Santa Teresita – PARAGUAY

16 February 2021

A group of people participate in the “cuchi-cuchi” game during the Arete Guasu celebration. Cuchi-Cuchi consist in throwing mud or embracing people and stain them with mud.

Guaraní Arete Guasu is the sacred celebration of the Western Guarani people and has been held since time immemorial, each year, in their ancestral territories of the great South American Chaco (central Chaco in Paraguay, southern Bolivia and northeastern Argentina). The ritual is a meeting of several worlds (of the living, the ancestors, the dead) from the Guarani cosmology, with a rituality, where masks, costumes, musicians and staging come together in a meeting between the sacred, the ancestors, and the so-called “games” and the uninterrupted music of the bands.