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

by Brian Kevin

  “I’m beginning to think that my coming here is like an Abolitionist going to the Old South,” Thompson wrote. “And considering the relations between the Indians and the wealthy (there is no other group) I think the comparison is fairly apt.”

  Thompson wrote three separate stories from Peru, one on his first visit and two more when he returned the next spring. The first two cover the country’s deteriorating political situation: the military takeover, the following year’s proposed “do-over” election, and what Peruvians’ nonchalant responses to the coup said about their attitude toward democracy. The first article ran with the headline DEMOCRACY DIES IN PERU, BUT FEW SEEM TO MOURN ITS PASSING. In its opening lines, Thompson sums up the scene that he walked into: Nobody took to the streets when the military annulled the election results, and Thompson compared the “death of democracy” in Peru to “the death of somebody’s old uncle, whose name had been familiar in the household for years. But he died where he had always lived, in some far-off town the family never quite got around to visiting.”

  When my bus finally pulled into Lima, it had been nine months since Peru’s last election, but the campaign detritus still littered most of the capital’s major thoroughfares. Big elections transform a Latin American cityscape like they transform prime-time television at home—they clutter it up with all kinds of obnoxious crap. Good taste has never been a prerequisite to run for the Peruvian Congress, and on my way into town, I saw one sun-bleached cardboard cutout of a candidate hitchhiking, another of a candidate flexing his biceps in a muscle tee, and a few torn campaign posters for a candidate named “Doctor Marcos,” who wore a full lab coat and stethoscope, in case the title didn’t sell you on his medical credentials.

  The marquee event during the last election, though, had been the presidency, and most of Lima’s dumpier buildings—including many private homes—still bore a fairly fresh coat of paint with the name of the candidate whose team had first shown up there with a paintbrush and a bag of rice.

  Presidential politics in Peru are fabulously sordid. Consider that the country’s last president, Alan García, had already held the office once in the 1980s, a term that bankrupted the country, immediately after which he escaped to Europe to avoid embezzlement charges. His successor was Alberto Fujimori, a conservative authoritarian who was eventually deemed “morally unfit” by the Peruvian Congress. After fleeing to Japan and attempting to resign via fax, Fujimori was extradited and convicted of corruption, kidnapping, and mass murder. He is currently serving twenty-five years in a Peruvian jail for approving death squads in the war against the Shining Path guerrillas. The following election brought in Alejandro Toledo, who confessed in office to having a secret illegitimate daughter and was plagued by media accusations of soliciting prostitutes and using cocaine. Following his term, the country took a long second look at old Alan García, decided he wasn’t so bad after all, and elected him again.

  I was beginning to understand why half of Thompson’s South America stories were about electoral politics. His literary idol, Faulkner, couldn’t have written better antiheroes, and there’s a kind of fatalistic absurdity to Latin American politics that seems to jibe with Thompson’s later gonzo persona. You can’t invent storylines like this: Toledo bounced back from the hookers-and-blow accusations to place a respectable fourth in the most recent election. He was edged out for third by an ethnic German economist, an affable gringo whose wife is from Wisconsin and who frequently appeared on campaign stops with his official mascot of a giant dancing guinea pig. Meanwhile, the top two candidates on the ballot were Keiko Fujimori, the chirpy thirty-six-year-old daughter of the imprisoned former president, and Ollanta Humala, a former military commander who once led a failed coup against Keiko’s dad. Nothing awkward about that.

  Neither Keiko nor Humala picked up 50 percent of the vote in the first round, so under Peruvian law, the election went into a run-off contest, a second round between only the two of them. To the nearly half of Peruvians who had voted for somebody else in the first round, the election seemed like a classic lose-lose situation. Keiko was an arch-conservative whose main platform seemed to be pardoning her war-criminal father. Many Peruvians feared a return to the days of secret police, forced sterilizations, and constitutional rewrites that characterized Fujimori’s government in the 1990s. Humala, meanwhile, was on the far left side of the spectrum, but also the son of a prominent ultra-nationalist. He had narrowly lost the previous election after declaring his admiration for then-alive-and-kicking Hugo Chávez and vowing to nationalize several industries.

  Of course, this lesser-among-evils scenario isn’t new for Peruvian voters. Thompson captured the similarly ambivalent atmosphere of 1963 when he described the front-runner of the reboot election as “the best of a bad lot.” The same sentiment was echoed last time around by Peru’s Nobel Prize–winning author Mario Vargas Llosa (a onetime presidential candidate himself), who told the press that choosing between Keiko and Humala was like choosing between cancer and AIDS.

  I crashed in Lima with Reid Wilson, an old friend teaching second grade at one of the capital’s most exclusive American schools. Reid’s a monkish vagabond of a guy, a vegetarian surfer and avid reader of New Age psychology who always looks a bit drowsy but was in fact one of the sharpest guys in my college graduating class. His students are the children of the Peruvian elite: government ministers, old-money families, and corporate and industrial titans—what Thompson called Peru’s “all-powerful aristocracy.” Both of the Peruvians on the Forbes list of world billionaires send their kids to Reid’s school, and even as second-graders, his students are being groomed for their eventual application into American colleges. Reid’s a hardworking teacher, popular with students, parents, and administrators alike, but he’s also pretty clear-eyed about the insular and privileged world that his students occupy.

  “There was a joke making the faculty rounds during the last election,” he told me on the day I showed up. “Ollanta Humala is driving through the streets of La Molina”—the country-club residential district where Reid teaches—“when suddenly, all the neighborhood kids start crowding the sidewalks and cheering his name. O-llan-ta! O-lla-nta!

  “So Humala thinks, This is great! I’m finally making some headway with the upper class! And he pulls over the car to thank the kids for their support.

  “ ‘Thank you for believing in the revolution!’ he cries. ‘It is so important to have the youth on our side!’

  “ ‘Revolution?’ says one of the kids. ‘All I know is that my dad said if you win, we get to move to Miami!’ ”

  Among the kind of people who volunteer for the PTA at Reid’s school, the prospect of a socialist-leaning president was about as ominous as a return to Fujimori-style dictatorship. It would herald the declining influence of the rich and educated class, along with a possible windfall tax on corporate profits and maybe even a government takeover of mines and utilities. In Bolivia, leftist president Evo Morales had recently nationalized the country’s oil and natural gas fields. In Venezuela, Chávez had gone so far as to expropriate golf courses, vacation homes, and private yachts in the name of state tourism. Thanks to a booming mineral industry and high commodities prices, money has been rapidly flowing into Lima’s private sector since the early 2000s. But all of this could dry up under Humala, the gentry feared—or anyway, it could be redirected into government coffers and social programs for the rural poor.

  In Reid’s neighborhood, a beachside condo and tourism district called Miraflores, evidence of Peru’s recent prosperity was hard to avoid. Reid himself was living a solidly upper-middle-class lifestyle, paying just under $1,100 a month for a sleek and spacious loft that most Manhattanites would drool over (Peru’s minimum monthly wage, by contrast, is about $280). Outside his windows, palm trees speckled a long beachside park and paragliders drifted on coastal thermals like windswept pieces of confetti. On the streets, there was no escaping the sounds of construction. Miraflores and its neighboring districts were
veritable jungles of cranes and steel scaffolding, with gleaming apartment towers going up anyplace they would fit. In recent years, some of the best restaurants in the world have opened up in these neighborhoods, along with a clutch of designer handbag stores and modern art galleries catering to tourists and the Peruvian 1 percent.

  My first task in Lima, though, was to venture into a very different part of the city—not a poor one exactly, but a working-class, light-industrial neighborhood called Breña, right on the edge of downtown. When the guidebooks mention Breña, which is rarely, they tend to use the word “dodgy.” In the heart of all that dodginess is a walled complex with a wrought-iron gate known as the Casa del Pueblo, or the People’s House. It’s the headquarters of Peru’s oldest political party, called the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, the historic champion of Peru’s common man. And it was here in 1962 that the military took a stand for the Peruvian elite the last time that a candidate of the populist left threatened to upset the established order.

  On the night of August 7, 1962, Thompson stood outside the Casa del Pueblo with a crowd of onlookers, watching as the military relinquished the building they’d invaded two weeks prior. APRA’s candidate had placed first in the presidential election that summer, but neither the military nor the upper class nor most business interests particularly wanted a lefty champion of the poor running their country. So the military annulled the election, drove some tanks through the gates of the presidential palace, seized power, and ransacked the Casa del Pueblo. Even then, the complex was as much a community center as a political nerve center, and Thompson’s catalog of the destruction gives a pretty good idea of the range of services that APRA provided:

  There were bullet holes in the walls and ceiling; doors and windows had been smashed and party records destroyed; and the entire building—nearly a city block of offices and facilities—was littered with glass, broken furniture, and water-soaked paper. Among the smashed or stolen items were the only dentist drills, all medicine from the clinic and drugs from the pharmacy, typewriters, a radio transmitter, all phonograph records, sculpture in the art workshop, instruments for the children’s band, food and plates from the dining hall, and records from the credit union.

  I walked up to the Casa del Pueblo on a characteristically muggy afternoon. My walk over had led through a tangle of blighted residential streets along the city’s hopelessly polluted Rio Rimac, and I’d heard a few “Hey, gringo!” catcalls from darkened doorways. The street out front was a six-lane boulevard, traffic-choked and deafening, with irritable limeño drivers leaning on their horns for every conceivable reason and no reason at all. The building itself was an anachronism, a powder-blue colonial manor wedged between dingy office buildings and staring across the busy road at one of the big-box stores that South Americans call hipermercados. Even the giant red star atop the Casa del Pueblo—instantly recognizable to Peruvians as the APRA logo—looked antiquated and tired.

  That red star, and its inevitable associations with communism, probably made some American business and policy types very nervous around the time of Thompson’s visit. APRA did indeed have its roots in socialism. Its presidential candidate, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, had founded the party in 1924 on a platform of land reform, state ownership of industry, and integration of the country’s indigenous majority. But the rallying cry of APRA was “Neither Washington Nor Moscow!” In a photo that Thompson took of several young Apristas (APRA supporters) cleaning up the wreckage at the Casa del Pueblo, a sign in the background reads, APRA SI, COMMUNISMO NO! Because of this anti-Soviet attitude, the Kennedy administration saw Haya de la Torre as an ally in the Alliance for Progress. But Peru’s wealthy and urban criollos (Spanish-descended “whites”) wanted to preserve the status quo, and as Thompson pointed out, they didn’t much care whether the country’s leadership was democratically elected.

  “The people [in Peru] who need democracy don’t even know what the word means,” he wrote. “The people who know what it means don’t need it, and they don’t mind saying so.”

  I walked into the Casa del Pueblo to find dozens of photos and busts of Haya de la Torre, the preempted would-be president. He was a doughy and clean-shaven guy with the benevolent look of a sitcom granddad. Thompson made no secret of his admiration, calling Haya de la Torre “a brilliant orator and writer and one of the most determined reformers in the history of Latin America.” No one bothered me as I wandered around the courtyard, picturing the buildings as Thompson might have seen them fifty years before. There was still a dentist’s office and a “people’s pharmacy,” and the on-site high school had just let out. I walked past a computer lab filled with uniformed kids checking Facebook, and a few others loitered around the courtyard, coaxing horrible sounds out of trumpets and clarinets. They stared at me blankly as I walked by.

  I didn’t find any statues or plaques commemorating the military’s sacking of the building in 1962, but I did see some shallow divots in the courtyard’s stone walls that I convinced myself were the bullet holes Thompson had described. I ran my fingers around a few of them, trying to look inconspicuous. A bullet hole in brick feels jagged and raw, like a scabbed-over wound that won’t heal. I wondered how many of the students around me could honestly imagine their own military just up and seizing control of the country overnight. The days of the military coup in South America are arguably over, but in Thompson’s day, the prospect of the army simply booting a democratic government was commonplace enough that it didn’t warrant much outcry. The same thing had just happened in Argentina five weeks earlier, and as Thompson noted, the takeover hardly affected day-to-day life in Peru, where most citizens saw the military government as “nothing more than a dress-uniform version of the same power bloc that has held the reins for centuries.”

  “Can I help you?”

  The dress-shirted attendant had snuck up on me from behind. He was no more than twenty-five, wearing a redstar APRA pin and toting a clipboard under one arm. I explained that I was an American history student who had read about the coup in 1962 and wanted to see the Casa del Pueblo for myself. The young man smiled at me apologetically and pointed toward a bookstand next to the dentist’s office, selling pamphlets about the party’s history.

  “That was a very long time ago.” He shrugged. “Perhaps you should try a museum?”

  A few weeks before the Keiko/Humala election, a Peruvian newspaper published the results of a poll across nineteen Latin American countries, asking respondents whether they’d be willing to trade democracy for a military government if their country were somehow in dire straits. If you stacked up those results next to a decade’s worth of economic stats, you would notice a trend. In countries where economic growth has been steady—places like Panama, Uruguay, and Costa Rica—authoritarianism was exceedingly unpopular. Meanwhile, in countries struggling with poverty and stagnation, clear majorities said they would accept some form of military rule.

  Peru was the conspicuous outlier in this comparison. Even after a decade of whirligig growth rates on par with India and China, 52 percent of the country answered that they would indeed support a military government. It was democracy’s fourth-poorest showing, behind near-destitute Honduras, Paraguay, and Guatemala. To understand this apparent contradiction is to understand how the country wound up choosing between “cancer and AIDS.”

  Sure, the success of mining and other resource-extraction industries sent Peru’s stock market soaring in the 2000s, but only a small segment of the population felt the effects of the boom. The great majority of these beneficiaries were in Lima, home to the country’s investor and entrepreneurial classes. As many as two-thirds of all employable Peruvians, however, work in the “informal economy”—think street vendors, subsistence farmers, and unlicensed taxi drivers—which is a very long way down for the wealth to trickle, especially outside of the capital. Meanwhile, in the country’s far-flung Amazonian reaches, locals have taken to protesting what they see as exploitation of their natural resources wh
ile all the money flows steadily toward Lima. Dozens have been killed in periodic violent protests in the Peruvian Amazon since 2009, when a series of strikes and occupations brought much of the country to a standstill.

  Of course, this dramatically lopsided balance of wealth and power stretches back well before the current mining boom, even well before APRA. Peru was ground zero for the Spanish conquest of South America, which kicked off in 1535 when Pizarro founded the city of Lima. Class subjugation, for that matter, was already a hallmark of the Inca Empire more than a century before the conquistadors even set sail. Highly stratified societies have been the norm in Peru for longer than any other place in the New World, and in Thompson’s mind, a lot of the country’s modern troubles could be blamed on a deep-seated cultural acceptance of the oppression of the many by the few.

  “From the beginning of their history,” he wrote, “the Peruvian people have been conditioned to understand that there are only two kinds of human beings—the Ins and the Outs, with a vast gulf in between.”

  For centuries, that gulf has been the dominant force behind Peru’s social and political development, and when the avowed leftist Ollanta Humala emerged from the last election three points ahead, the results were widely interpreted as a long-overdue victory of the Outs over the Ins.