LIMA, Peru (AP) – Circuses in Peru are built around clowns and offer paintings for more than 500 characters. But screens have experienced difficulties in recent years, their consumers have been attracted to the Internet, video games and other entertainments, and then the pandemic has arrived.
The coronavirus has kept millions of Peruvians locked in their homes, blowing the country’s hundred small circuses.
In an empty box in Lima, Santos Chiroque helps keep the yellow carp, logs and ropes he used until March to mount the circus that fed him and his family.
He had installed the new store in the hope of stimulating the business. “What’s invested in vain,” says the 74-year-old man, whose clown call is “Piojito.”
Now his wife and five young men are promoting caramel apples on the streets of Lima in search of coins.
At least one clown died of coronavirus, William Tovar, in the town of Huancayo. His white coffin painted in colorful circles and six saddened clowns carried him through the streets of the village.
Other clowns check to accommodate pandemic confinement. Carlos Olaz-bal and his 4 children make video calls with screens of young people from his house of 4 floors. His circle of relatives also sells salted apples and popcorn for income.
Olaz-bal, who plays “Chiquitin,” said he had also turned away in times of crisis.
“I wasn’t thinking about a pandemic. Mi are earthquakes,” he says, referring to the common tremors in Peru, of which 25,648 coronavirus deaths are the 3 largest in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico.