Andrés Roca Rey enters the arena every afternoon with the intention of “fighting with the greatest possible truth.”
Christopher North went all the way to Lima, Peru to see one matador at work, and the very long trip was clearly worth it.
I have just made a 13,000-mile round trip to watch a bullfight. I’d like to tell you that I also went to admire the exquisite latticework of Lima’s 18th century balconies, to savour the city’s matchless cuisine, to linger reverently in its Viceregal churches. Doing so would make me come across as a more rounded human being. But the truth is that I went for one weekend and for one matador.
And what a matador! Andrés Roca Rey is the world’s Número Uno, the first Peruvian ever to claim the top spot. Eighteen months ago, interviewing him for this magazine, I wondered whether he could rise any higher. He was already the torero of the moment, combining easy grace with suicidal courage. But this summer in Spain, he went up another gear, triumphing in plaza after plaza, culminating in an extraordinary performance in Bilbao. Despite being badly knocked about by both his bulls, he came back with such unhurried elegance that with a unanimity I have never known before, the critics proclaimed it the corrida of 2022.
Peru, like many less developed countries, gets excited when one of its citizens achieves recognition overseas. Even those Peruvians who have no interest in toreo know about Roca Rey — rather as English people who know nothing about cricket know about Ian Botham. To watch the return of the national hero to the ring where he began his ascent — that, surely, was worth an 18-hour flight. …
I made my way to the 257-year-old Plaza de Acho, the greatest bullring in the Americas. Bullfights in Lima are always special, but the buzz that Sunday had a different quality. You could sense the excitement everywhere — among the touts, the anticucho sellers, the lines of police. Crime in the Lima borough of Rímac is normally rife but that day even the muggers and pickpockets were more interested in getting hold of tickets.
Lima brought forth the fatted calf for its famous son. Before the opening parade, we were treated to a performance of the national dance: the marinera, performed both on foot and on that other national symbol, the Peruvian pacing horse. Bands from the army, navy, air force and police played marching tunes. Then 14,000 voices belted out the national anthem. Afterwards, high on the patriotism of the moment, they chanted against Peru’s Leftist president, Pedro Castillo.
A modern bullring, like a Roman amphitheatre, is a forum for public grievances. I happened also to be in the Plaza de Acho in November 2000, when word came through that Alberto Fujimori, the effective but corrupt autocrat, had resigned. It was fascinating to watch the news rustle through the stands. The Fujimorista crowd noticed a Congressman who had been accused of taking a bribe to vote against the president. Without any pre-arrangement, they began tossing coins at the poor fellow until he was driven, puce with rage, from the ring.
The Peruvian government is planning to file criminal charges against Greenpeace activists who may have permanently scarred the Nazca Lines World Heritage Site during a publicity stunt.
As The Guardian reports, the Nazca lines “are huge figures depicting living creatures, stylized plants and imaginary figures scratched on the surface of the ground between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago.” The figures, which can only be seen from the air, are believed to have had ritual functions related to astronomy.
The ground around the site is so sensitive and so sacred that Peru has even forbidden presidents and top officials to walk where the Greenpeace activists went. Peru’s Deputy Culture Minister told the BBC: “You walk there, and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years.” Tourists generally get to see the site from the air, or, on rare occasions, are equipped with special foot gear.
“They are absolutely fragile. They are black rocks on a white background. You walk there and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years,” said the minister. “And the line that they have destroyed is the most visible and most recognized of all.”
Several Greenpeace activists entered into the prohibited area beside the figure of a hummingbird where they laid big yellow cloth letters reading: “Time for Change! The Future is Renewable.” They were also sure to leave a signature. The message was intended for delegates from 190 countries at the UN climate talks being held in Lima.
Peru is planning to file criminal charges against the activists before they leave the country.
Alberto Fujimori saved Peru from a bloodthirsty communist terrorist movement, the Shining Path, of which the British editorialist Theodore Dalrymple wrote:
The worst brutality I ever saw was that committed by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, in the days when it seemed possible that it might come to power. If it had, I think its massacres would have dwarfed those of the Khmer Rouge. As a doctor, I am accustomed to unpleasant sights, but nothing prepared me for what I saw in Ayacucho, where Sendero first developed under the sway of a professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzman.”
So, naturally, we read in today’s New York Times that Alberto Fujimori is being extradited by the socialist government of Chile (a country which was itself saved from Marxist totalitarianism by the late General Augusto Pinochet, who was also internationally hounded by leftist attempts at judicial vengeance) to Peru to stand trial on “human rights and corruption” charges.
Save a country from Marxist totalitarianism’s reign of terror, and you’ll be indicted and internationally extradited to be tried as an enemy of “human rights.”
But, if you take US diplomats hostage, and become head of a major terrorist regime which stones people to death, wages covert war against the United States, and bends every effort at acquiring nuclear weapons, why! then, you get to give a speech at Columbia.
Recent years have seen a tremendous retreat by Reason from the public dialogue, providing a concomitant opportunity for ideologies embodying the worst of mankind’s vices and follies, socialism and nationalism, to take its place. When foreign governments behave contemptibly, asserting irrational and self-aggrandizing claims of ownership to artistic treasures created by civilizations which existed ages before their own time, the leftwing press typically rushes to add its voice in support for yet another contemporary expression of ressentiment.
Refreshingly, Arthur Lubow, in the Sunday Times Magazine, is less than sympathetic to Peru’s attempts to wrest custodianship of artifacts from Manchu Pichu discovered by Yale’s Hiram Bingham in the early years of the last century from the Peabody Museum.
other countries as well as Peru are demanding the recovery of cultural treasures removed by more powerful nations many years ago. The Greeks want the Parthenon marbles returned to Athens from the British Museum; the Egyptians want the same museum to surrender the Rosetta Stone and, on top of that, seek to spirit away the bust of Nefertiti from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Where might it all end? One clue comes in a sweeping request from China. As a way of combating plunder of the present as well as the past, the Chinese government has asked the United States to ban the import of all Chinese art objects made before 1911. The State Department has been reviewing the Chinese request for more than two years.
The movement for the repatriation of “cultural patrimony†by nations whose ancient past is typically more glorious than their recent history provides the framework for the dispute between Peru and Yale. To the scholars and administrators of Yale, the bones, ceramics and metalwork are best conserved at the university, where ongoing research is gleaning new knowledge of the civilization at Machu Picchu under the Inca. Outside Yale, most everyone I talked to wants the collection to go back to Peru, but many of them are far from disinterested arbiters. In the end, if the case winds up in the United States courts, its disposition may be determined by narrowly legalistic interpretations of specific Peruvian laws and proclamations. Yet the passions that ignite it are part of a broad global phenomenon. “My opinion reflects the opinion of most Peruvians,†Hilda Vidal, a curator at the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Peru in Lima, told me. “In general, anything that is patrimony of the cultures of the world, whether in museums in Asia or Europe or the United States, came to be there during the times when our governments were weak and the laws were weak, or during the Roman conquest or our conquest by the Spanish. Now that the world is more civilized, these countries should reflect on this issue. It saddens us Peruvians to go to museums abroad and see a Paracas textile. I am hopeful that in the future all the cultural patrimony of the world will return to its country of origin.†Behind her words, I could imagine a gigantic sucking whoosh, as the display cases in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Louvre and the other great universal museums of the world were cleansed of their contents, leaving behind the clattering of a few Wedgwood bowls and Sèvres teacups.
Terry D. Garcia, an ally and enthusiast promoter of Peruvian repatriation claims who works at National Geographic and who has made himself into an active participant in the controversy, was dismissive of Yale’s concerns for the preservation of the artifacts as politically incorrect.
It’s so patronizing of them to suggest that you can’t return these objects to Peru because they can’t take care of them — that a country like Peru doesn’t have competent archaeologists or museums,†he says. “Maybe if you were a colonial power in the 19th century you could rationalize that statement. I don’t see how you could make it today.
But Arthur Lubow describes his own experience with Peruvian standards of stewardship.
Fernando Astete, an archaeologist who has worked at the Machu Picchu park since 1978 and been director of it since 2001, wants the Bingham collection to be exhibited at the site’s museum. When I spoke with him in Cuzco, he said: “I am happy with the museum. It has temperature control and humidity control and guards.†But when I visited the site museum, which is located about a mile and a half from the Aguas Calientes train station, I found evidence of none of those amenities. The doors were open to the air, which was moist from the nearby river, and the sole official was a caretaker who sold tickets and then exited the building.
