BOGOTA, Colombia––Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia, on May 28, 2024 appeared to win a 12-year fight to ban Spanish-style arena bullfighting.
The 166-member Colombian House of Representatives voted 93-2 to ban bullfighting by the start of 2028. The vote in the 102-member Colombian Senate was reportedly 96-2.
The last remaining formality needed to make the three-year phase-out of Spanish-style arena bullfighting official is Petro’s signature on the legislation, a foregone conclusion.
Then mayor of Bogota, the Colombian capital city, Petro in 2012 banned bullfighting at the city-owned Plaza de Santa Maria stadium, which had hosted bullfights since 1931.
“No torture is regulated; it is prohibited!”
Petro had offered to allow the Taurine Corporation, leasing the stadium for bullfights, to switch to promoting so-called “bloodless” Portuguese-style bullfighting, but the Taurine Corporation refused.
Elected president of the nation in 2022, Petro allowed the bullfighting industry no such option this time around.
“Ours is a country that says that no torture is regulated; it is prohibited,” Bogotá member of the House of Representatives Juan Carlos Losada told media.
“We became a less violent and more civilized society today. We took a quantum leap in respect for life,” Losada exulted.
Gustavo Petro, President of the Republic of Colombia. (Facebook photo)
“Children will no longer be exposed to this spectacle”
Agreed Cali city councilor Terry Hurtado, who has worked to ban Spanish-style arena bullfighting for more than 25 years, “This ban is a huge victory for organizations that have worked to transform society and reject violence against animals.
“I feel relieved that in Colombia, bulls and horses, who also participate in bullfights, will no longer be tortured, and that children will no longer be exposed to this spectacle.”
Reported Adry Torres for the Daily Mail, “Valle del Cauca representative Christian Garcés, who opposed the bill, attempted to introduce a measure to find an alternative solution, stressing that the ban would negatively impact workers.”
The Santa Maria bull ring in Bogota.
(Flickr photo)
Earlier Bogota ban was overturned by court
But relatively few workers will be affected.
“In Colombia,” said Torres, “fewer than two dozen municipalities continue to hold these events, although the annual bullfights in the western city of Manizales still draw tens of thousands of spectators.”
The Colombian prohibition of Spanish-style arena bullfighting may yet meet judicial opposition.
The Bogota bullfighting ban imposed by Petro was judicially overturned in 2016, after Petro was succeeded as mayor by Enrique Penalosa, who is now a member of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
“The constitutional court ruled that bullfighting was part of Colombia’s cultural heritage and couldn’t be blocked,” explained Joshua Goodman of Associated Press on January 22, 2017, soon after bullfighting resumed at Plaza de Toros La Santa María after a four-year hiatus.
Tear gas
On that occasion, Goodman reported, “Hundreds of protesters clashed with riot police and harassed spectators. Police had to fire tear gas to control the protesters, many of whom shouted ‘murderers’ and ‘torturers’ while spitting and sometimes coming to blows with spectators nervously making their way to Bogota’s 1930s-era brick bullring.
“There were several arrests,” Goodman said, “as tensions ran high in what at times seemed a reflection of deep social divisions between wealthy, well-dressed spectators who had expected a booze-filled, fun afternoon and a crowd of mostly young, angry protesters screaming obscenities at all who passed before them.”
Mayor Enrique Penalosa told Goodman that “while he sides with animal rights activists who consider the bulls’ slow, agonizing death in front of an audience a barbaric throwback, he had no choice but to enforce the high court’s ruling.
Penalosa emphasized to Goodman that he supported legislation then before the Colombian congress to prevent state resources from being used to finance bullfights, while allowing each municipality to decide for itself whether to allow bullfighting.
Bullring collapse
An incident interpreted by many Colombians as an omen that bullfighting should end was the June 2022 collapse of an improvised temporary bullfighting stadium in El Espinal municipality, Tolima state, southwest of Bogota.
A child, two women and a man were killed, with at least 500 people injured, Tolima governor Jose Ricard Orozco told reporters.
Nine of the injured fled the stadium collapse into the area itself, and were charged by a bull. Other bulls escaped into the city.
Pope banned bullfights in 1567
Attempts to stop Spanish-style arena bullfighting as pointless cruelty have been made, detailed the late Michael A. Ogorzaly (1948-2006) in The Case Against Bullfighting (2006) since 1567, when Pope Pious V in the papal bull De salute gregis dominici forbade bullfighting as an entertainment “more proper of demons than humans.”
Pope Pious V excommunicated emperors, kings and cardinals who would not ban bullfights, and clerics who attended bullfights, and excluded bullfighters from Christian burial.
Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Gasparri affirmed in 1920 that, “The Church maintains His Holiness Pious V s condemnation of such bloody, shameful shows.”
Monsignor Mario Canciani reiterated the Vatican position in 1989.
Vatican theologian Marie Hendrickx reiterated it yet again in 2000 in the semi-official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
Bullfighting ban lifted in Mexico City
In theory, no Catholic nation should permit bullfighting now.
Yet bullfighting on January 28, 2024 returned to Plaza México in Mexico City, the world’s largest bullring, six weeks after the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice on December 6, 2023 lifted an injunction that had suspended bullfighting since May 2022.
A May 2022 local court ruling had held, responding to a petition from the human rights organization Justicia Justa, that bullfights violate Mexico City residents’ rights to inhabit a healthy environment free from violence.
While the five-justice Mexican Supreme Court of Justice panel that overturned the May 2022 ruling did not explain themselves, they appeared to have accepted an argument from lawyers representing the National Association of Fighting Bull Breeders that the only human rights issue involved was their own right to stage bullfights.
(Beth Clifton photo & collage)
Uruguay, Nicaragua, Catalan
Uruguay, a somewhat smaller South American nation located on the Atlantic coast between Brazil and Argentina, banned bullfighting in 1912.
No other nation in which Spanish-style arena bullfighting had ever become established passed a bullfighting ban until July 2010, when the Nicaraguan legislature prohibited bullfighting by a vote of 74-5.
Catalonia, the Catalan-speaking eastern region of Spain, banned Spanish-style arena bullfighting in 2010, effective on January 1, 2012.
The last bullfight in Barcelona, the Catalan capital city, was held in 2011.
Banner used by Catalonian nationalists opposed to bullfighting.
(Catalunya Accio flag, Beth Clifton collage)
Spanish court overturned Catalan bullfighting ban
“The decision was part of the growing movement against bullfighting,” explained Ciaran Giles of Associated Press, “but it was also seen as another step in the Catalan government’s push to break away from Spain.”
On October 20, 2016, however, the Spanish Constitutional Court, the highest court in Spain, voted 8 to 3 to overturn the Catalonian ban on arena bullfighting.
“The Catalonian ban is unconstitutional, the court argued,” wrote Antonio Lorca for the Madrid newspaper El Pais, in an English text translated by George Mills, “because bullfighting had been declared part of Spain’s cultural heritage in national laws introduced in 2013 and 2015.”
Despite the court ruling, Spanish-style arena bullfighting has yet to resume in Catalonia. Some events in which locals torment and chase bulls may continue in rural communities.
COVID-19 did what lawmakers could not
The government of the Spanish island province of Majorca, also with a strong separatist movement, in July 2017 banned Spanish-style arena bullfighting, but exempted Portuguese-style “bloodless” bullfighting.
Bullfighting resumed in 2019, however, at the 95-year-old Coliseo Balear in Majorca, also by direction of the Spanish Constitutional Court.
COVID-19, killing nearly 122,000 Spaniards, on March 14, 2020 brought a complete three-month shutdown of bullfighting and related events throughout Spain, including cancellation of the Feast of Saint Fermin week of bullfights, preceded each day by the “Running of the Bulls” at Pamplona.
But the suspension of bullfighting was lifted on condition that bullrings could only be filled to one third of normal capacity, approximately as large a crowd as any attracted anyway, and that bullfights could only be held outdoors, as they are anyway.
According to the Statista.com information service, only 129 bullfights were held in Spain during 2020, but the total rebounded to 1,546 in 2022, the most since 2018, but still barely 40% as many as the 3,651 bullfights held in Spain in 2007.
The number of bullfights held in Spain has dropped in 12 of the most recent 15 years for which Statista has data.
Ed Boks: time for U.S. to ban rodeo, too
Observed Ed Boks, formerly animal control director in five cities including New York City and Los Angeles, in his blog Animal Politics, “Colombia’s decision to ban bullfighting is part of a broader movement against the practice in Latin America and beyond. Countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and Uruguay have already prohibited bullfighting, while it remains legal in Ecuador, France, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Spain, and Venezuela.
“U.S. legislators should follow Colombia’s lead by banning rodeos,” Boks recommended. “Both bullfighting and rodeo share a history of subjecting animals to unnecessary stress, pain, injury, and death for the sake of entertainment.
“Just as Colombia has recognized the inherent cruelty in bullfighting, it is time,” Boks concluded, “for the U.S. to acknowledge and address the similar ethical concerns present in rodeo events.”
Exposing the Big Game 
