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A criminal gang in Peru is suspected in a string of horrific murders that include extracting body fat from their victims. Police in Peru have dubbed the gang “pistacos” after a mythical being known to many Peruvians. Anchor Jeb Sharp finds out about the ancient myth from Harvard professor Gary Urton.

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JEB SHARP: A news story out of Peru is getting a lot of attention around the globe. And we should warn you it involves some gruesome details. Peruvian authorities have arrested four people on suspicion of murder. The suspects are alleged members of a gang operating in the Peruvian jungle. Police commander, Angel Toledo, offered more details.

ANGELA TOLEDO: [SPEAKING SPANISH]

TRANSLATION: We’ve broken up a criminal organization dedicated to trafficking bodily tissues, human fat.

JEB SHARP: That’s the gruesome part. The gang is accused of killing people in order to extract and sell their body fat for use in cosmetics. The police dubbed the gang, the piztacos, after an ancient Peruvian myth. We asked Harvard professor Gary Urton to tell us more. He traces the myth back to the early days of the Spanish conquest.

GARY URTON: It was said that Europeans who came into Peru and came elsewhere into the Andes that one of the things they were looking for was they were looking for body fat to extract from Indians to be used for cosmetics and various purposes like that. In the present day ideas about piztacos are very common in the Andean Highlands. The piztacos are usually people who are associated with modern life, with machinery, with advanced technology. A piztaco will be a tall man, in the leather coat, with a felt hat and tall boots and who carries a knife. The piztaco will find an Indian in an isolated place, meet him on trail for instance, cut his head off and extract the body fat. The stated reason for this is usually in some way to oil the machinery of industry. So for grease for airplanes or automobiles or various things that usually are associated with the advance modern world.

SHARP: And is there a real basis in the original stories? I mean it just sounds like your worst kind of fear and that it would serve some function about fear and strangers as a story. But was there a reason that this story began in the first place?

URTON: Well I think you make a very good point is that it spoke to a time when Native people were in fact being severely abused by foreigners when their land was being taken, when they were being pressed into service for this colonial project, or that, when they were being killed also outright, and when diseases were rampant through the country. And it is I think probably form early colonial times to the present day a general set of beliefs saying be careful of what’s from outside.

SHARP: Do you believe the current news story out of Peru?

URTON: If you’re asking me personally if I believe them, no I don’t believe. I have heard too many of them in my years. I’ve lived for some five years or so in villages in the Andes and I’ve heard them time after time and every time one tries to track down the truth of one or another story it always sort of dissolves into the mist of folklore or myth or someone’s mischievous or fearful account. To me there are various things about this that I found very interesting. One that it’s being played up so much by the press. I can understand why it is. I mean it seems that in Peru that the identity of the bottles of supposed body fat were confirmed by the police. I’d be interested to see those lab reports.

SHARP: This is pretty loaded then – to call these defendants piztacos and yet these are true-life alleged murderers. So what do you do with the real part of the story?

URTON: Well I guess that’s where I would want to reserve judgment on the sort truthful nature of the accounts until we actually learn that these guys did kill 60 or more people and did cut of their heads and their arms and hung them upside down on hooks and drained the body fat out. I would just like to see what we learn over the days and weeks to come.

SHARP: Now what’s interesting about this story is that it involves Peruvians going after other Peruvians and the telling of the myth suggests it’s usually reserved for strangers and others. What do you make of that?

URTON: But remember that when we say Peruvians there are Peruvians and then there are Peruvians. So the piztaco story has always really turned on the opposition between native, local, so-called Indian people and people from the outside. So although these are Peruvians I mean you know it remains to be determined. I haven’t seen these guys or heard them talk or know anything about their personal histories, but I suspect that they’re probably mistisos, people who are sort of mixed ancestry and mixed culture. That is they know something about the countryside but they’re also intimately familiar with urban ways of doing things. Those are also outsiders.

SHARP: Finally Gary Urton, I’m just curious about how myths like the piztaco myth are perpetuated. I mean is it about these occasional flourishings in contemporary life? Is it that they rear their head once in a while and that story gets retold or re-imagined?

URTON: Well I think that to answer that you would really have to look at stories like this in many different contexts from those rare contexts like we are living through now where this very common myth is being told internationally. Here we are talking about it in Boston. To everyday tellings of it and various versions of it in small, local communities. I think that the sort of engine of it, let’s say, is not the big media event like this – because this will die down. This will go away and attention will move somewhere else. But when you go back to the Peruvian countryside you will still see that the mother is still concerned with the safety of her child and one of the most effective tools that she will have at her disposal will be to tell that child be careful of strangers. They can do these terrible things to you.

SHARP: Gary Urton is the Dumbarton Oaks professor of pre-Columbian studies at Harvard University. Thanks very much.

URTON: Thank you.

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