The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (28 page)

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:

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.”

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.

“Hay un bloqueo,”
a ticketing attendant told me. “There’s a blockade. Some kind of local border dispute between here and Santa Cruz. We can’t go there until they clear the road. Could be this evening. Could be days from now.”

She was leaning against her counter and smoking, taking a short break from her usual routine of bellowing her company’s destinations at passersby. Andean bus stations are noisy like a carnival midway, echoing with the cries of dozens of barrel-chested ticket vendors, all chant-shouting their itineraries at once.

“So there’s really just one route to Santa Cruz?”

The ticket vendor snorted. “Of course not!” she said, sounding insulted. “There are two.”

“OK then,” I said. “In that case, I’ll take the second one.”

She shook her head angrily. “That one is blockaded also. A truckers’ strike that’s been going on for weeks. You haven’t heard,
señor
? There is no hope of going that way.”

The agent herself sounded frustrated about this fact, so I tried to be sympathetic. “I guess this is a difficult week for buses,” I said. She exhaled a thick cloud of smoke.

“Bolivia is a difficult country for buses,” she spat.

So I opted instead for a six-hundred-mile detour on a dirt-cheap chicken bus going south. Onboard, I was seated next to a very kind, very large Aymara
cholita
, so wrapped in layers of skirts and woolen
manta
blankets that I assumed she was padding herself as precaution against bus collisions. My seatmate had the troubling habit of coughing without covering her mouth, which she indulged in even while leaning over my lap to look out the window.

On the way out of town, we made an hour’s worth of stops in what’s called El Alto, a sprawling suburb on the rim of the canyon that now outpaces La Paz for population growth. El Alto was originally founded as a shantytown by Aymara urban migrants in the mid-twentieth century. In 1962, it was little more than a pop-up nuisance, and Thompson acknowledged it only in passing, mentioning “squatters who have built shacks around the runways at El Alto Airport.” These
days, those squatters have evolved into a sprawling city of one million, more than three-quarters indigenous and overwhelmingly fueled by an “informal sector” of produce stands, cell-phone kiosks, pedicabs, and other low-wage, off-the-books enterprises. Our bus crawled slowly through the gray streets of the improvised city, passing every imaginable sort of sidewalk vendor. By the time we were on the highway, I was the only non-Aymara passenger aboard.

Technically, Potosí is off the Thompson Trail, as the young writer never made it there, but he did write an
Observer
piece focused on Bolivia’s troubled mining industry, and Potosí is the undisputed eye of the five-hundred-year-old storm that is the country’s history of mining. Simply put, Bolivia’s future has always been underground. The Spanish built a new civilization there out of silver, the postcolonial ruling class emerged from tin, and even as Thompson crossed the country, Bolivians were pinning their economic future to petroleum and natural gas reserves in the east. All of this started centuries before at Potosí, when the Quechua servant of a Spanish captain discovered silver on the side of a lonely mountain in 1545.

The peak would ultimately become known as Cerro Rico, or “Rich Hill,” and although the Spanish had already been plundering the riches of the Andes for a few decades at that time, it was Cerro Rico that single-handedly launched both an industry and an empire. Within twenty-five years, an estimated quarter of a billion dollars in silver was extracted from Cerro Rico. Potosí sprang up seemingly overnight. An account from 1573 puts the population of the brand-new city at around 120,000—London, at the time, had around 180,000. By the late eighteenth century, well over a billion dollars in silver had been extracted, and the wealth of Cerro Rico was almost wholly responsible for an international
silver standard that dominated world trade for centuries. In seventeenth-century Europe, the very word “Potosí” became shorthand for unfathomable riches. Writing his masterpiece
Don Quixote
in the early 1600s, Miguel Cervantes had his hero dramatically declare that he would relinquish “the treasures of Venice and the mines of Potosí” to free his enchanted Dulcinea.

Cerro Rico stayed profitable during the tin boom of the early twentieth century, but things went south after it was seized by the government during the National Revolution. Thompson set the scene in 1962: “Near each tin mine in the arid, poverty-ridden nation of Bolivia,” he wrote, “… stands a large, bleak, and fully visible graveyard. The graveyard is a symbol of the condition of the miner, who is responsible for 88 per cent of Bolivian exports and whose life expectancy is 29 years. It may become a symbol of the nation.”

As Thompson explained in an
Observer
piece headlined
OPERATION TRIANGULAR: BOLIVIA’S FATE RIDES WITH IT
, Bolivia’s new government had seized copious underground resources following the National Revolution, but virtually no equipment, most of which had been exported by the savvy tin barons in the months leading up to revolution. In the decade since, worldwide demand for tin had fizzled, and the mines’ new owner, the Bolivian government, had refused to trim back a hugely swollen labor force, justifiably afraid of the powerful unions who’d been so key in overthrowing the last government. The miners’ militias, Thompson pointed out, were still “strong enough to topple the government any day of the week.”

So the industry was hemorrhaging money, and without any revenue coming in, the miners’ living and working conditions were only slightly better than the pre-revolution
arrangement that Thompson called “one of the purest forms of exploitation existing in South America.” That was fifty years ago, and very little has changed at Cerro Rico since.

Modern Potosí is windswept and whisper-quiet. Its wealth has long since dried up, and the city today is one of Bolivia’s poorest, which puts it high in the running for poorest worldwide. I stepped off the bus on a Friday during Lent, and as I walked past the twin-towered cathedral, the only sounds were the muted hymns from inside, drifting like ghosts across an otherwise empty plaza. Dwarfing the cathedral—dwarfing everything, in fact—was the eerily isosceles mound of Cerro Rico itself. Potosí is the highest city in the world, bone-dry and chilly at more than 13,000 feet. The mountain tops out at close to 16,000, and its scraped-clean slopes are visible from anyplace around town, tawny and crumbled, like a sawdust pile. Cerro Rico looks like a good, stiff breeze could scatter it across the plateau, and considering how porous it must be after five centuries of dynamite and drills, I suppose it’s kind of a miracle that it hasn’t yet.

Just off the square, I found an eighteenth-century mansion now converted into a dirt-cheap bunkhouse, and I asked right away about the possibility of a mine tour. Today’s miners work in small cooperatives, pulling tin, copper, zinc, and some low-grade silver out of Cerro Rico, and the smarter co-ops have learned to supplement their meager profits with no-frills, at-your-own-risk crawling tours of the working caverns. Around Potosí, a number of former miners have hung out their shingles as tour guides, most of them with a little education and occasionally some English.