Pishtaco Myth

“The pishtacos would kidnap people and change them into tallow to sell them for soap,” reads this ghastly modern cartoon. Legends about the pishtacos as boogeymen have been around the Andean cultures of Peru and Bolivia since the 1600s. Traditionally depicted as a white man with a beard and blue or green eyes, the pishtaco carried a knife and had one consistent goal in the stories: to steal their victims’ fat.

This myth was so prominent that in 2009 there was a notorious police cover-up that involved officials manufacturing stories about a gang of criminals who were killing people to sell their fat to a European cosmetics company. The police had lied — they wanted a story that could obscure the fact that they had grossly neglected investigation of non-pishtaco murders — but the fact that they expected their story to be believed shows just how enduring the pishtaco belief still is.

In fact, the Andean peasants have a sobering real story of continuous oppression that can explain why their ideas about pishtacos have been embedded in folklore. As the Peruvian _retablo_ (a type of tableau sculpture, often devotional art) by artist Nicario Jiménez shows in the second image, the pishtaco clearly manifests the abuse that white or mestizo outsiders have inflicted upon the Andean peoples.

From the days of the Conquistadors, when the Spanish coerced the indigenous populations to la or on their farms and in their mines, to the days of modernization when the economy was hijacked to benefit outsiders, to the brutal Peruvian civil war of the 1980s and 1990s that put Andean peoples in the center, the mountain peoples of Peru and Bolivia have had good reason to fear the white or mestizo powerful outsiders.

And this fear mixed with ideas of fat — the Andean belief that human fat is a kind of life-force, rumors that the Conquistadors used human fat to oil their Church-bells, and a kind of overarching thought that the powerful white/mestizo men were stealing the life force of the Andean peoples for ill-gotten purposes: to benefit the Church, for medicine, for their own economic gain.