The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (24 page)

“Of course,” Devries said, “when I explain this to my friends from Lima, nobody understands. They just look at me confused, like, ‘Why would anyone do that?’ ”

Our bus was grinding its gears up a steep and gravelly incline, leaving a plume behind it like a tail-spinning jet. As we climbed the walls of the gorge, the cinder-block buildings out the window gradually changed over to jumbled rows of plank houses.

“But do you get a few volunteers from Lima anyway?” I asked. “People just who pitch in for a day or two?”

“Almost none,” she said, matter-of-factly. “And it isn’t for lack of trying.”

“Really?” I was surprised. “Why do you think that is?”

Devries sat quietly for a minute and pursed her lips. She reached back and did a twisty maneuver with her long pony-tail, pulling it tighter against her head. Then she leaned over and pointed out the window next to me.

“Do you see how all those houses are the same color?” she asked. I looked out. Sure enough, all the clapboard shanties out the windows were an identical shade of baby blue. “The neighbors here pitch in to buy their paint in bulk, so as you work your way up the hillsides, all of the neighborhoods look like they’ve been color-coded.”

Higher up the hill, I could see where the blue houses gave way to residential clusters of dusty salmon, harder to pick out against the totalizing beige of the mountainside. Devries and I rode awhile longer in silence before she took a stab at answering my question.

“Honestly,” she said, “I don’t think the middle and upper classes here understand what it means to be poor.”

She said it with a note of resignation, as if admitting something she hadn’t wanted to—maybe to me, maybe to herself.

“That’s not so uncommon, really,” I said. “Like they don’t understand the extent of it? They don’t really get how bad it is?”

“No,” she said, “it’s more than that. It’s like they don’t even understand who these people are. ‘How did they all get here? Where did they all come from? What do they want?’ I’m not sure they really know how to process it.”

I thought that over for a second.

“Why?” I asked. “Because they’re sheltered? Because they don’t
see
enough of it?”

“Oh, they see plenty of it,” Devries said. “Maybe not out here in Huaycán, but they see it in the city every day. It’s more like there’s just such a dramatic gulf.”

Without knowing it, she was echoing Thompson.
The Ins and the Outs
, he had said,
with a vast gulf in between
. It occurred to me that Huaycán didn’t even exist when Thompson was here, that the notion of 200,000 people scraping a living off these parched hillsides would probably have seemed absurd.

“Fine,” I said, trying to understand, “but there’s a gulf between rich and poor in the US, too. I don’t get why it should be so different here.”

Devries furrowed her brow. We were the only two people left on the bus now, which was rapidly running out of road as it approached a one-room plank-and-sheet-metal schoolhouse, standing alone near the top of the slope.

“I think there’s just less empathy here,” she said finally. “Maybe it’s because there’s no social mobility. There’s no conception that you could have
been
one of those people, you know? Or that they might work hard and someday become you.”

We climbed out of the
combi
and headed into the tiny stand-alone schoolhouse. The inside was dim and cool, with
dirt floors. Ten or so elementary schoolkids were gathered around a table, watching the British guy point to a stick figure on a whiteboard, phonetically repeating English words for body parts.
Ee-ur. Stuh-meck. Ell-boh
. When Devries and I walked in, a handful of the kids got up and gathered excitedly around her legs. How was their day going, she asked them in Spanish. Most of the kids clearly recognized her as the chief gringa, although a few may just have been captivated by the foreign creature in their midst—this tall, pale woman who spoke their language and had to crouch when she stepped through the doorways.

I grabbed a seat on a rough wooden bench and helped a couple of boys in baseball caps fill out their anatomy worksheets. They had a knack for English, I told them, and they laughed and said I spoke good Spanish—the first and last time I have ever received that compliment. The next hour went by very quickly as we all sat around the table, repeating after each other and pointing one at a time to our hands, our heads, our hearts.

On one of my last days in Lima, I took a taxi to La Molina to join a faculty game of Ultimate Frisbee at Reid’s school. The campus, needless to say, made both my high school and elementary school look like the cinder-block facilities in Huaycán. Reid’s was just one in a line of spotless, exterior-entry classrooms, with a whole wall of windows and more high-end AV equipment than a Tokyo Apple Store. We played Frisbee on an immaculate lawn stretched between clusters of brick buildings and were serenaded during the game by a talent show under way inside the state-of-the-art theater.

In case you’re wondering, neither the students nor their successful capitalist parents ever fled to Miami. Peru’s stock
market plummeted the day after Ollanta Humala’s victory, but it has since bounced back and then some, as Presidente Humala has turned out to be a surprisingly centrist leader. During the run-off election, he scrapped his plans to nationalize the country’s private pension system, and he swore on a Bible before a TV audience to uphold free-market principles and abide by term limits. Today, Humala keeps leftist neighbors like Correa at arm’s length and instead publicly identifies with former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, whose combination of market capitalism and generous social spending made him one of the world’s most popular leaders. Meanwhile, the moneyed class in Lima has happily continued, as Thompson put it, “maintaining itself in the style to which it has long been accustomed.”

Reid and I got a ride back to Miraflores with one of his coworkers, a high school English teacher whose beat-up sedan had sprung a serious exhaust leak. As we idled our way through the city’s debilitating traffic, the car gradually filled with noxious fumes. Amid the stench, our conversation turned to those aspects of life in Lima that the two of them didn’t much care for. Traffic, they agreed, was hellish. Reid said he had lately been unable to ignore countless tiny instances of petty rudeness—adults cutting in lines, pedestrians butting shoulders, cars ignoring the crosswalks. Sometimes, he vented, it seemed as if Peruvians simply had an ingrained disregard for other people around them.

“You know what’s getting to me?” the English teacher said. “Walls and gates.” He braked to avoid hitting a moto-taxi that veered into his lane. “Everywhere I go, I’m surrounded by walls and gates.” They really did seem pretty ubiquitous around Lima. From Miraflores to Huaycán, most public buildings and virtually every private home seemed to be surrounded by tall iron bars or brick walls topped with
broken bottles. The two teachers described private beaches south of town where security guards monitored gates like bouncers holding velvet ropes. Even after my short time in Lima, I could see how this might come to seem oppressive.

“I think I’d get tired of that pretty quick,” I said, my head partially craned out the window to avoid the exhaust smell, “always feeling like you’re being kept out of someplace.”

“Yeah, but do you know what’s worse?” the English teacher asked. “What’s worse are the people on the other side, the ones who just have no idea about anything because they’ve only ever been on the inside of the walls.”

He might have said more, but then a
combi
swerved violently in front of us, narrowly missing a taxi, and a deafening crush of car horns cut the conversation short.

“Day and night are one,” Steinbeck wrote in
Travels with Charley
. “The setting sun is neither an invitation nor a command to stop, for the traffic rolls constantly.”

Overnight buses are a fact of life for travelers in South America. It’s a big continent, with substantial geographic obstacles and occasionally shoddy infrastructure, so a distance that might require a long day’s drive in the United States instead becomes a twenty-four-hour odyssey of stale air and wildly fluctuating temperatures. Thompson made some of his early jaunts by plane, but with his typewriter and camera weighing him down and his finances ever dwindling, he realized in Peru that it was time to join the great unwashed masses. “It cost me $38 simply to get my gear from Guayaquil to Lima,” he explained in a letter. “It goes without saying that I have taken my last plane in South America.” From
Lima to Rio, the rest of Thompson’s route would be carried out by bus and train—“a mad, headlong, poverty-stricken rush across the continent.”

The overnight bus from Lima to Cusco departs in the evening and climbs 15,000 feet in the darkness. I stared out the window at the central Andean highlands until my eyes hurt, thinking about the mountains back in Montana and tracking the taillights of the buses ahead. Sometimes I’d spot them an hour or more up the road, ascending a switchback on the opposite side of a gorge, faint red dots bobbing and gliding through the night like lit cigarettes. I slept as best I could, and in the morning, the high-country sunrise burned slate-gray and pink.

The bus route led through roughshod mining towns clinging to the sides of mountains and through valleys filled with sugarcane plantations, where every stooped laborer wore the patterned alpaca poncho of the Quechua-speaking highlanders. This was the other Peru, the one that Thompson said was as different from Lima as Manhattan was from Appalachia. Geography is culture, of course, and Peru sits at a crossroads of three disparate South American ecosystems. The criollo cultural elites make up a majority in the coastal departments (
la costa
), but almost half of Peru’s population is of pure Amerindian stock, and these indigenous descendants overwhelmingly occupy the Amazon regions (
la selva
) and the thin air of the Andes (
la sierra
). In these inland provinces, poverty rates are a few clicks higher and literacy rates substantially lower. Lima feels far away indeed, and antiestablishment messages tend to resonate here, which is one reason why Ollanta Humala won handily in thirteen of the fourteen Peruvian departments that lack an ocean view.

Back in Thompson’s day, support for APRA was also heavy in
la sierra
, but with one key difference: literacy and
ID requirements kept between 65 percent and 80 percent of the largely Quechua population from voting. And this kind of indigenous marginalization was at the heart of Thompson’s remaining article on Peru, entitled “The Inca of the Andes: He Haunts the Ruins of His Once-Great Empire.” It’s a piece that paints a pretty brutal picture of the indigenous experience in the Andes during the Alliance for Progress era. It opens on downtown Cusco, where Thompson says that a Quechua drifter on the street was “as sad and hopeless a specimen as ever walked in misery. Sick, dirty, barefoot, wrapped in rags, and chewing narcotic coca leaves to dull the pain of reality.” In the article’s opening lines, Thompson describes the waiters scurrying to close the blinds in the lounge of his comfortable Cusco hotel, so that the tourists inside won’t be bothered by the “Indian beggars” staring in from the other side of the glass.

Reading through his articles and letters, it seems to me that Thompson was particularly put off by indigenous poverty in South America. As evenhandedly as he described the Wayuu back in Guajira, he seemed to write with genuine surprise and revulsion about their squalid living conditions, about the food that was “unfit for dogs.” In his letters, he gripes that “the whole continent is covered in Indian shit” and regularly complains of having to “carry a truncheon to ward off the citizenry.” “From Bogota south,” he wrote in the
Observer
, “the Andean cities are overrun with Indian beggars who have no qualms about lying on a downtown sidewalk and grabbing at the legs of any passers-by who look prosperous.”

What to make of Thompson’s outsize discomfort? To put it in context, it helps to remember that in 1962, what we then called the Third World hadn’t really come into Americans’ living rooms yet. If John Q. Public had any idea
of what life looked like for an Andean farmer or a child in sub-Saharan Africa, he sure didn’t get it from Alan Sader or Sally Struthers. The global proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) didn’t kick off in earnest until the 1970s, and up until then, most of the hardest-luck corners of the world were still largely the domain of missionaries. If Thompson at first seemed shell-shocked or even derisive about the extent of Andean poverty, it could be because very little in his experience would have prepared him for so many abject faces staring in through the windows—or the callousness with which the blinds were pulled.

Thompson pitched “He Haunts the Ruins” not long after leaving Cusco, but he was back in the United States by the time he finished writing the story, in the early summer of 1963. By then, he’d had some distance from the Andes, and he’d also passed through Bolivia, where the Amerindian population had voting rights and an increasingly prominent place in civil society. With the benefit of hindsight, Thompson took a more nuanced view of the Quechuas’ plight, explaining how the active disenfranchisement of the indigenous population worked to benefit those in power. “Once the Indian begins voting,” he wrote, “he has little common cause with large landowning or industrial interests. Thus the best hope for the status quo is to keep the Indian ignorant, sick, poverty-stricken, and politically impotent.” By the end of the article, Thompson comes off as a strong advocate for indigenous empowerment.

Whether the indigenous descendants of the Incas are any more empowered today is up to debate. Voting is compulsory now, so even the most isolated Quechua-speaking family is at least that much more involved in the democratic process. Native Andeans are also a lot more “serviced” than in 1962. Over the last few decades, Peru in general has become
a nexus of the booming NGO and nonprofit industry, and
la sierra
is the sector’s major focus. One British think tank published a report nicknaming Peru “The Kingdom of the NGO,” and the country’s International Cooperation Agency lists more than three thousand such organizations on the books. A couple hundred of these are based in the Department of Cusco, home to the Sacred Valley, the historic heart of the Incas’ “once-great empire.” Today, the only thing that attracts more foreigners to the Sacred Valley than the NGO sphere is that great consecrated citadel of international tourism itself, Machu Picchu.