Before the coup, the people of Anchuria celebrated the Day of the Dead. Not with the excess you see in México, but with roughly the same sentiment. I've always found it creepy, but it's interesting to see the ways the holiday is adapted by other cultures.
Maybe that goes back further than most of us might imagine.
I can even see the Indians and the Conquistadors bonding over a shared fascination with death. The morbid Catholicism of the Spanish might have felt really comfortable inside the pyramids and tombs dotting the new continent. And the darkly romantic flamenco could have been danced at the very same festivals where the ancient Anchurians held their cruel sacrificial games.
The mixing of pleasure and pain, life and death, still reverberates through modern Anchurian culture, but the most sinister practices have been abandoned in favor of loud parties with dancing skeletons and colorful candy, almost like Halloween back home. Only the very traditional families in the country continue to remember the dead with any real enthusiasm these days, but some of those make up for the rest, engaging in all sorts of bizarre local rituals.
I wonder what Gabriel Ortega's family was like when he was young. What did he inherit from his oldest grandparents? Sometimes these wealthy families stubbornly maintain old traditions, despite how that seems at odds with their business affairs and otherwise worldly views. Who knows what goes on behind the closed doors of those colonial mansions?