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The Fist of God -- Page 2


	Hit parade: A San Pedrino from the upper part of town (opposite) delivers a left to a fellow citizen. Wolfgang Schüler

THERE ARE WORLDS OF marvel in Bolivia. Doors that open onto other ways of seeing, trails that lead across solitary landscapes and end in unexpected places, and inner and outer wildernesses where no trails yet exist. A couple of German filmmakers told me in a pizza joint in La Paz last year how they'd come off a salt flat into a village whose annual festival had just started, and they went wild for this drunken feast, its totem poles and stuffed condors.

With only nine million people in an area not much smaller than Alaska, travelers here enter the uncrowded space of an ancient population balance. More and more people have discovered this, and now La Paz sometimes seems overrun with loping, fleece-clad, sunglassed refugees from ourselves, all beating a path to the next untrampled adventure destination. But hours outside the capital, the gringo trail peters out, and vast, acute terrain takes over. You can scale 5,000-meter snowpeaks, trek around them, or machete through rainforests. You can cross the lands of the Kallawaya healers, the magicians of the Inca empire.

But it's never safe to hike alone. Fatal accidents have occurred on the popular trekking route from La Paz to the resort of Coroico, where a Swiss blonde disappeared last April. Most of the countryside is peaceful, but there are places where tourists are not welcomed. Years ago my friend Peter had a fantasy that he and I would get some llamas and trek around the northern shores of Lake Titicaca. Our map showed a dirt road and the town of Achacachi. We imagined ourselves strolling between golden fields of quinoa and the thrilling blue waters of the highest lake. Living in Bolivia for part of each year, I asked about Achacachi. Don't go there, people said; Achacacheños were mean and fuertes. A friend in La Paz happened to come from there, as I learned one night, drinking, when he suddenly commanded me to fear him: He was from Achacachi, he ate babies. It turned out to be a common rumor, this baby-eating. Eventually I asked a Bolivian anthropologist. He said there were a lot of strange things in the backcountry. He'd never seen baby-eating, but he was sure it had happened in secret, because, he explained, a myth that has never been disproved must contain some truth. Another visitor told of a black dog howling like a woman in the haunted plaza. I decided not to go.

I've been a festival dancer in La Paz, even president of one of its diabladas, its groups of masked devil dancers, but I was afraid tinku was one festival I shouldn't attend. Tinku was brutal, forbidden, for campesinos only. In 1999, at Bolivia's biggest tinku, in the town of Macha, a French photographer was seriously injured, beaten over the head with his own camera. The gesture was hard to misinterpret. Beyond endangering myself, I didn't want my presence to make the fighters feel like animals in the tourists' zoo. And yet the pull was deep. I grew up in South America, feeling a complicated mix of separation, identification, responsibility, and desire. At age ten, in Peru, I found a woman's skull in a pre-Inca burial ground. I used to sit and stare into her eye sockets, wondering who she'd been.

And I'd wanted to see a tinku ever since a friend evoked a haunting, Kurosawa-like scene of campesinos converging across an arid altiplano amid the howling of giant panpipes and the fluttering of flags. The Quechua word tinku means "encounter"; weddings and fistfights happen at the same celebration. Somehow the conjunction made sense to me, as if a festival of life and death, excluding no type of human contact, might offer a glimpse of wholeness.

I decided to go, but quietly, responsibly. I dug up most of what's in books, on film—not much. I tracked down experts in La Paz. I learned that the southern Andes are dotted with violent festivals, where people fight with fists, whips, rocks, farm tools, on horseback, or sling dried apricots at one another. Bloodshed, even death, are overt objectives as extended Andean families, called ayllus, square off in slugfests that can last from a few minutes to nearly a week. Most such battles (and the deaths that occur in them) are undocumented, but the tinku tradition, based in the altiplano departamentos of Oruro and Potosí, is coming out of oblivion. A dozen or so are held annually, defying efforts to ban them; the Macha tinku makes the TV news. Two thousand campesinos fought there last year under the pacifying influence of police armed with bullwhips and tear gas. One death was reported—a man beaten so badly that he couldn't be identified. At least one other man died without making the news. A stylized tinku dance was even in vogue among educated, roots-oriented young people, but before joining a real tinku most urban Bolivians would rather visit Miami, or maybe rot in hell.

Editorials echoed the words of Spanish observers 400 years ago—savage, subhuman. Resisting such portrayals, an Aymara pundit told me that soccer was more brutal—and didn't norte-americanos have their boxing? Clearly tinku was being obscured by the very sensationalism that had brought it to light. I had to see for myself. La Paz friends urged me not to go. There was also a war going on for much of last year on the border of Potosí and Oruro, a feud between two of the ayllus that compete most ferociously at tinkus. The army had gone in. The news was full of burning hamlets, corpses, poked-out eyes. Fifty people had died, but it was hard to believe that all of tinku country—some 60,000 square miles—was aflame with danger. "Ay, Katy!" my Bolivian tocaya, or same-name friend, Katy Camacho, said. "Why don't you go to Cochabamba instead? There's a Christ there. He cries real tears!"

I know now that I was failing to imagine what real violence would be like.

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