Lucha Libre from Bolivia

[Jetlag]

I've come across clips of this stuff on Youtube, highly interesting. There's a high level of athleticism and invetiveness on display that doesn't seem to be far below of what the mexican guys were doing around the same time.

Check out this clip, some impressive stuff here:

 

 

Makoto Morimitsu apparently is a Japanese guy who learned how to wrestle in South America and he has worked there since, trotting the globe during the 2000s. His channel has more stuff, although only highlights and usually doesn't show the finish of the matches sadly:

https://www.youtube.com/@makotomorimitsu6249/videos

He also has clips of him wrestling in places like Peru and Colombia, apparently wrestling in Peru was also called Catchascan tracing back to the catch as catch can wrestling style.

This channel has a bunch more stuff, although quality is a nightmare as all the videos are grainy with a watermark overlaid and low fi heavy metal overdubbed. Gee I love low fi heavy metal as much as anyone but sometimes you can overdo it.

https://www.youtube.com/@jaidercito1/videos

This channel also has some stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/@luchafuertextremabolivialf151/videos

 

The high production value TV stuff from 1997-2002 ca. looks great. I'd love to see the full matches. I've no idea if maybe Bolivia has a TV archive like France and Chile or we need to find the Bolivian lucha super aficionado who has every episode on VHS in his garage.

Also, add Bolivia to the list of countries where they fucking love wrestling mummies.

[Phil Lions]

I believe the TV footage is from 1998-2000, to be more precise.

About ten or so years ago the Bolivian giant Walter "Tataque" Quisbert randomly peaked my interest and I wanted to find out more about his pro wrestling career so I ended up looking into the Bolivian scene a bit. There wasn't detailed info available on the older stuff, but there was a blog that had a lot of photos and info on the current day scene. The scene at that point, however, seemed very cartoonish in terms of presentation and characters, i.e. so nothing like the video above. This is the blog in question: https://luchalibrebol.blogspot.com. It's no longer active, but the archives are still there.

And then there was another blog, in English, which provided some info on the history of lucha libre in Bolivia: http://www.nellhaynes.com/fieldnotes/la-historia-el-mito-de-origenes + http://www.nellhaynes.com/fieldnotes/la-historia-la-epoca-dorada + http://www.nellhaynes.com/fieldnotes/a-brief-history-of-bolivian-lucha-libre.

By the way, here's Tataque on the right.

Next to him is Sombra Vangadora who was one of the top Bolivian stars back in the 1980s (not to be confused with the Mexican Sombra Vengadora - different guy). Two of the guys featured in the video that Jetlag shared, Sombra Vengadora Jr. and Vampiro Uno, are Sombra Senior's sons. LFX (Lucha Fuerta Xtrema), one of the YouTube channels in the original post, was their company. The other channel, Jaidercito, is mostly about Jaider Lee. In addition to being second-generation wrestlers (their father was Napoleon Simonini, better known as Medico Loco, another one of the top Bolivian stars from back in the day), Lee and his brother Kid Simonini used to run a company called LIDER. I'm not sure who's running it today, but the company is still around. And a quick glance at their Facebook page tells me that they're doing weekly shows and they've got a couple of third-generation Simoninis wrestling there.

[Hernan]

On 5/17/2024 at 7:29 PM, Phil Lions said:

The scene at that point, however, seemed very cartoonish in terms of presentation and characters, i.e. so nothing like the video above.

Not long time ago, I listened to a podcast that speaks about the Argentine Wrestling scene (called simply "Wrestling Argentino"). In one of the episodes, they mentioned about the influence of Martín Karadagian's Titanes en el Ring in South America kept for longer than it should. That might explain why some countries close to Argentina took inspiration from Titanes as far as being cartoonish/family friendly. My country kept for years the Titanes influence and there were clones/spin-offs, which most of them failed. Nowadays, they are trying to distance themselves from the innocent image of Titanes, some of them are in favor while others do not.

That explains why you may find that point of the Bolivian scene cartoonish.