Tigre Capiango

Also Known As: capiango; equated in popular usage with the Guarani yaguarete-aba and the Quechua runa-uturunco, “man-jaguar”
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Argentinian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A man who becomes a jaguar by rolling on a jaguar hide, and who keeps the animal’s strength and appetite while wearing its shape.
Role in Mythos: The capiango explains night killings of livestock and the unearned ferocity of certain men, and in nineteenth-century Argentina it was believed to walk in the ranks of a caudillo’s army.
Relation to Humans: He is a neighbour before he is a monster, usually a woodcutter or a herder whose family notice only that he goes out after dark. He raids stock, terrifies country districts, and can be undone by anyone who finds where he keeps his hide.

A jaguar skin hung folded in the fork of an algarrobo where the thorn scrub closed over the path, and its owner came for it after dark. He spread it on the bare ground, lay down on it, and rolled. What got up afterward went out across the neighbours’ fields, and by morning there were dead cattle with their throats opened and no tracks that any man could have left.

That is the shape the story takes across the dry monte of central and northwestern Argentina, in Cordoba and Santiago del Estero and Tucuman and the Llanos of La Rioja, and it is settled enough there that the Spanish of those provinces built a word around it. In the northwest, capiango means the jaguar itself. It also means a man to whom country belief credits the power of becoming one. The Diccionario de americanismos lists both senses under a single headword, then lists a second capiango entirely, borrowed from Brazilian Portuguese, meaning a sly, light-fingered, faintly criminal sort of person. Whether the cattle thief and the cattle-killer are the same word twice is not a question the dictionary tries to answer.

The story that carries the belief is nearly always told about two brothers. They lived alone in the bush, working as hacheros, felling algarrobo and quebracho with the resin sticking to their forearms and the axe ringing flat in the heat. One of them began slipping away at night. Livestock started turning up dead on the neighbouring fields, and the brother who stayed home did the arithmetic and did not like the answer. He followed. In a clearing he watched the other take a jaguar hide down from a tree, spread it, and roll himself across it until the thing that rose from the ground was not his brother. So the next day he came back with fire and burned the skin. He walked home to find the sleeper laid out and grey and dying, who looked up and asked him what he had done. A scrap, the dying man begged. Bring me one scrap of it and I will not die. The brother went back to the ashes, found a corner that had not caught, and carried it in. The moment it came through the door the dying man was off the bed and on the floor and rolling, and the jaguar that came out of that rolling went through the window and into the monte and was never seen again.

The hide does the work. Every version says so in its own way. A telling from Entre Rios has the man put grains of salt in his mouth before he rolls; the versions from the littoral add a fumigation, the man standing in the smoke of burning chicken feathers, which is a smell nobody who has met it forgets. But the constant is the skin, and the standard way to destroy a capiango is not to hunt him but to find his hide and burn it while he is still wearing his own face.

Descriptions of what the transformation produces are frankly inconsistent, and the inconsistency runs along a geographic seam. In the western monte the change tends to be total, and the capiango is simply a jaguar, larger and bolder than a jaguar has any business being. Along the rivers of the northeast, where the same figure is called yaguarete-aba, the change stalls halfway: a black cat with a man’s hands and a man’s legs, and a wide bald forehead above the eyes. That one is said to eat the flesh of cattle, of mules and of people, to sack lonely houses, and to carry off young women to pick the lice out of its hair. The horneros raise the alarm when it passes. It can also come as a black bull.

Behind the criollo folklore sits something considerably older. In the sierras of Cordoba, at Serrezuela, the floor of a rock shelter carries human footprints and feline footprints mixed together, and on another panel a masked human figure stands beside a second figure that is half man and half cat, which reads as two frames of the same sequence. Early in the seventeenth century, at Quilino in the same province, a court officer raided the house of an old woman who officiated at rituals and came away with confiscated jaguar skins. Further north and further back, the potters of the Cienaga and Aguada cultures modelled jaguars with bared canines and spotted flanks into drinking vessels, and their people took the ground seed of the cebil tree as snuff, which opened the door to a different order of reality and, for the man who went through it, to another body. Andean Quechua still has a word for the result, runa-uturunco, and nineteenth-century testimony from Santiago del Estero and Catamarca insists the thing was real.

The capiango’s strangest hour came in the winter of 1829. The unitarian general Jose Maria Paz was gathering forces in Cordoba to meet Facundo Quiroga, the Tiger of the Llanos, and had ordered Commander Camilo Isleno to bring in a squadron from Ojo de Agua. One hundred and twenty men out of a hundred and fifty deserted in the night, a stone’s throw from the camp. Pressed for an explanation, Isleno finally admitted what the militiamen had been told: that Quiroga carried four hundred capiangos in his army. Four hundred beasts loosed on a camp at night, the commander pointed out reasonably, would finish it. Paz wrote the exchange into his memoirs with the air of a man who cannot quite believe his own notebook. Isleno was real, the desertions are recorded elsewhere, and the battle of La Tablada was fought a few days later without them.

Not everyone has taken it at face value. Pedro de Paoli, writing on Quiroga in 1973, dismissed the whole capiango passage as one of Paz’s inventions, a piece of stagecraft designed to paint a rival as the chieftain of savages. The argument has force. It also does not touch the folklore, which was in the mouths of hacheros and herders long before either general was born and stayed there long after both were dead.

What a capiango can do follows entirely from what he is. He changes at will, provided he has the skin, and while he wears it he has a jaguar’s weight, a jaguar’s silence and a jaguar’s indifference to fences. Bullets that have not been blessed tend to miss him or to do nothing. He hunts at night, takes stock rather than fights men, and prefers a household with no dogs.

What undoes him follows just as directly. He is chained to an object, and objects burn. Strip the hide off him and he is a naked man on the ground; spit three times in his face after that and he goes blind. A blessed bullet or a blessed machete will kill him, and the moment he dies the jaguar collapses back into the man, which is generally how a district learns whose neighbour it had been.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tigre capiango?

A tigre capiango is a man in Argentine folklore who can turn himself into a jaguar. The word comes from the Spanish of northwestern Argentina, where capiango means both the jaguar and the person credited with becoming one, and the belief is strongest in Cordoba, Santiago del Estero, Tucuman and La Rioja.

How does a capiango transform into a jaguar?

He keeps a jaguar hide hidden, usually in a tree out in the bush, spreads it on the ground and rolls his body across it. Some versions add grains of salt held in the mouth, and versions from the northeast have him stand in the smoke of burning chicken feathers first. Without the hide there is no transformation.

How do you kill or stop a tigre capiango?

Burn his hide while he is in human form and he weakens and dies, though a single unburned scrap is enough to save him. He can also be killed with a blessed bullet or a blessed machete, and stripping the skin from him and spitting three times in his face is said to blind him. When a capiango dies he reverts to human shape.

Were there really capiangos in Facundo Quiroga’s army?

The belief was real even if the jaguar-men were not. General Jose Maria Paz recorded in his memoirs that before the battle of La Tablada in 1829, one hundred and twenty of Commander Camilo Isleno’s one hundred and fifty militiamen deserted because they had been told Quiroga marched with four hundred capiangos. Paz’s account has been challenged as propaganda against Quiroga, but the desertions themselves are documented.

Is the capiango the same as the yaguarete-aba?

They are usually treated as the same figure under two regional names, but the traditions differ. Capiango belongs to the Spanish of the Argentine northwest and generally describes a complete change into a jaguar, while yaguarete-aba is the Guarani name used along the northeastern rivers, where the creature is more often half jaguar and half human.