The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (42 page)

What everyone agreed about is that Brazil right now is a land of opportunity, a place where an outsider with some ambition can write his or her own ticket. The Texan called it “a country that’s on the way up,” and not one of
my correspondents failed to mention Brazil’s role as host of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics—widely viewed as validation of the country’s increasing global prominence. Thompson had called Brazil a “semi-dormant nation,” but it is dormant no more. Socially, politically, and economically, the country has come a long way since the currency crisis and the fall of Jango. The military government that replaced him stayed in power until 1985—staunchly anti-communist, but increasingly oppressive, violent, and indifferent to human rights. Even after its transition back to democracy, Brazil struggled well into the ’90s with corruption, inflation, and debt.

Ironically, it wasn’t until the country pivoted
back
to the left that it morphed into a global powerhouse. Under labor hero Luiz Inácio da Silva, elected in 2002, Brazil made huge strides against poverty and became the world’s eighth-largest economy. “Lula” is a former head of the steelworkers’ union, once jailed for leading strikes in the 1970s. His generous social spending helped create a new Brazilian middle class, and his tight regulation of banks minimized fallout from the global recession. This prompted big-time foreign investment, much of it in the country’s booming oil industry. Brazil today still struggles with corruption and the cost of living, but economically it’s riding high, and current president Dilma Rousseff is Lula’s handpicked successor, a former Marxist agitator herself who was also jailed and tortured by the military regime.

As an indication of the country’s rapid progress, everyone I spoke with referenced the ongoing “pacification” of the favelas—Rio’s famously crowded and violent hillside slums. Since 2008, heavily armed squadrons of military and police have been systematically invading the city’s most plagued neighborhoods, seizing weapons, expelling gangs
and militias, arresting drug lords, and establishing a permanent police presence in areas that have long been essentially lawless. With dozens of favelas now patrolled for the first time in decades, murders and robberies have decreased, and basic services are reaching many areas that were formerly off-limits. The pacification campaign arguably reached its pinnacle in November of 2010, when the Brazilian military took control of a sector called Complexo do Alemão, the city’s largest network of favelas and one of its most impregnable. When I was in Rio, the Brazilian Army had only just relinquished control of the area to civilian police.

I went to Complexo do Alemão on an overcast day during my last week in town. Since the moment I’d stepped off the plane in Barranquilla, the experience of profound poverty had been such a common thread across South America, I had almost become desensitized to it. Notably, I’m not sure you can say the same thing about Thompson. His vivid and affected descriptions of the “fear & rot in the streets” color his writing right up through his final dispatches from the continent. The favelas would have been conspicuous during his time in Rio, having swelled considerably over the previous decade as country-dwellers flocked to the city seeking jobs in the ballooning industrial sector. In 1950, there were 58 favelas on Rio’s hilly outskirts. By 1962, there were about 150, and one in every ten Cariocas lived somewhere in the city’s sloping shantytowns.

In an effort to stem the tide of squatters, the Alliance for Progress funded vast residential developments on the city’s outskirts, but in many cases, these simply devolved into new slums. Just months before Thompson’s visit, thousands of favela dwellers had been “resettled” out of Rio’s affluent south and into new, Alliance-funded developments on the city’s western edge. By the time I showed up, neighborhoods
like “Vila Aliança” and “Vila Kennedy” were among the most brutally violent on the continent, high on the list for future pacification.

There are close to 1,000 favelas in Rio today, tightly packed pop-up communities that house a third of the city’s population. Some 400,000 people live in Complexo do Alemão alone, a network of adjacent favelas filling up neighboring hillsides in the city’s Zona Norte. Each one is set progressively farther from Rio’s main roads and transit corridors, and until pacification, it took residents hours just to reach the city proper. Then, in 2011, the city unveiled an aerial tramway that links Complexo do Alemão to Rio’s train system, soaring above the district’s chaotic tangle of single-lane roads and M. C. Escher staircases. I bought my ticket at the connecting station and climbed into a tram car alone.

From the air, Complexo do Alemão is actually pretty breathtaking, a geometric chaos of rectangles upon rectangles. The colorful, flat-roofed houses are stacked on top of one another like matchboxes, and they look about as sturdy. I stared out the windows at the narrow streets and footpaths that spidered through the neighborhoods and marveled that these seemed to be the only undeveloped patches for miles. There were no green spaces and no parking lots—just an uninterrupted slag pile of housing. At first glance, Complexo do Alemão doesn’t necessarily look any poorer or more dangerous than similar slums in Bogotá, Lima, or La Paz, but the sheer density of the place set my head spinning.

I got off at the last tram stop, but I didn’t wander far. The visible presence of policemen toting M-16s was in some ways reassuring, but I worried about getting lost on the nonsensically snaking streets. I walked down a long and steep
staircase, through a claustrophobic corridor of houses. Most of them were brick and about the size of a train car; others were tiled on the outside like bathroom walls or slapped together with a polychrome of scrap wood. Laundry lines stretched across the rooftops like prayer flags in some jumbled Tibetan monastery. Occasionally, an alleyway stretched between the houses, and I waved to the kids I saw playing there, barefoot and clutching naked dolls.

The stairway ended at a dirt road lined with trash piles and graffitied storefronts, where I picked a direction at random and started walking. The street was empty, but from inside the darkened bodegas, unsmiling men looked out at me with vacant eyes. Their gazes betrayed nothing—not curiosity or irritation or welcome. It was uncomfortable, and I looked away. I thought sadly of T. S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Hollow Men,” about the “eyes I dare not meet in dreams.” The street kept winding along, silent except for the occasional mongrel dog rifling through the trash. On either side was a row of slab-concrete houses behind crumbling brick walls. I followed the road, curving this way and that for all of ten minutes, just long enough to get confused about which direction I’d come from. Then I turned around and retraced my steps.

Heading back up the long stairway to the tram, I slowed up behind a young girl and her father, who were trudging toward the station with agonizing slowness. The girl seemed to have some severe physical handicaps—muscular dystrophy, I guessed—and her father watched her silently from behind as she made her way up, one gasping step at a time. Of course, medical facilities in Complexo do Alemão are sparse to nonexistent, and I couldn’t imagine how this girl managed to navigate the crumbling cubist landscape of the favela each day. When her father heard me coming up behind, he gently
tugged on his daughter’s sleeve. I thanked them quietly as I walked past, and I ascended the rest of the staircase feeling the weight of their misfortune.

It is a testament to Thompson’s moral core that the misery of places like Rio’s favelas seemed to weigh on him as well. As I rode the slow tram back over the clutter of Complexo do Alemão, I felt that just maybe I had finally zeroed in on the foremost way in which South America changed Thompson’s outlook on things. In the early months of 1963, having lost his
Brazil Herald
gig, Thompson saw his initial affluence fade, and his enthusiasm for Rio faded with it. His later articles and letters from Brazil give a vague sense that something in him is about to crack. In a letter from early April, Thompson warned his editor at the
Observer
that he was starting to come undone:

I find this passage to be one of the most poignant in all of Thompson’s writing. Not only because it shows the genuine vulnerability of a young writer who was once so eager to “sink his teeth” into South America. And not only because it illustrates an empathy for society’s castaways that would stick with Thompson in the years to come. It also contains
the sad, implicit admission that struggle and revolt are nothing more than cathartic rituals for the “harassed, badgered & put upon” masses: a kind of pressure-release valve that masquerades as ideology and fosters little change. As Thompson watched, again and again, the Sisyphean struggles of the South American underclass, he felt inside of him a growing tension, a vague and nameless friction between political idealism and tragicomic nihilism. Before long, that tension that would manifest itself as something called “gonzo journalism.”

In a year of South American travel, Thompson had seen the left revolt against the right, the right revolt against the left, the powerful putting down the people, and the people dispensing with the powerful. And yet everywhere, he still encountered the same urban beggars, the same starving miners, the same illiterate Indians and destitute
campesinos
. If Thompson’s year abroad showed him why the United States would never be “what it could have been, or at least tried to be,” maybe it’s because he looked homeward and saw just how much of the American project in the twentieth century had become the unchallenged domain of parties, movements, and isms—and he had come to suspect their futility. The goal of the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy had said, was to “lift people up from poverty, ignorance, and despair,” but in South America, Thompson saw how the Alliance’s pro-growth, anti-communist aims left it hopelessly mired in empty isms and fruitless uprisings. From where he stood in Rio, the poverty and ignorance and despair seemed entrenched in ways that none of these mechanisms could touch.

A year after returning to the States, Thompson wrote a book review in the
Observer
, noting that “the difficulties thus far confronting the Alliance for Progress should be a good indication of how easily a fine and noble idea can get
bogged down in unforeseen realities.” It’s exactly the kind of language he would later adopt to describe both the counterculture and the American Dream. This dichotomy—of noble illusions versus grim realities—would become a recurring theme in much of Thompson’s work. In the end, he couldn’t buy into the supposed “good life” of the South American expat, but for years after leaving the continent, the lessons he learned there still continued to shape his work. In 1970, in a campaign ad from his quixotic run for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, Thompson might have been channeling the frustrated hopes of the Indians, miners, and
campesinos
when he wrote:

It is pure speculation on my part, but one final event in February of 1963 may have further jangled Thompson’s nerves and soured him on life in Rio. On the first of that month, about an hour before dawn, Thompson woke to a frantic phone call from a friend. The Army was killing people right outside of a Copacabana nightclub, the voice shouted, at a place called the Domino. The caller was locked inside a nearby club, watching the violence play out in the street. Over his tinny connection, the still-groggy Thompson heard his unnamed friend yelling that he needed to get down to the nightclub district and see what was going on, and he needed to go
now
.

The Domino, it turned out, was on the very same cobblestone nightclub strip as the Kilt Club. By the time Thompson pulled up in a cab, the shooting had stopped and the soldiers moved on. The sidewalk was littered with slug casings and broken glass. In front of the club, an unexploded hand grenade lay ominously in the street, and blood pooled on the asphalt where a doorman had been killed. Medics were loading an injured bartender and several patrons into ambulances, and bystanders were still milling about in the road, stunned and inspecting the damage. Thompson walked among them, passing right outside the bar where he liked to drink and talk politics, and his observations formed the basis for a powerful article that the
Observer
ran ten days later. The headline read
DAYBREAK AT THE DOMINO: BRAZILIAN SOLDIERS STAGE A RAID IN REVENGE
.

Rereading the piece in my grungy hostel one afternoon, I just about fell off my bunk when I realized that the Domino Club had also been on tiny Rua Carvalho de Mendonça, just blocks away from where I was sitting. A half hour later, I was back down at the Orgasmo, where the beer-bellied proprietor smiled to see me coming. With help from my Portuguese phrasebook, I managed to ask him whether he knew anything about the story of the ambushed club.

“Doh-mee-nah, doooh-me-nah,”
Dom Orgasmo said, stroking his chin. He shook his head vigorously and stepped out onto the sidewalk, leaving his bar unattended and motioning for me to follow.
“Vem comigo,”
he said. Come with me.

The violence at the Domino was a major news story at the time. The renegade soldiers were avenging the death of a sergeant who’d been killed there weeks before, beaten to death when a fight broke out over his bill. “The establishment was completely wrecked,” according to the
Brazil
Herald
’s coverage the next day. The culprits were a “paratrooper detail with blackened faces” who barricaded the street before firing tear gas and machine guns into the crowd. For Brazilians, the shooting at the Domino was an ominous reminder that, more and more, the military was acting with impunity. In retrospect, it seemed to foreshadow the country’s impending military takeover. As Thompson pointed out, “The basic problem is hardly unique to Brazil: Where civil authority is weak and often corrupt, the military gets power by default.”