The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (15 page)

With regard to what motivated people to dismember their neighbors: Thompson happened to be passing through Colombia at a pivotal moment, just as the partisan chaos of La Violencia was coalescing into the orchestrated guerrilla campaigns that would plague the country for the next fifty years. Ever since Gaitán’s assassination, rural bandits had been wreaking havoc on the countryside, taking advantage of the political freefall to settle old scores, seize land, and generally rule by brutal intimidation. Trying (unsuccessfully) to pitch a story to a men’s magazine, Thompson described in gruesome detail the photos he’d seen of rural atrocities: dead pregnant women, their fetuses ripped out and replaced by cats; victims with their throats slashed and tongues pulled out through the wound, a maneuver known as the “Colombian necktie.” Thompson called the photos “the goriest goddamn things I’ve ever seen.”

The violence subsided a bit in 1958, when the Liberal and Conservative parties signed a power-sharing agreement after a decade at odds—a big reason why Thompson could write about Colombia’s political stability four years later. But he also theorized in his pitch letter that the remaining bandits could represent “the nucleus for a guerrilla army,” and in this he was proven all too correct. Rather than dispersing, some bandits decamped to semiautonomous mountain hideaways, many of them encircling the Valle del Cauca. These enclaves attracted political dissidents from the cities, and gradually the leftist ideology motivating urban strikers and students blended with the militancy of the rural outlaws. The FARC was born in 1964 when the Colombian military attacked one such outpost, near Cali. The rebels there, once a disorganized peasant mob, became radicalized, a socialist militia bent on government overthrow, and similar outfits emerged throughout the ’60s and ’70s.

These days, the FARC is the only real guerrilla bloc left in Colombia, and decades after insinuating itself into the narcotics trade, there isn’t much ideology left, just a fanatical devotion to drug profits. The Valle del Cauca is one of the FARC’s last strongholds, but even there, in post-Uribe Colombia, the group is pretty marginalized. On my own overnight ride into Cali, the biggest danger in the mountains was that my climate-controlled coach might lose its 3G wireless signal.

Cali today is no more dangerous than Bogotá, but it didn’t take me long to realize that the two cities are profoundly different. For starters, Cali is hot. Never mind the 3,200-foot elevation—the city is just a few ticks north of the equator and every bit as sweltering as Barranquilla and the coast. With a year-round growing season, it’s grassy and colorful where Bogotá is stony and muted. The day I arrived, I took a long walk through breezy palms lining the pedestrian trail downtown. The path led to Parque Jorge Isaacs, where flirty couples lounged beneath giant gothic banyan trees. Farther along was another small park with a few dozen colorful cat statues, any of which would have seemed out of place among the marble heroes and classical busts of Bogotá. There was still plenty of traffic, of course, but the café diners at their canopied tables seemed noticeably unhurried, sipping beer and not coffee in the early afternoon, and even among the steel towers of the business district, people walked languidly, stopping here and there to chat.

Sky was right about the women, too. They were indeed stunning, absurdly voluptuous and dressed to beat the heat—which is to say, minimally. Cali is famous for both its nightlife (it’s the self-proclaimed salsa capital of the world) and its enthusiastic embrace of cosmetic surgery (with more plastic surgeons per capita than anywhere else in Colombia). So it’s
maybe no surprise that Thompson found there the ambient sexual energy he’d been missing in Bogotá. “Walking the streets here can drive a man up the wall in ten minutes,” he wrote admiringly. Cali, he noted, was famous even then for its beautiful women, although the city’s obsession with silicone probably owes much to the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that prevailed during the heyday of the Cali Cartel. Laundered money from that era also fueled (and is perhaps still fueling) a building boom, so what Cali lacks in charming colonial architecture it makes up for with an impressive skyline. Today’s central Cali is a thick forest of luxury high-rises, more than you’d expect in a city of 2.4 million, and from anywhere on the streets of downtown I could crane my neck to spot a half dozen rooftop oases, impossibly distant and ringed with palms.

If high-mountain Bogotá is the love child of Denver and DC, then Cali is Miami’s less trashy, landlocked stepsister. Thompson called it the “Valhalla of Colombia, which in turn is the Valhalla of South America.” He loved the city, the encroaching rural violence notwithstanding. Whether it was the sunshine, the women, or perhaps an
Observer
paycheck finally putting some pesos in his pocket, Cali seemed to restore Thompson’s enthusiasm for the trip. The
caleño
poet Ricardo Nieto might have been speaking for him a few decades earlier, when he wrote the memorable line “I would rather have a hangover in Cali than a party in Bogotá.”

One muggy afternoon in Cali, Thompson watched as a wealthy British expatriate drove golf balls off the terrace of his downtown penthouse apartment. Sipping a tall gin and tonic, the tubby Brit chatted nonchalantly with Thompson and a dozen other guests, pausing every so often for a swing, then relaxing his stance as the white orbs rose and
fell, landing somewhere among the sheet-metal roofs of the impoverished neighborhood below.

So begins “Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border,” Thompson’s
Observer
piece that arguably made the most waves. It’s the only one of his stories that mentions Cali, written and published in the summer of 1963, after Thompson had returned to the United States. In about two thousand words, Thompson outlines a process of gradual disillusionment, cynicism, and finally hostile superiority that he saw playing out among many North American businessmen, bureaucrats, and NGO types in South America. The story opens on the callous golfing “Britisher,” then shifts its focus to a hypothetical American relief worker named John. How much either character is based on a real-world personage is a mystery, but in Thompson’s telling, John starts out sympathetic and ambitious, eager to make a difference in this part of the world. Soon, however, he finds himself a victim of petty crimes and hassles, perpetrated by the very people he’s working to help. All the while, he hears disparaging remarks about the greedy capitalist gringos, and in a moment of frustration, he retorts with an insult of his own. His relationship with the community deteriorates thereafter, and as John imparts his increasingly caustic views to new recruits, it instigates a downward spiral of resentment and distrust between the locals and the formerly well-meaning Americans.

What’s more, Thompson continues, the wealthy elite in much of Latin America in 1962 took a pretty dim view of empowering the poor. Too robust a democracy threatened to upset the apple cart for powerful upper-class families—those whom Gaitán would have called
la oligarquía
—many of whom didn’t imagine they had much in common with the people in the streets. Meanwhile, since even a moderately
paid American is wealthy by Latin American standards, a gringo abroad often ends up running with exactly this moneyed crowd. And in an effort to do as the Romans do, many an expatriate “not only tends to ape the wealthy, antidemocratic Latins,” wrote Thompson, “but sometimes beats them at their own game.” In other words, a decent middle-class guy from Montana suddenly finds himself living in a luxury loft, insulated from local hardships and screaming at the maid.

We have a phrase for this kind of behavior, one that was just coming into parlance in the early 1960s—acting the “ugly American.” It’s a term that derives from a 1958 novel by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, a moral fable about arrogance, entitlement, and willful ineptitude among American diplomats and businessmen, and about how their actions were losing us the Cold War in a fictional Asian country called Sarkhan. The embassy crowd in Sarkhan is blithe and somewhat boorish. Most foreign service officers are indifferent to the culture, unable to speak the language, and more concerned with schmoozing the cocktail circuit than listening to the concerns of their host nation. Fraternizing with the locals is discouraged, and the superiority of American ideas is sacrosanct. There’s no telling whether Thompson read
The Ugly American
before coming to South America, but he could hardly have been unaware of it. The book was a phenomenon that spent seventy-eight weeks on the bestseller list and prompted a national conversation about the role of the US diplomatic corps. Senator John F. Kennedy had mailed a copy to all his legislative colleagues. Thompson would have made it home in 1963 just in time to catch the Marlon Brando adaptation in theaters.

What’s more,
The Ugly American
itself came on the heels of Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American
, another bestseller
revolving around expatriate American antiheroes and the consequences of their hubris. Published in 1956,
The Quiet American
painted a different picture, this one of a true believer—“not one of those noisy bastards,” as the book’s British narrator explains, but an earnest young aid worker in Vietnam, so convinced of his essential rightness that it blinds him to collateral damage. (Thompson later praised the book, saying it “gave the Vietnam experience a whole new meaning.”) The back-to-back success of these books was no accident. Both were published near the zenith of the Cold War containment era, when the battle for hearts and minds was raging fiercely and the question of how America represented itself abroad was a hot one. Sure, we’d been traipsing the globe for some two hundred years already, but only in the decade before Thompson’s visit had it become a matter of policy that Americans
make a good impression
while we were out there. Television and the dawning jet age were just giving many Americans their first glimpse of what “out there” even looked like. At the same time, the Cold War was prompting a mass realization that American identity was shaped as much by our actions abroad as by our aspirations at home.

Of course, Cali wasn’t the first place that Thompson had encountered the “ugly American” mentality. He’d seen his share of crass American profiteers two years earlier in Puerto Rico, and his unpublished manuscript for
The Rum Diary
actually borrowed themes from Greene. More recently, in Bogotá, he’d written off other American journalists and the embassy’s “Alliance for Progress boys” as clueless hacks, in it only for show. “They are hauling the indians out of mud huts and putting them in huts made of concrete blocks,” he wrote, “then hiring $100-a-day photographers to take pictures of the progress.… I think all the good Americans died in a riot somewhere.”

But in the closing lines of “Anti-Gringo Winds,” Thompson seems to acknowledge how easy it was to drift into this mind-set of cavalier self-importance. “Now, looking back on that man with the golf club,” he wrote, “it is easy to see him as a fool and beast. But I recall quite well how normal it seemed at the time, and how surprised I would have been if any of the dozen people on the terrace had jumped up to protest.”

What Americans were realizing about their national identity, Thompson was coming to realize about individuals—namely, that who we are away from home is a powerful indicator of who we are
really
, a window into our fundamental character. If I’m honest, my own suspicion of this was partly why I’d wanted to come to South America. I imagine the same was true for Thompson, coming up in the era of ugly and quiet Americans. As I sipped a beer in one of Cali’s riverfront cafés, I could almost picture him sitting at the next table over, staring up thoughtfully at the high-rises and asking himself the same question running through my mind:
What kind of American am I going to be?

Without any particular task to accomplish in Cali, I spent most of my time just walking around, eating chorizo from street carts and searching for a glimpse of the city as Thompson might have seen it. Fifty years ago, Cali was just a quarter of its current size, and I found old photos in bookstores that made it look manicured and idyllic, like one giant retirement community. I got a weird blast from the past as I walked by a small art fair, where portraits of John F. Kennedy seemed only slightly less popular than representations of Christ. One of the canvases showed the president seated with Jackie, staring nobly at something off and to the left, in the manner of a senior class photo. Kennedy was such a presence during Thompson’s tour of South America—his
policies shaping the continent even as Thompson traveled it—and I was tickled to encounter him here. When I asked the artist why JFK, she just smiled at me and shrugged.

“Era un buen hombre,”
she said, as if it were self-evident.
“Todos les gusta.”
He was a good man. Everyone likes him. I didn’t ask why there weren’t any portraits of Eisenhower, Johnson, or Nixon.

I spent an afternoon trying to get up into one of the rooftop gardens crowning the many apartment towers. I was hoping I could soak up some of the colossus perspective and cold isolation that Thompson had attributed to the Britisher and his guests. If you’re looking for a concrete manifestation of the distance between rich and poor, a high-rise penthouse is hard to beat—especially in an urban South American landscape, where movement and noise on the ground simply never cease. A penthouse in Colombia, I imagine, is equal parts castle, keep, and sensory deprivation chamber.

But every high-rise in Cali, it turns out, has large and intimidating guards, and none of them want to let a perspiring gringo with a backpack wander freely through their property. Under a brutal midday sun, I crisscrossed the downtown, cajoling to the extent that my crappy Spanish allowed, offering to pay a “fee” directly to the doorman, even playing the clueless tourist and trying to breeze right on through. No dice. After a few hours of fruitless inquiries, I was too sweaty for anyone to take me seriously, and I threw in the towel.