Burning the Old Man

The first sign for me, never having spent the end of the year in Ecuador before, was the pile of headless stuffed figures dressed in jeans and button-down shirts on the street corner. I didn’t think much of it at first because on any given street corner, at any given time, you can find things from mangoes to DVDs to diet supplements. But when I started seeing stacks of the stuffed people on street corners all over Quito and an array of freakish masks, I asked. “Those are the old men,” my friend informed me.

The last few days of every year Ecuadorians pick out their old man, give him a face, attach notes to him conveying whatever sentiments, thoughts, etc they want to get rid of, and then burn the whole thing on the street. The old man, 2007, is reduced to ash, and for added affect, men don party dresses and wigs and parade around as the widows of the old men. My guess is these are mostly straight men, based on the unsophisticated drag, but I’m sure some gay men get into the act to, since it’s the only time of the year when cross-dressing is widely accepted.

On New Year’s Eve I was in Cuenca, which I discovered is fairly buttoned-down during the holiday, but that afternoon people were busy preparing a massive float for the midnight parade. The old men to be burned were none other than the Spanish Prime Minister, the King of Spain (am I the only person who didn’t realize Spain still has a king?), and Hugo Chavez. I didn’t get the joke until I saw the end-of-the-year news montages on TV: at a meeting in Chile earlier in the year, Hugo Chavez was insulting the Prime Minister, and the King, sitting between them, said, “¿Por qué no te calles?”—why don’t you just shut up? It wasn’t long before the King’s phrase got ripped to an MP3 file and downloaded as a ringtone on millions of Ecuadorian cell phones. As my Ecuadorian friend put it, “Chavez is Chavez. We all know how obnoxious he is. But on the other hand he’s still a head of state. You (referring to the King) can’t treat him like he’s one of your servants.”

So all three went up in flames as Ecuador prepared for 2008. But not all the old men were politicians. Here’s a baby Shrek (the movie is wildly popular here—I don’t know why) named Pipicho, the Kichwa word for penis. Who knows what notes were attached to that one . . .