La Fiesta De La Cruz (Bolivian beatdown fest)

The wacky holiday Agnes and I had been waiting for finally took place last week and it didn't disappoint. La fiesta de La Cruz in Potosi, Bolivia begins with animal sacrifices every year in May, proceeds with the blessing of crosses for people who don't believe in God, and ends with raw fisted beatings and tear gas. And the entire time, peasants spend their waking moments drunk.

Taking place at the end of the harvest, the holiday is an unusual blend of pre-Colombian and Catholic symbolism, involving thanksgiving and sacrifice, though its most prominent features appear to be drinking, repetitive dance routines, and brawls. The folks who celebrate the festival in this way are very poor peasants in the northern portions of Potosi province. The land here, much of it at higher than 12,000 ft, yields little in terms of crops but tubers, beans and barley. Trees don't grow here and the salient feature in the landscape is of rocks and dust. Not surprisingly, they lack electricity and running water and live in mud huts.


We booked a trip with Koala Tours, which was the first group to make tourist inroads with the Macha community, where the largest celebrations and fights take place. As recently as eight years ago, when the tours first started, the festival continued to escape the attention of government authorities and tinkus, individual, one on one fights, often evolved into community versus community battles involving rocks, sticks, and other armaments. Parts of vanquished opponents were sometimes eaten raw in triumph by their victors, according to our guides. Since then, the authorities have deemed the festival illegal. Though resigned to the fact that they cannot stop the celebrations entirely, they send team a team of police to referee the fights and stop the one on one battles before someone suffers grievous harm. They also stop the group battles by lobbing tear gas canisters into the crowd.

Our tour started uneventfully on a brisk Saturday morning, when we joined our tour of roughly 25 happy tourists on our way to the community of Puruka, about five hours north of Potosi. As the community of 20 families is not used to tourists and does not have phones, our agency needed to negotiate on the spot for places to stay. This took about an hour, after the head of our agency, Wilbur, plied our hosts with coca leaves, cane alcohol, and of course cash. All the while, bystanders gazed at us blankly while a few drunken villagers harassed us and demanded money. Off the beaten track, the village hosts just the few tourists with our agency en route to the fiesta once a year.
And to say our experience was un-touristy would be an understatement.

While occasionally, we've visited villages on treks to experience life with the locals, we are somehow blessed with toilets, good food and even running water, as villagers on trekking routes tend to have foreign visitors every week. In contrast, our village was a reminder of how shitty life must be to those who are very poor. Five of us stayed in a 10 by 15 foot mud hut with a perforated straw roof. The dirt floor was punctuated with field stones that jutted into every muscle of your body when lying down. And while it had sort of a camping indoors feel to it, it would have been far more enjoyable had it not been 30 degrees out.

Our family was not alerted in advance of our arrival, so we waited in the freezing cold without a fire waiting for some festive sort of entertainment, though absolutely nothing happened for about three hours. We were offered chicha, a foul slightly alcoholic brew made from boiling barley dough in water (the fermentation process for chicha used to involve women chewing the barley and spitting into a boiling pot). It's served in a dirty gourd or half a recycled coke bottle and looks like bubbly diarrhea. In any event, we sat around till around 11:30 before anything happened. Then, the villagers, who'd been just hanging around each other chatting and drinking chicha finally brought out the llamas for the kill. We had trouble interacting with them since only the children spoke Spanish. By that time, everyone but Agnes and I had gone to bed, which actually meant a few blankets spread over the rocky floor.

The ritual llama sacrifice was both brutal and uneventful. Two llama were tackled by couple guys each and had their necks slit by a third over a small rock. The poor animals struggled for about ten seconds before succumbing to their fate. Then the dancing and music started. Dancing, in this case, involved marching around the fire, changing direction, when they say, change direction, and then, when they say, dance in place, you march in place. It's a ritual dance that I'm sure took a wealth of creativity to come up with. Marching is an important feature of the dance because it would be otherwise easy to trip over the rocky terrain. The music consisted of a four note song played with flutes called hula hulas, made with either hollowed out sugar cane or bamboo. Each handmade instrument was out of tune in its own unique way, resulting in a cacophony that has probably evolved little from the first time it was played by a llama sacrificing band of Indians. In any event, we danced around the fire while one fellow smeared our faces with llama blood freshly squirted from the jugular of the departed llamas. This was supposed to be a blessing. Other than this, we paid very little attention to the animals. In the other two groups, one at least danced around the dead llamas, and the other got to eat the heart. Ours just lay off to the side like dirty socks.

The next morning, our hosts provided us with a breakfast of boiled yucca covered in sandy bits of dirt. I guess we sometimes take it for granted that our food is clean and free of soil, but in northern Potosi at least, all meals appear to have grindy bits of earth all over them. A bit later, they cooked us some potatoes and fava beans, also covered in dirt, as they had been buried with heated rocks underground. Fortunately, they also gave us some llama soup from the sacrifices the night before, which tasted quite good. Nearly a quarter of our tour had stomach issues by the end of the tour.

One thing worth mentioning is that I had been suffering from yet another bout of food poisoning from before the trip, which required an unusually high number of trips to relieve myself. Without running water or even any outhouse facilities, the villagers just pee and crap in the fields. And while this doesn't bother me in the least (I'd rather squat in an open field any day than have to endure the fly ridden, sauna-like enclosures many public facilities resemble in South America), but one thing I didn't want to do is litter their fields with toilet paper, which got me thinking, how do the villagers dispose of their paper after a dump? After all, the crusty soil would not be an easy place to dig a hole every time you had to relieve yourself. It was only then that we learned something that at once horrified me and made me happy that I wasn´t a poor mountain peasant: the villagers use stones to clean themselves after defecating! I always thought folks without toilet paper would use leaves, but there are no trees here – only rocks.

During day two of our trip, we spent the entire day on the lawn of a tiny catholic church, where numerous groups came to have their crosses blessed and of course to drink and dance. Various groups of villagers, some dressed in traditional dress, did the same circle dance, played the same tune as the night before and drank. We spent the entire day sort of waiting for something to happen, but this day of the fiesta held little for the casual tourist. A few crosses were likely blessed inside the church and a few babies were baptized, but it was all in Quechua, the local language, so we didn't understand any of it, and by the looks of it, didn't look particularly interesting anyway.

In the evening, we left for Macha. A community of approximately 100 families, Macha has become a focal point for the festival as it offers the largest church in northern Potosi. It is here that the villagers come to engage in their tinkus, one on one bare fisted battles between men and women from different villages. Some competing theories seek to explain the origins for these encounters. First and foremost, bloodshed is eagerly anticipated and applauded. Like the slaughtered llamas, it is considered to be a sacrifice for Pachamama, or mother earth. The more blood spilled, the better the harvest the following year. And a death or two is supposed to bode especially well. But in real terms, I believe that these people simply like to fight, and that they often don't like the neighboring communities very much. So the yearly encounter is designed either to limit the beatings you might give to your neighbors to once a year, or to simply give you the opportunity to beat the crap out of someone you don't like.


The ritual aspects of the festival precede the actual fighting and really consist only of the communities' entrance into the town square, where they repeat their dance at each of the four corners. After that, they go off to eat and drink until they decide they're ready to have at it. In the morning, before many of the communities filed in, we saw some of the best action of the day. In one of the first battles in the day, one young mother calmly unstrapped the baby off her back before taking her spot in the circle and unloading a series of straight right hands into the nose of her larger opponent. Like most of the women fighting that day, she grabbed the hair of her counterpart for leverage, lining her up to deliver some punishing damage.

The Bolivian authorities take a dim view of the festival and while they allow it to occur, they make it safer by trying to referee the one on one encounters with policemen. On average, I'd say most fights lasted only about 2 minutes, or until someone had been knocked down or if the community of one of the fighters decided to stop it when one of their members had taken too much punishment. I'm not sure if the presence of the police influences the way in which the villagers fight, but one thing I can say is that no one backs down in the least. Very little circling and there's no time for the fighters to feel each other out. They simply try to inflict as much punishment as possible on each other within a short period of time and appear to think little of their own safety. And while a tinku is considered a ritual battle, there is nothing fancy about it, it's just about crushing the other guy (or gal).

While the authorities attempt to keep order, some of the craziest battles appear in the corners where the police are not. These go on longer and often result in greater injury. Some folks reported seeing fighters knocked unconscious, especially when falling on the ubiquitous cobblestone. Either way, there's no shortage of blood on the ground by sunset.

Not surprisingly, many one on one battles evolve into group battles, when folks whip each other with ropes and sticks. Rocks are sometimes also thrown in such altercations. Before getting out of hand, the police lob a few canisters of tear gas to disperse the crowd and calm settles. Some girls in our tour reported seeing an ear torn off (probably grabbed by an opponent for leverage), though the owner appears to have gotten it back.

One thing that surprised me somewhat is that there were no displays of sportsmanship after the fights. No hugging or handshakes. In fact, it seemed more likely that someone usually wanted to keep banging away even after it was over. While our guides told us that virtually all the villagers who showed up to the festival was prepared to fight, I'd say that only about 200 individual battles took place. The authorities appear to be trying to get rid of the festival since they consider it barbaric and few Bolivians appreciate the holiday enough to pay a visit. So a few years from now, I wouldn't be surprised to see the entire festival watered down and reduced to boring dances.

The next day, our tour made a stop home at another hot spring, our third in roughly three weeks. This particular spring is several hundred feet deep, making it sort of a difficult place to relax, as you heat up pretty quickly swimming around. Here, one of our guides related that he had gotten laid the previous evening with another (female) guide. What somehow makes it amusing is that they did it on the communal bathroom floor of our lodgings, perhaps one of the filthiest places on the planet to have sex. A group of toilets without running water employed by drunken backpackers finding there way around with flashlights. But I suppose when you grow up in a poor village without running water, boning in the slick mud of a restroom floor isn't so bad.