A Dance Claimed by Two Nations

The Diablada, the masked dance of devils descended from the ambivalent tradition surrounding Supay, has become the centre of a genuine and still unresolved cultural heritage dispute between Bolivia and Peru, both of which claim the dance as a distinctly national tradition with roots in their own regional colonial and indigenous history.

Bolivia's Carnival of Oruro, where the Diablada is performed on the grandest scale by thousands of costumed dancers over several days, was recognized by UNESCO in 2001 as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, a designation Bolivia has treated as an important affirmation of the dance's Bolivian origin and identity, while Peru points to its own long-documented Diablada traditions, particularly around Puno on Lake Titicaca, a region with deep pre-Columbian and colonial connections to the Bolivian altiplano that straddled and continues to straddle the modern national border established well after the dance's traditions had already taken shape. The dispute has occasionally become a matter of formal diplomatic friction between the two governments, including public disagreements over UNESCO listings and national cultural promotion campaigns, illustrating how a dance tradition rooted in a shared pre-conquest Andean religious understanding of Supay and the underworld, further reshaped by a shared colonial Catholic overlay equating that underworld lord with the Christian devil, became entangled centuries later in the modern politics of national cultural ownership between two countries whose current border did not exist when the Andean religious complex underlying the dance first took shape.