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

by Brian Kevin

  “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.

  My innkeeper made a few calls, then asked me to meet a guide downstairs the next morning. Bring a pair of long pants, he told me, plus a bottle of water and some money to buy alcohol for the miners.

  The main thing I learned the next day is that mining in modern Potosí involves a staggering amount of drinking. In the morning, I climbed into a van with a pair of Israelis, a German/Portuguese couple, and a Brit. All of them were passing through Potosí on their way to or from the world-famous Uyuni Salt Flats—a considerably more popular tourist attraction a few hours up the road. Our guide was a brusque former miner named David who spoke a hodgepodge of English and Spanish. In his mid-thirties, David was too young to be a “former” anything, really, but since it’s not uncommon for miners to take up the pickax at age fourteen, he might have had a long and storied career before transitioning to tourism.

  On our way to the mountain, David pulled the van over at an edge-of-town street and ushered us out onto the sidewalk.

  “This is
the only street in Potosí,” he announced, “where it is legal to buy and sell dynamite.”

  We walked up to a folding card table beneath a plastic awning, and David nodded familiarly to the cholita vendor standing behind, who nodded back. Then, abruptly, he grabbed a stick of dynamite off the table and lobbed it at me.

  “Catch!” he cried, and I did, clumsily. It was the first time I’d ever held dynamite in my hand, much less had it thrown at me. The cylinder had the heft of a piece of sidewalk chalk and seemed tightly wrapped in something like butcher paper.

  “Don’t worry,” David said. “It can’t ignite without this.” He grabbed a Ziploc bag off the table and handed it to me. It was full of small pink pellets that looked like candy and smelled like gasoline. “Ammonia nitrate,” he said. “Powerful stuff.”

  Before going into the mines, David explained, it was a custom to buy gifts for the workers we would encounter down there, a sort of a currency with which to buy their attention. The preferred tender was coca leaves and beer. Because it was Saturday, David said, most of his compatriots would be taking the day off from their other favorite beverage, a straight cane alcohol sold in flimsy plastic bottles and weighing in at 96 percent ABV. He grabbed one off the table and poured a few capfuls to pass around. The liquor numbed my tongue and burned like bleach going down. I flashed back instantly to the unsought chirrinchi sesh back in the Guajiran desert.

  “Sir, you should have another,” David said to me, in the voice you use to dare a little sister, “since you caught that dynamite.” So I did, and my brain reeled just a little. Then each of us bought five cans of beer for the miners, and I threw in a bag of coca for good measure.

  We continued up the hill, winding our way past heavy machinery and abundant piles of trash before parking next to a row of brick buildings and a gaping hole in the mountain. Emerging from the mouth of the mine, three men pushed a steel cart loaded with ore along a decrepit railway track. Another dozen miners stood in a semicircle nearby, grubby in their jumpsuits and helmets, chewing coca and looking on placidly. Their cheeks bulged like cartoon ballplayers in the bullpen. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and most of them were drinking cans of beer. A couple of rotting wooden beams shored up the entrance to the mine, and above it a sign read: LA MONJA II—KORIMAYU LIMITADA. Our mine was called “The Nun,” and apparently it was a sequel. Korimayu, meanwhile, was the name of the co-op, which David said came from a Quechua phrase meaning “river of gold.”

  Miner-owned cooperatives are the norm in Bolivia now, following the collapse of the government-owned mining system. What Thompson had called “Operation Triangular” back in 1962 was an Alliance for Progress program designed to stave off that collapse. The Alliance bargain was that the United States and other nations would bail out and temporarily subsidize Bolivia’s ailing industry, provided that Bolivia started diversifying its economy, laid off 20 percent of its workers, and shut down unprofitable mines. Predictably, this agreement led to an armed revolt by the workers, who clashed violently with the military in 1963. Tom Martin, Thompson’s buddy in the USIS labor office, was kidnapped by protesting miners and held hostage for ten days that December. His capture prompted an op-ed from Thompson in the Observer, blasting the miners for stupidly abducting “a man who understood their aspirations” and “the best source of American bourbon that Bolivian labor leaders have ever been lucky enough to find.”

  “If Operation Triangular fails,” he predicted, “… the prospects for Bolivia are not pretty.” And here Thompson was right yet again. The bailout helped for a while, and Bolivia’s mining industry limped through the 1970s on the strength of cheap credit and high tin prices. At the same time, though, a series of military governments tried hard to crush the miners’ unions using arrests, torture, and violence. In 1980, as many as 900 miners protesting a recent military coup were killed or “disappeared” during a massacre by the Bolivian Army in a mountain town southeast of La Paz. The market for tin tanked again shortly thereafter, and by 1985 a pound of tin worth $2 cost Bolivia more than $6 to produce. The government mining company finally succeeded at laying off workers—about 30,000 of them in a single year—and by 1990 mine ownership was privatized and restructured. Poor urban areas like El Alto exploded as the huge layoffs abruptly swelled the ranks of Bolivia’s ragtag informal sector.

  Of course, the industry’s legacy of violence and oppression has its roots in Potosí, and as we donned jumpsuits and helmets to go underground, David explained how Cerro Rico earned its nickname, “The Mountain That Eats Men.”

  “Eight million miners have died here,” he said. “From explosions, falls, silicosis, gases. There are many, many ways to die inside this mountain.” Historians back up the number. For centuries, indigenous and sometimes African slaves were simply fed into the mountain by Spanish viceroys, and for the free miners who came later, a meager paycheck and a union were little protection against frequent cave-ins and the ubiquitous black lung. Today, silicosis is by far the main cause of death. The average life expectancy of a Potosí miner is just over forty.

  All around us, stoic-looking men were going about their business, hauling bags of minerals and smoking in small groups, obviously accustomed to clusters of gringos lurking on the periphery. Single-file, we walked into the mine. The damp central tunnel was warm like a locker room, and the beams from our battery-powered headlamps dissolved helplessly in the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I made out corridors peeling off to the sides, plus the occasional gaping pit topped with winches that looked like they’d been fabricated in a high school shop class. It was quiet enough to hear the breathing of the German guy behind me. We plodded along the tracks behind David. Every so often, he yelled to warn us of an oncoming cart, and we pressed up against the cave’s slick walls to avoid being flattened as it hurtled by. Sometimes the cart-pushers stopped to chat with David, speaking Quechua or a heavily accented Spanish—I wasn’t sure which.

  “Give him a beer,” David ordered each time, and one of us would reach into our canvas sack to retrieve a lukewarm can. The miners took it wordlessly or with a polite gracias, then drained it quickly and tossed aside the empty. An unending stream of water bottles and beer cans floated in puddles next to the track. Here and there, I kicked them out of the way, like pinecones along the trail. For every ounce of tin that comes out of this mountain, I thought, the miners must put a pound of plastic and aluminum back in.

  When we were deep enough that the air had turned sour, David peeled into a side chamber and motioned for us to follow. The seven of us clustered into a tight and low-ceilinged room. The German/Portuguese couple, I noticed, were holding hands and looking a bit tense. David pointed into the corner, and we shined our headlamps there to see a crude man-sized sculpture of some kind of saturnalian demon, with horns and hooves and a huge phallus, seated on a ledge and decorated with colorful string confetti.

  “This is Tío,” David said reverently. “Every mine has its own Tío. Down here, Tío is God. He decides whether you find minerals. He decides whether you live or die.”

  I drew in closer to the wild-eyed statue. This particular Tío (“uncle” in Spanish) was grinning like a rogue. He was decorated with a rainbow of paper-thin streamers and looked like something out of an occult fetishist’s vision of a sinister Mardi Gras parade. On his lap and shoulders, the miners had placed cigarettes, small vials of cane liquor, and green baggies of coca leaves.

  “Offerings?” I asked David.

  “Of course,” he said. “It is important always to keep Tío happy. We give him these things, and in return, Tío gives us his protection.”

  We left Tío and descended deeper, peeling away from the tracks and following David down narrow chutes and twisting diagonal passageways. Every hundred yards or so, we handed out beer to the dusty miners who seemed to emerge from the walls of the cavern itself, crouched in corners and chipping away listlessly. David didn’t do much talking. Sometimes we slithered on our bellies for twenty or thirty feet at a stretch
, shimmying through horizontal fissures like sideways chimneys. I was damp with sweat, and the cavern’s ambient grit crunched between my teeth.

  In Montana, I’d been on walking tours of limestone caverns with guardrails and electric lights, with guides like chatty real estate agents who coaxed you through the occasional tight squeeze. The difference between that and this was the difference between an interpretive trail at Mount St. Helens and a backpacking trip through Mordor. I have no particular discomfort in small spaces and a great, irrational confidence that strangers won’t lead me into life-threatening situations. All the same, it takes a little deep breathing to keep the panic at bay when you’re leopard-crawling through a thirty-foot tunnel the approximate height and width of a sewer grate and when your janky twenty-year-old headlamp picks that moment to come disconnected from its battery pack. The others seemed to be holding it together well enough, despite an occasional whimper from the Portuguese girl. It’s only a tourist attraction, I imagined everyone saying to themselves, not fundamentally different from a ranger-led waterfall hike or a docent’s tour of the Catacombs in Paris—just with an uncomfortably sullen guide and twenty tons of earth pressing down on top of you. So yeah, there was nothing to worry about, not really, and besides, I’d left a handful of my coca leaves back in the devil-worship chamber with Tío.

  After an hour or so, we stumbled into a high-clearance cavern where a corpulent miner sat on a boulder, working a vein of tin and muttering to himself. David introduced him as Pablo, and I handed over a beer without waiting to be asked. Pablo was one of the older miners we’d encountered, pushing forty anyway, and he held the can out to me in a mock toast before bringing it to his lips.

  “I’m going to leave you guys here with Pablo for a while,” David said abruptly. He wanted to know whether there were any detonations planned for the afternoon, and he asked us to sit tight for a few minutes while he wandered off to find the jefe.