Los Santos: where
the bulls crash the party
article and photos by
Darrin DuFord
Panama has long been known as a home of
talented ballplayers—but let’s not forget the bullplayers.
In the Panamanian province of Los Santos, the job market is anemic, the soil is poor and difficult for cash crops, and the roads are pocked more than an asteroid.
But the people of the province still always manage to find a reason to party, especially when partying hard means fighting the bulls.
At the end of August, the community of
Llano de Piedra holds their annual Santa Rosa de Lima Festival in their
downtown consisting entirely of two rustic, T-shaped intersections, sans
traffic lights. When I arrived by public van on the last day of the
festival, the tiny ranching community was celebrating from one
intersection to the other with two improvised bullrings, in between which
they scattered stalls of fried fare, dusty gambling tables, and a live
cumbia band competing with a stereo system the size of a pickup truck’s
entire payload. Defying --- albeit fleetingly --- the 33°C afternoon, the
open-air bar stocked crates of 50-cent beers, just within the budget of
the campesino’s average wage of $7 per day.
And then the matches began. But before
you spin up images of tight-fitting matador costumes and poodle-ear hats,
let me say that participants in a Panamanian bullfight hop into the ring
with whatever they were wearing on the farm that morning. In most cases
the ring is not even a ring—it’s a square pen constructed out of
five-rail, cattle-corral panels, reinforced with tree posts sunk into the
ground several feet. Fans of blood sports might want to stick to
cockfights, because under the tropical palm trees of Panama, the object of
the bullfight is not to kill the bull; the bulls are only teased with a
couple ratty quilts and then get to go home. The object, so it seems, is
to avoid being killed. Good exercise for both man and bull.
Even though the bulls stomp into the
close-quarters pen with 900 pounds of drooling angst, the matadors --- er,
make that jugadores (bull “players,” I suppose) --- don’t rely on any
arrows to weaken the bulls before the game begins, as is done in Spain, to
balance the playing field. You see, the bulls in Panamanian bullfights
aren’t bred for fighting. They’re bred for, well, breeding. The
bullplayers only equalize the game by fortifying themselves with generous,
dribbly swigs of 70-proof Seco Herrerano.
“I’ve been fighting the bulls for 12
years,” declared Juan, an open-shirted bullplayer, in between skirmishes.
He told me that he traveled from neighboring Costa Rica to party with the
bulls at the Santa Rosa Festival, as we conversed through the fence gaps
just small enough to prevent a bull from ramming his head into the torso
of one of the many onlookers.
And speaking of onlookers, the bravado
was far from reserved for the bullplayers, since many of the beer-gripping
locals sat balanced on the fence’s top rung, kicking the bulls in the head
when the beastly breeders wandered their way. Carlos, a veteran bullkicker,
turned his grinning face down to me and remarked, “The bulls can’t jump up
and hurt us way up here. We’re safe.” He slapped his hand on the steel
railing next to him, offering me a choice spot. “Are you afraid?”
After I answered him affirmatively, I
remained at ground level with the families, the curious dogs, and the
skewer vendors, who dragged their hibachis next to the fencing (location,
location). That was when I noticed I was the only man in shorts. Even most
of the boys wore jeans, despite the town’s year-round, balmy climate at a
latitude of not even eight degrees north of the equator. I was also the
only one who jumped when fireworks exploded from just a few feet away,
behind the bull truck. Meanwhile, the party didn’t miss a step. A salesman
carefully weaved through the crowd, proving worthiness of his arsenal of
waterproof watches by toting them around in jars filled with water. A
sweet crack of billiard balls discharged from the open-aired, dust-swirled
table near the bar, then a peevish grunt escaped from the end of the bull
ramp. Next contestant, please.
As a barkeep cranked the handle of an ice
crusher, the equatorial sun baked the ground, which was dusty even though
it had rained heavily two days before. The grass on which the bulls romped
and the bullplayers quaffed resembled that of the province’s nubby, crew
cut mountains that had proudly been shaved and converted to pasture for
cattle. Some mountains in the province are so steep that cows sometimes
lose their footing and roll to their deaths (adding a whole new sinister
dimension to cow-tipping, I suppose). The name Llano de Piedra ---
literally Stone Plain --- speaks honestly about the town’s unusually
flatter geography, as well as the difficulty the campesinos have had in
growing crops.
Stripped of the natural variety and
bounty of tropical plant matter --- both live and decaying --- the
pasture’s soil, as scientist Benjamin Turner of the Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute once explained to me, becomes easily destabilized and
dries quickly. From the point of view of a bullplayer, however, this might
not be a bad thing. “Mud, that’s no good for bullfighting anyway,” a
spectating santeño pointed out under his sombrero pintado, as he motioned
with his beer bottle. “It’s dangerous if the bullfighter slips.”
As Juan taunted his next hoofed
counterpart around the pen alongside Chino, an equally dexterous,
jeans-clad bullplayer from the province, a third lassoed the bull’s horns
in a perfect rope toss, sending the animal back up the exit ramp. Recess
was over for the bull, but another groaning bovine soon sloppily dove into
the pen with a boy hanging onto his back, riding him like a pony. No
saddle, no reigns --- just an adventurous sense of fun.
The next bull, searching zealously for
the party to which he had been listening from the inside of a cattle
truck, slammed his boulder of a head into one of the pen’s corners,
slightly but ominously jarring loose a few posts. The true fans knew a
thin post when they saw it; no one had been sitting atop that corner all
day.
At the end of the afternoon’s bull
procession, the only casualties were a few livers, and perhaps a couple
dice-chucking gamblers who lost more money than the ground lost topsoil.
The people of the town gave their patron saint a good show.
While most Los Santos hotels remain
packed during the big events, like carnaval and Easter, the province’s
hotels reported a seven percent occupancy rate for the entirety of 2002,
according to IPAT, the Tourist Institute of Panama. Not all fiestas bring
in the bulls, but since the agrarian province holds hundreds of fiestas
every year (760, according to one historian), you should be able to find a
party where a santeño is saving you a choice seat atop the railing.
