My Columbian Death - Matthew Thompson
Former Sydney journalist journeys to the dark heart of Latin America for a death-defying rite of passage
By Luke Benedictus
Dissecting the stubble on Matt Thompson's chin is a streak of white hair, a physical memento from his time in Colombia. These bristles changed colour overnight from shock after Thompson ingested yagé, the shamanic drug believed to be the most powerful hallucinogen in the world. The resulting experience wasn't pretty.
Thompson was pitched into a nightmare world of bewildering intensity, believing that he'd died and his soul had escaped his body. "I was so profoundly shattered and terrified by the experience, I felt like a smoking ruin of a person," Thompson says. The Sydney writer then proceeded to repeat the experience the following day.
This kamikaze sense of adventure pervades My Colombian Death, a gonzo travelogue through South America's wildest country. Thompson dodges death in an amateur bull-ring, hangs out in squalid crackhouses and seeks out the right-wing paramilitaries that control half of Colombia's $3.5 billion drug trade. "I started to get quite full of dread about the paramilitaries when they said that I'd have to put a bag over my head and lie in the back of a van (to be taken to the meeting)," Thompson says. "Then they said I'd have to pay them for the experience and I started to think that here I was in the world capital of kidnapping and was about to pay for my own."
He wisely rejected that invitation. But Thompson did eventually secure an audience with Salvatore Mancuso, the warlord in charge of the paramilitary armies that have massacred thousands of Colombians. Recently extradited to America, Mancuso has since confessed to personally ordering and participating in 336 killings.
"He's a mass-murdering swine, basically," Thompson says. But in the flesh Mancuso presented himself as an urbane playboy suavely dressed in expensive clothes. "He was like a politician - very smooth and conscious of how he came across," Thompson says. "Meeting him was actually a bit disappointing - he wasn't either more of an animal or more of a thinker. He was not an interesting man personally."
The 35-year-old writer deliberately sought out dangerous scenarios as a strange form of personal quest. He'd worked unhappily as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald, describing himself as a "hair-pulling, stressed-out lunatic with a bad back". Bored by his daily routine, Thompson craved action so urgently that he left for Colombia just one month after the birth of his first child. "I felt like I could live my whole life without ever knowing whether I could trust my instincts," he explains.
"In Australia you get carried along by a decent economy, decent social services, law and order - it's such a stable country. I wanted to spend time somewhere where the consequences of a mistake were extremely serious. I wanted to see whether I could handle the intensity and to see whether I was up for it."
Fortunately, he not only survived this self-imposed test but returned home more comfortable in his skin. "The yagé experience where
I believed I was dying and dead - that really made me re-evaluate my life," he says. "It was a horrendously powerful time and I don't have the same compulsion to peck at the edges of death anymore."
And what do his parents think of this book that swarms with reckless escapades, murderous paramilitaries and cocaine-fuelled paranoia? "My father-in-law is the only family member to read it so far," Thompson says. " He said he doesn't approve of everything I did. I'm now thinking about giving my own parents special copies with the pages glued shut."
My Colombian Death (Pan Macmillan, $32.99) is out now.
Read an Extract from My Columbian Death