia had been gathered to sow over the grave, then dampened with water from the Magdalena. The stone inscription read:
JORGE ELIÉCER GAITÁN, 1903
–∞.

In an early letter from the Magdalena, Thompson mentioned having made the social page of the newspaper in Barranquilla, where (not unlike Honda) a visit from a virtually uncredentialed foreign journalist was apparently still a big enough deal in 1962 to warrant some coverage. The only archive I could find of Barranquilla’s
El Heraldo
was at the National Library in Bogotá. The day I decided to go there turned out to be what the
bogotanos
call Dia Sin Carro.

Bogotá, of course, isn’t all gloomy architecture and street violence. On the contrary, it’s a fun city with great public parks, tasty street food, and what I would later come to appreciate as the only decent beer in all the Andes. It’s also a town with a penchant for ambitious and offbeat social experiments. In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, a pair of progressive-minded mayors earned worldwide recognition for a handful of oddball initiatives that put mimes on the streets to shame bad drivers and banned men from appearing in public a few nights each year. To mitigate traffic, they grounded drivers on alternating days with a kind of license-plate lottery. If your plate ends in an 8, for example, you’re not allowed to drive on Mondays or Thursdays in Bogotá. If it ends with a 6, then you’re busing it on Mondays and Wednesdays. And if it happens to be the first Thursday of February, then all across Bogotá it’s Dia Sin Carro (or Car-Free Day), and ain’t nobody driving anywhere.

Or that’s how it was pitched to me, anyway. So I rented a cheap ten-speed the day before my trip to the National Library, and I was looking forward to cruising there in a Tour de France–style peloton. It turns out, however, that there are many exceptions to Dia Sin Carro. When I wheeled my bike out of the hostel the next morning, I was immediately
confronted by the sights, sounds, and smells of the zillion or so taxis, buses, government vehicles, and
colectivo
microbuses that all still managed to fill the streets.

OK, I thought, so only private cars are banned—surely this still relieves some of the traffic pressure. So I strapped on a rented helmet about as sturdy as a Tupperware bowl and pedaled out into the fray.

To say that Dia Sin Carro relieves some of the traffic pressure in Bogotá is like saying that Tylenol relieves some of the pain from a pencil jammed into your eye. It’s a start. The cobblestone streets of the colonial Candelaria District weren’t so bad, but the broad avenues of El Centro were a calliope of car horns and backfiring buses. I was the only bike on the road for ten blocks in any direction, hemmed in against the curb by a demonic fleet of taxis and more wildly swerving VWs than the parking lot after a Grateful Dead show. The painted lines indicating traffic lanes in Bogotá have as much authority as No Smoking signs on the moon, and the traffic laws are about as stringently enforced. It’s the law of the jungle out there, and a guy on a rickety ten-speed is a hobbling wildebeest. By the time I pulled up to the library, I was white-knuckled and panting from my fifteen-block ride.

Colombia’s national library is an imposing Art Deco building on the edge of the city’s oldest park. Like every other public building in the country, it goes in big for armed security, and the strict visitor protocols seem more geared toward the protection of knowledge than the diffusion of it. This might be a sensible policy, given Bogotá’s off-and-on history of wanton destruction, but navigating the library’s byzantine security process can be challenging for a foreigner. At the registration desk, a brisk attendant issued me a photo ID, then ran me through some ground rules. I could bring in my laptop, but not its case. I could take a pen, but no
notebooks. I would have to relinquish my English-Spanish dictionary, but my camera was OK. Except for its case. No cases of any kind. And after much thought, it was decided that I could bring in
some
papers from my folder, but only the ones I really, really needed.

Eventually, the attendant pointed me toward the periodicals room, where a librarian from the archives set me up with a hand-bound, two-foot-tall book—every edition of
El Heraldo
from the second quarter of 1962. The cover was disintegrating at the corners and opened stiffly.
“Todos originales,”
the librarian said. Microfiche apparently never caught on in Colombia. I turned the crisp beige pages with the utmost care.

There’s something transportive about paging through an old newspaper, a tangible reminder that the events of history were once the events of the day. I inhaled deeply; the pine-cone musk of newsprint only gets stronger with age. First, I leafed through a few articles about the student riots in Barranquilla (“the unfortunate events of last night …”), then a reprint of Kennedy’s congratulatory message to Leon Valencia, Colombia’s president-elect and Thompson’s profile subject. I skimmed the entertainment pages. The season’s biggest movie seems to have been a Raymond Burr romance called
Desire in the Dust
, renamed
Echoes of the Past
in Spanish. I scanned an article about some very early nuclear-disarmament talks in Geneva, then another about Kennedy sending his first major troop deployment to Southeast Asia. Echoes of the past indeed, I thought.

On the “De Sociedad” page of the May 26 issue—beneath a paragraph about a perfume-industry banquet and next to a photo of a froggy-looking but impeccably dressed toddler—I found a small column with the simple headline
PERIODISTA NORTEAMERICANO
. The text is straightforward:

Best impressions? In my head, I played back Thompson’s litany of complaints: the mosquitoes on the Magdalena, the cold water at the Imperial, the strikes, the church bells, the dysentery. By the time he was gearing up to leave Bogotá, I’m not sure that “the best impressions” were among Thompson’s souvenirs. The blurb mentions the
New York Herald Tribune
, for which he’d written a few stories from the Caribbean years before. That the
National Observer
goes unmentioned is a reminder that Thompson was only a freelancer—he had no guarantee that
anyone at all
would be buying his articles. He mentions selling two short items to the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
for $20. It took the
Observer
weeks to pay up for his first two pieces from Colombia, the Guajiran travelogue and the Valencia profile, and until they did, Thompson had virtually no money coming in. It occurred to me that one reason for his bleak outlook on Bogotá might have been the looming threat of utter destitution.

All the same, I smiled to read the
Heraldo
item. How many other researchers had plumbed the Colombian archives
to dig up this piece of Thompsonalia? Not many, I thought. Maybe none. So I felt pretty good about myself as I wheeled my ten-speed back into the war zone of downtown traffic. For weeks, I’d been following a route parallel to Thompson’s, but there in that fluorescent-lit reading room, my fingers smudged with fifty-year-old ink, I felt for the first time like our paths had crossed.

“There is a hell of a problem here in Colombia with what they call the Rural Violence,” Thompson wrote to an editor from Cali. “This means that out in the countryside, there are a good many people who pass the time of day whacking off their neighbor’s [
sic
] heads with machetes.… I came over the mountains in a taxi from Bogota, right through the center of the bad area, and people here have yet to get over it.”

The sun-soaked metro of Santiago de Cali is quite a taxi ride from Bogotá, three hundred miles west of the capital and across two of the three mountain “fingers” that Colombians (and geologists) call cordilleras. It’s also a full mile lower than Bogotá, at the edge of a broad valley carved out by the Cauca River. Fertile and ringed with mountains, the Valle del Cauca is a longtime producer of industrial-scale cash crops like sugarcane, soy, and cotton. Then, in the 1970s, farmers there went all-in on the cashiest crop of them all: coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine. The subsequent rise and fall of the Cali Cartel brought money and glamour like
caleños
had never seen. It also brought horrific violence, which, as Thompson suggested, they’d already seen quite a bit of.