In the yawar fiesta, the blood festival, a captured condor is tied to the back of a bull and the bull is released into a ring. The bird claws at the bull's head, the bull bucks, and after some minutes the condor is untied and released, sometimes to a feast in its honour. The rite is documented in the southern Peruvian highlands and is the subject of Jose Maria Arguedas's novel of the same name.
The reading given locally is not subtle and is not hidden. The bull is Spain, brought with the invasion along with bullfighting; the condor is the Andes. The condor is on top, and the condor walks away. It is a colonial rite about the colony, performed within the calendar of Catholic patronal festivals, which is where a great deal of Andean religion has lived since the sixteenth century.
The bird's survival matters to the meaning. A yawar fiesta in which the condor died would say something different, and the released bird is treated as carrying the community's petition back to the mountains.
The practice is now restricted in Peruvian law, since the Andean condor is protected and the capture, however brief, is legally and biologically costly to a bird that breeds slowly. Local authorities and conservation bodies have negotiated substitutions in some districts. That argument, between a threatened species and a rite that is itself a form of cultural survival, has no clean resolution and the atlas does not offer one.