The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (35 page)

Stroessner held on to power for a whopping thirty-five years, during which as many as 1.5 million Paraguayans left their country for greener pastures in Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere. It’s hard to imagine the kind of relationship these exiles must have had with their homeland. To hear Thompson tell it, a good number of them may
actually have preferred life in exile. Paraguay’s voluntary émigrés were overwhelmingly from the wealthier, educated classes, and even without the threat of political oppression, the appeal of life in comparatively glitzy Rio or Buenos Aires may itself have been a big draw:

This was in 1963, still early into Stroessner’s reign, when the extent of his administration’s atrocities were little known and less discussed. So Thompson might be forgiven if he seems to give short shrift to the exiles’ potentially graver motivations. He was straightforward, of course, about the ways that Stroessner rigged the political system—banning opposition and renewing a state of emergency every ninety days, a habit he continued for the next twenty-six years—but he wrote very little about violence or oppression in Paraguay, except to acknowledge ominously that the dictator “doesn’t look kindly on people who agitate for change.” In Thompson’s view, the relative backwardness of life in Paraguay was as much to blame for the exodus as the dictatorship itself.

Thompson and I arrived in Asunción from two different directions. I left the Brazilian Pantanal and headed south to Paraguay, whereas Thompson’s “jungle train” continued
east, arriving in Rio in mid-September of 1962. It wasn’t until November that he headed to Asunción, flying in on a five-week reporting jag through Paraguay, Uruguay, and briefly Argentina. By then, Thompson was feeling refreshed and rejuvenated after his physically and psychologically exhausting trek through the Andes. The sun, sand, and sophistication of Rio had agreed with him, and he hadn’t been eager to leave his new coastal digs. In Paraguay, he suddenly found himself back in the Third World and, more depressingly, in yet another stodgy, sleepy city. Despite a population of 400,000 at the time, Asunción seemed to Thompson more like some backwater village in the Amazon.

“It is about as lively as Atlantis,” he wrote, “and nearly as isolated.”

Asunción may well have seemed sedate. Thompson’s photos from the time show men dozing on park benches, a trolley sliding down an empty street, and vacant sidewalks with storefronts shuttered for the midday siesta. The city still lacked water and sewage systems back then. Cars were a rarity. Not until the 1980s did Asunción get its first traffic light, and still today, it’s one of the smallest capitals in Latin America, with just over half a million people. It is a stiflingly hot place, and there is absolutely no sense in which it is
on the way
to anywhere.

Unlike Thompson, though, I found Asunción’s quietude charming. It was Semana Santa when my bus pulled into town, the Catholic Holy Week that’s overwhelmingly observed in the more rural corners of the continent. I caught the tail end of a downtown procession on Holy Thursday, complete with the Easter carolers whom Paraguayans call
estacioneros
, singing about the Stations of the Cross in Paraguay’s widely spoken indigenous language of Guaraní. After that, though, the city seemed to empty out, as residents left
to be with their families in the vast Paraguayan countryside, the rural 99.6 percent of the country that residents of Asunción simply refer to as
el campo
. Most of the storefronts were shuttered, and I spent the weekend strolling through shady parks and the historic government district along the Rio Paraguay, feeling like I had the city to myself.

By one measure, Asunción is the true birthplace of independence in South America. Patriots there declared Paraguay’s freedom from Spain back in 1811, when other South American revolutionary governments were still ruling in the name of the deposed Spanish monarch Ferdinand VII. The people of Asunción don’t let a visitor forget this fact. On the day before Easter, I visited the Casa de la Independencia, an unremarkable house downtown where the plan for emancipation was hatched. When I left, I walked a few blocks and found myself standing on the corner of one street called Independencia Nacional and another called El Paraguayo Independente. Fifty years ago, when the summer heat convinced Thompson that “the only safe place to see Asunción is from the inside of a dark, open-front cafe,” he set up shop in a popular watering hole called Bar Independencia (sadly, since demolished and replaced with a bank).

During my visit, Paraguay was just coming off its bicentennial anniversary, and the city still hadn’t taken down the posters of Paraguayan national heroes adorning the streetlamps downtown. Every block had three or four of them, black-and-white images of persons significant to the country’s history. In the United States, you might expect such a roster to be long on politicians: founding fathers, beloved presidents, pioneering leaders of minority groups, and so on. In Asunción, though, the ranks seemed to consist mostly of journalists, poets, composers, and other humanities types. It occurred to me that Paraguay’s history of
dictatorship kind of limits its bench of leaders worth honoring. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, while we cycled through mythic framers like Madison, Monroe, Quincy Adams, and Jackson, Paraguay had just a single founding father, the dictator José Francia, who clung to power for twenty-seven years and liked to call himself “El Supremo.” During Stroessner’s time in power, Americans saw eight sitting presidents, all the way from Eisenhower to George H. W. Bush. If you haven’t had many leaders—and those ones not particularly admirable—I guess you have to cast a wider net for your heroes.

The parade of paper luminaries around Asunción was actually kind of stirring. In the days that I spent walking around the city, I never once spotted a banner honoring one of Paraguay’s dubious presidents, warmongering generals, or junta leaders, but I did see several commemorating teachers, painters, and priests. I took it as a reminder that it’s perfectly all right to compartmentalize a nation’s problems, villains, and misdeeds while instead keying in on its heroes and core values. This, after all, is exactly what the four of us were doing in the brothel on Easter night, trying to speak up for the best aspects of our homelands without making ourselves into scapegoats for the worst. And if that’s a kind of cop-out, then so be it, because it’s this kind of sequestration that makes cultural exchange possible.

Of course, beer helps too, and the Brits, the Dane, and I cleaned out the brothel manager’s mini fridge before calling it a night. It was light outside when we finally slunk out of the Hotel Sheik, and we paused outside to squint and get our bearings. The buses were running, and the few pious families left in the sleepy city seemed to be making their way either to or from church. My fellow diplomats and I reached a consensus—the first of the night—about the direction of
the hostel, and we wished the prostitutes out front a happy Easter.

“Same to you,” said the tallest one, in a surprisingly deep voice. She stifled a yawn and adjusted her slouch against the hood of the taxi. “Going to be a slow day.”

The Librería San Cayetano is the kind of bookstore where the thick dust is a mark of distinction and serious bibliophiles can lose themselves for days. The shelves are packed three-deep with old volumes, the piles on the floor are belly-button-high, and the collections are organized with all the care and precision of a teenager’s sock drawer. Every disturbed stack unleashes a cloud of dust and a skitter of silver-fish. If you’ve been inside San Cayetano for an hour and you have yet to knock over a leaning tower of books, you’re probably not browsing hard enough.

The store had exactly one shelf dedicated to English books, maybe forty ratty paperbacks in total, so I was straight-up dumbstruck when I reached in and pulled out exactly the book I’d been looking for—one well-thumbed copy of
The Ugly American
, which had been on my mind since Cali. This particular edition was from 1961, a fifth printing that included a then-timely blurb on its back cover, asking:

As it happens, I had been wondering that myself. When Thompson arrived in South America, the United States’ first-ever crop of Peace Corps volunteers had been on the
ground for less than a year—yet another example of Kennedy’s long shadow across the continent. The president had inaugurated the volunteer service program in 1961, pitching it as a sister project to his Alliance for Progress. He was a big fan of
The Ugly American
, having mailed copies to all of his legislative colleagues as a senator, and many historians view the Peace Corps as a direct response to the book’s call to replace the country’s decadent and insulated diplomatic corps with a “small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hardworking, and dedicated professionals … willing to risk their comfort and—in some lands—their health.”

In the novel, a Philippine government minister explains the advantages of such a force to a fictional American ambassador:

Of course, Thompson echoed this idea—about Americans trying to “live up” to their privileged position—in his “Anti-Gringo Winds” piece about the golfer on the terrace. Nonetheless, he was skeptical of Kennedy’s new program, which sent American volunteers, usually with a trade or a college education, to serve two-year stints abroad in fields like health, education, and agriculture, often in isolated and
rural areas. The Peace Corps was launched with a three-part mandate: to improve Americans’ understanding of other cultures, to help build capacity in developing nations, and to better the US image abroad. At the outset, Thompson was unconvinced that troupes of “unaffected” young Americans would be any more competent on these last two points than the shortsighted Alliance bureaucrats or the earnest NGO professionals (“who make a man feel like a degenerate if he can’t avoid a feeling that they are all phonies”).

But Thompson’s encounters on the continent gradually won him over. In the Andes and Brazil, he rubbed shoulders with several Peace Corps volunteers, and he chatted over whiskey with at least one of them in Tom Martin’s living room back in La Paz. A few were jackasses, he admitted, but more of them struck him as smart, hardworking types whose hands he’d been proud to shake. By the end of 1962, he was advising an old girlfriend back in the States that she consider joining.

“Don’t think I’ve gone gung-ho,” he wrote, “because I came down here thinking the PC was a bag of crap, but now I think it’s the only serious and decent effort the US is making in Latin America or anywhere else.”

I thought hard about joining the PC myself after I graduated from college, but that was in 2002, and I had reservations about becoming a foot soldier for a Bush-era foreign policy that I often disagreed with. On paper, of course, the PC is a politically neutral entity, but its directors are political appointees, and the State Department ultimately assigns or withholds volunteers from any given country. At the time, post-9/11 posturing was in vogue, and the pre-Iraq propaganda machine was just hitting its stride. The notion that the PC might be misused for geopolitical ends didn’t seem all
that farfetched to me. I also worried about becoming some kind of missionary for industrial capitalism, the promotion of which was (after all) one of the original goals of the agency. So I signed on instead for two years of national service with AmeriCorps, often referred to as the Peace Corps’ domestic equivalent, and in the years since, I’ve come to think of the PC as a sort of ace in the hole—like, hey, when everything else goes to shit, I can always join the Peace Corps.

Thompson seemed to have shared my inclination, but he joked to the girlfriend that he was too much of a scoundrel to join up. Then he dropped a line that has stuck with me since the first time I read it in
The Proud Highway
more than a decade ago. “I can be twice as effective for the same idea by writing as I could by joining,” Thompson said in his letter.

I have mixed feelings about this statement. On its face, it strikes me as disingenuous and self-aggrandizing to suggest that the scribblings of a footloose writer are in any way more valuable than the sweat of a latrine digger, a malaria educator, or a clinic builder. Journalism is a critically important trade, no doubt, but those first PC members were out there in the trenches, and their efforts were literally saving people’s lives. Thompson, meanwhile, was back in his hotel room, bitching about the hot water. In fairness, I’m not entirely clear what the “same idea” is that Thompson’s referring to here. If he understood the central mission of the Peace Corps to be a diplomatic one—championing the American way of life, promoting mutual understanding across cultures—then I suppose he has a point. An
Observer
story like “It’s a Dictatorship” reached 200,000 readers, after all. It certainly offers some insight into the realities of Paraguayan life under Stroessner, and it does paint an unambiguous picture of democracy as the preferred alternative.

If, however, we suppose that the main goal of the Peace
Corps is to improve people’s lives in the developing world, then Thompson at his typewriter had less impact on his best day than an Amazon volunteer distributing mosquito netting on her worst. There’s a dialectical tension between these two objectives that I’m hardly the first person to point out. The debate has existed within the Peace Corps, in fact, ever since its inception: To what extent does the agency’s mission resemble that of the Public Affairs Section of the embassy, like I saw back in Quito? To what extent is it more like, say, that of UNICEF or Doctors Without Borders? It’s hard to parse Thompson’s statement without knowing the answer to these questions. On paper, of course, it is easy enough just to check “All of the above”—the Peace Corps does all of these things. But in practice, there isn’t necessarily much overlap between helping villagers access clean drinking water, for example, and furthering their understanding of American culture. At the very least, a person can wholly succeed at one of these things without even attempting the other.