Peruvian fat stealers

Horrific accounts of a Peruvian gang that police allege murdered their victims to extract body fat and sell it to Italian cosmetics companies isn’t a new story. It’s based on an old myth deeply embedded in the psyches of indigenous people across the Andes.

Most anthropologists think folklore about the pishtaco figure—an outsider who lurks on country roads to kill Indians for their fat—probably has its roots in reports of 16th century Spanish colonial soldiers using local people’s fat to treat wounds. From that grain of truth, the rumour changed its shape but persisted through the years, unfounded until Peruvian police last week found bottles of yellow fluid and a crude jungle laboratory where apparently dismembered bodies were hung over candles with cooking pots below to catch the dripping oil. The proven facts have yet to emerge, but my guess is that this group tapped into local fears of a 500-year-old bogeyman to keep gang members and people around the mountainous region terrified and compliant.



Over the decades, the pishtaco has taken many forms. Soon after Europeans arrived in the Americas—unleashing massacres, disease and subjugation on the continent’s original inhabitants—there were stories in the Andes that priests killed Indians to make soap out of their fat. By the 1800s, indigenous peoples feared prosperous miners or merchants who sought out Indian fat to oil the machines of expanding industrialisation. In the 20th century, the pishtaco was usually associated with the authorities—not surprising, given the army’s cruelty towards indigenous peoples during its crackdown on rebel movements in the mountains and jungle.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the pishtaco became a white doctor seeking out human organs for rich patients. While the early pishtaco stalked villages, this time he found victims in urban settings, where peasants had fled to shantytowns to escape the repression back home. In late 1988, thousands of parents in Lima, Peru’s capital, kept their children out of school in a panic over an eye-stealing pishtaco. Up in the highlands, where the appearance of strangers tends to herald bad times ahead, even aid workers and anthropologists have risked stoning by indigenous communities on suspicion of being pishtacos in disguise.

The rumour’s true origins, however, aren’t as important as understanding why the gruesome myth still resonates today. Most argue that racism and discrimination have kept the legend alive in Peru and Bolivia, where the word “Indian” is still an insult, synonymous with dirty and dishonest. The countryside—home to indigenous families who live in hardship—is perceived as wild, dangerous and backwards. So even though nearly half Peru’s population is indigenous, and the languages Quechua and Aymara are very much alive in the Andes, plenty of people choose to redefine their identity.

Taking this into account, many anthropologists are convinced the perseverance of the pishtaco rumour is a form of indigenous resistance. There is debate, however, about whether it has more to do with racism or global inequalities. The ethnographic curator at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Tony Eccles, says both are factors. “It’s a response from indigenous peoples to rapid, hostile changes that are constantly being forced on them,” he says. “It’s about fear, and lack of control. Retelling the myth lets children know who they are. And it marks out Indian territory even while their lands are often under threat.”