LACHAQUI, Peru (AP) - His left knee to the ground, Nuno Casquinha theatrically tosses away his red cloth, muleta and sword and stares down the bleeding bull that is scratching the dirt with its hooves in a haze of rage. Casquinha pivots, rising to his feet, and turns his back on the fuming half-ton beast, its rack of sharp horns just paces away. The crowd jumps to its feet and cheers the 27-year-old Portuguese matador whose Iberian elan graces the makeshift ring on the edge of a cemetery in Lachaqui, a tiny town more than 12,000 feet (3,700 meters) up in the Andes. "If you dont kill the bull, well kill you," a group of drunkards shouts, hurling bottles. Casquinha is unruffled, and the spectacle ends with the bull slain and the matador on the shoulders of an ecstatic farmer, villagers clamoring for his autograph, pleading to be photographed with him. The Lisbon native is among dozens of bullfighters, mostly Spaniards, who are hoping to gain the fame in Latin America that the economic crisis back home, compounded by rising ethical opposition to the bloody sport, has made near impossible. The number of annual bullfights in Europe nearly halved to 1,997 last year from the crisis inception in 2008 and is down an additional 15 percent this year, said Vicente Royuela, a University of Barcelona economist who studies the sport. When the trim, blue-eyed Casquinha left home early last year, Spain had 765 registered bullfighters competing in the fights, known as "corridas." Hed only managed to get into one bullfight in the first four months of last year, spending his time instead raising bulls on his parents farm and training in the familys basement, "imagining all the bulls I would never see." Even before hard times bit, only 10 percent of bullfighters in Spain got more than 20 fights a year and half quit after six years, Royuela said. "Things were so bad, with no bullfighting in Europe, that I decided to take whatever I could," Casquinha said over coffee on a gray afternoon in the working class Lima district of San Felipe where he lives. Peru, his friends told him in Facebook chats, was the place to be.
Reported by MyNorthwest.com 4 hours ago.
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