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Apart from being an expense in hiring the band, basically carnival is to drink – it has been made for that. In that sense, it has been distorted since the 1980s, more or less since the famous Jatun – that’s what the company was called. They broke the tradition of the celebration of tata k’accha and of the Virgin Mary. They wanted to make a sort of mockery. And they went out in fancy dress, and they did not even come out as a matter of devotion at all. Instead, they came out in a burlesque way, like a carnival. They dressed as cholas, pepinos… Some did not dress up – they dared to leave poorly dressed, with their work clothes, but already in a state of drunkenness. That is what began, and it degenerated from there. It became a matter of competition between the workers of the state and the cooperativists.

It began as a kind of competition [over] who spends more. It has degenerated – there is an issue of incredible drunkenness. In three consecutive years, we have had problems between cooperatives. And so to avoid that, what is done in ours is that we do not participate in ‘the descent’. But, yes, in the case of the saints, they bring them to the cooperative the day of compadres. The mass is carried out in one of the churches, and the party is held for everyone in the cooperative, for all the sections. Because what happens in other cooperatives is that each section holds their party – then everyone is scattered; there is not much community. In contrast, here in the ‘Fiscal Reserve’ cooperative, everyone participates. – Luis