Cali, Colombia and César Rincón
Alberto García, head of Tauroemoción, is to be congratulated on putting on another fine Feria del Señor de los Cristales at Cali (Colombia) to follow on from the 2021 edition. Although organised by a Spaniard and featuring matadors from Spain and Peru, the feria did its best to promote Colombian tauromaquia - the opening novillada on Christmas Day featured three Colombian novilleros; Boxing Day’s Corrida de la Oportunidad presented another Colombian novillero and no less than six Colombian matadors, one of whom (it turned out to be Luis Miguel Castrillón) as triunfador de la tarde would be offered another spot in the feria; Gitanillo de America, Juan de Castilla, Ricardo Rivera and Luis Bolívar all performed later in the feria, the last of these twice; and all the events involved home-raised toros bravos. Bulls of Victorino Martín had originally been booked for the final corrida - a repeat of the previous year’s marvellous mano a mano featuring the Spanish bulls with Luis Bolívar and Emilio de Justo - but, in the event, a case of blue tongue disease in Extremadura ruled out the animals embarking for Colombia and they were replaced with bulls of César Rincón’s Las Ventas del Espíritu Santo brand.
Each event featured some worthwhile toreo. Anderson Sánchez was triunfador of the novillada, cutting one ear; novillero Christian Restrepo did well in the Corrida de la Oportunidad, as well as Castrillón; the Corrida Internacional, featuring Antonio Ferrera, Joselito Adame and Juan de Castilla saw each matador win two ears, symbolic ones in the Mexican’s case as a bull of Salento was indultado; the toreros in the following day’s corrida - Alejandro Talavante (at last showing a return to his pre-retirement form), Emilio de Justo and Andrés Roca Rey - all cut ears and another bull, this time from Juan Bernardo Caicedo, was indultado; the picturesque night-time Festival del Señor de los Cristales contained another Caicedo indulto, Luis Bolívar claiming two symbolic ears; while the closing mano a mano saw Bolívar cut one ear and lose a puerta grande triumph with the sword, while Emilio de Justo left on shoulders after winning two ears.
The toreros parade carrying a religious statue at the start of Cali’s night-time Festival del Señor de los Cristales (image from blogspot.com)
The feria was not without its controversy. Ten days before it was due to start, Colombia’s Senate voted in favour of prohibiting bullfighting and Alberto García (already promoting the feria as ‘La Feria de Libertad’) had to clarify that Cali’s feria would proceed as two further debates in Colombia’s Chamber of Representatives were needed before bullfighting in Colombia could be considered illegal.
Then, midway through the feria, Colombia’s Ministerio de Trabajo announced the remaining events would not be allowed to proceed if the planned appearance of the 15-year-old becerrista Marco Pérez, together with that of the horse rider ‘la niña Mariana Mantilla’, in the December 29 festival went ahead, classifying this as “a serious risk to the youngsters’ safety”. Alberto García immediately announced that both appearances would be shelved, but added that “The prohibitions are more to do with a dictatorship than a democracy,” pointing out that Colombia’s taurine regulations permit the participation of minors as long as only novillos are involved and parental consent is obtained beforehand. In the event, Marco Pérez (who had performed during Manizales’ feria earlier in the year) was invited out on to the sand at the start of the corrida featuring Talavante, de Justo and Roca Rey and was given a standing ovation as he circled the ring.
Gustavo Petro
García’s reference to a dictatorship was because many saw the hand of Colombia’s new Left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, behind the Ministerio de Trabajo’s pronouncement.
Petro (62) became President of Colombia in June 2022. Around the age of 17, he joined the 19th of April Movement (M-19), a terrorist organisation that emerged in 1974 in response to allegations of fraud in Colombia’s 1970 presidential election. Unlike other Colombian guerrilla groups, the largest of which was FARC, M-19 was not founded on communist principles, but rather democratic ones, its aim being to strengthen and create a more inclusive democracy, the group’s ideology being essentially nationalist. In February 1976, the organisation kidnapped union leader José Raquel Mercado, president of the Confederation of Workers of Colombia, charged him with selling out the interests of Colombian workers to U.S. imperialism, sentenced him to death and killed him. In the late 1970s, M-19 began to kidnap drug traffickers, or their children, for ransom, kidnapping over 400 victims until, in 1982, the group’s leader, Iván Marino Ospina, met with the drug baron Pablo Escobar and pledged never to kidnap traffickers or their families again. Two years later, President Belisario Betancur Cuartas negotiated an amnesty with some factions of M-19. However, in November 1985, some 300 lawyers, judges, and Supreme Court magistrates were taken hostage by 35 armed M-19 commandos at Bogotá’s Palace of Justice, which houses the Supreme Court of Colombia. They demanded that President Betancur be tried by magistrates for allegedly betraying the country's desire for peace. The Government left resolution of the situation to the military; in the ensuing heavy crossfire between the incoming soldiers and the entrenched rebels, the building was set ablaze and more than 100 people died, including 11 of the country's 21 Supreme Court Justices. Since then, the sons of two of the murdered Supreme Court magistrates have pushed for further investigations into the presumed links between M-19 and the Medellín Cartel drug lords. Petro has said that the surviving members of M-19 do admit to their share of responsibility for the tragic events of the siege, on behalf of the entire organization, but deny any links to Colombia’s drug trade. He himself was arrested in 1985 and imprisoned for 18 months for illegal possession of arms, emerging from incarceration no longer viewing armed resistance as a feasible strategy to gain public support, and involving himself in the peace negotiations between M-19 and the Government that were finally settled in 1987. From then on, Petro has been a participant in mainstream politics, initially as a representative of the M-19 Democratic Alliance party.
In 2011, Petro founded el Movimiento Progresistas to successfully stand for the position of mayor of Bogotá (the organisation has since been renamed as Colombia Humana - Humane Colombia). In June 2012, Petro banned bullfighting within Bogotá’s Santamaría bullring, a measure that was later ruled illegal by Colombia’s Constitutional Court. Petro’s response was to establish new rules about bullfighting in the city, including prohibiting the killing of bulls, which have meant that no empresa is now willing to put on corridas there, believing they would attract very few spectators. An environmentalist and concerned with the wellbeing of animals, Petro also suppressed animal-drawn vehicles used by the city’s refuse recyclers, putting many out of work, although some help was given with replacement with automotive vehicles and provision of subsidies.
Bogotá’s Santamaría bullring (image from radiosantafe.com)
Petro spent the month and a half between his election and his inauguration as Colombia’s president negotiating with centrist and right-wing political parties to build a majority in Congress, where the Left formed a minority in both houses. In exchange for several seats in his government, he obtained the support of the Liberal Party, the largest force in the House and third largest in the Senate. His coalition now includes a dozen political groups.
Taurinos’ response
Following the controversy over Marco Pérez’s Cali participation, the taurine media duly weighed in to attack Petro’s past with arguments commonly associated with the Right, several making comparisons with FARC (of which Petro was never a member) and its killings and links to the drugs trade as well as its treatment of children: over 18,000 boys and girls were recruited as child soldiers by the terrorist organisation.
Admittedly, Colombia’s democracy can be murky at times (there were, for instance, large-scale financial contributions from drug traffickers to the successful presidential campaign of Ernesto Samper in 1994), but it is a democracy. Whether or not bullfighting will be allowed to continue in Colombia will be a decision for the country’s Chamber of Representatives (made up of 172 individuals representing 15 political parties) to take: not Gustavo Petro. Far better to argue against the proposed ban on cultural and general principle grounds (see my earlier ‘French lessons in protecting the corrida’ article), than to simply attack the country’s elected leader on spurious grounds.
César Rincón’s perspective
In a new book of interviews of taurinos by Zabala de la Serna, Colombia’s great matador, César Rincón, is asked what Gustavo Petro was doing in 1991 when César was paraded as a national hero through the streets of Bogotá:
Still exiting, I imagine, from M-19, a guerrilla group which, helped by Pablo Escobar, once attacked the Palace of Justice - one amongst several criminal enterprises. Petro belonged to this terrorist organisation.
And what has changed since then?
He has become the republic’s president, while people call me a murderer.
It’s that raw?
It’s terrible. As soon as he became mayor of Bogotá, Petro closed the Santamaría bullring, obsessed with making tauromaquia a class struggle, as if it was for rich people and not for the people generally, an integral part of our culture.
But Rincón goes on to point the blame for the current state of bullfighting in Colombia more broadly and identifies that the rot set in over a longer timeframe than Petro’s enjoyment of power:
During all these years, the animalistas have focussed on indoctrinating children with the theory of animal superiority over human beings, introducing the seed of the devil - animals have rights: people solely responsibilities. We’ve since lost many bullrings and things haven’t been done well. The legislative framework suffocates the free exercise of a legal cultural activity. Just as has happened in Cataluña.
Animal rights and the radical Left go hand-in-hand.
They’re also very well organised and financed […] We, the taurinos, lack the organisation and money to form a lobby. We intervene very rarely in the Senate.
Do you think the abolition of bullfighting in Cataluña harmed things in America?
Very much so. I’m not imagining it. It held up a mirror and led to a domino effect. People saw that el toreo, the most Spanish of arts, was banned in Spain. And then the same thing happened in Bogotá, Quito… The only ferias left in Colombia are those of Cali and Manizales. Between 1986 and 1990, the years before my breakthrough in Spain, one would perform in 40-60 corridas in the pueblos […] Now, Popayán, which had a small feria of three or four afternoons, is no more, nor Palmira, Armenia, Duitama, Sogamoso, Cartagena de Indias, Medellín, Cundinamarca, Boyacá, Santander, Antioquia… The stone bullrings have been taken over by jungle.
Colombia represented El Dorado for the Spanish toreros.
[…] You earned a lot of money […] Now tauromaquia is living its saddest moments. We should never have abandoned the pueblos.
Because?
That’s where our roots lay, the origin of it all. As children, we would learn how animals were used - perhaps not in the cities, but certainly in the countryside. They were well-fed and maintained so that we could make use of them. We took great care of chickens, sheep and pigs, yes […] so we could go on to eat them - it’s the link with death that people now wish to deny.
Rather than place all the blame on Gustavo Petro, César points to a process of sentimentalisation regarding animals, coupled with a poor response from the taurine community, as the main causes of Colombia’s current situation. His reference to abandoning the pueblos gives some credence to bullfighting, over time, having become an entertainment for comparatively well-off city folk and consequently easier to attack.
In the meantime, the response from the bullfight community to events in Colombia remains poor. Alberto García has commented that he feels he is conducting a lone fight about the continuation of bullfighting in the country. It took ANOET a week after the Ministerio de Trabajo announcement to issue a short statement complaining about the use of “legal subterfuges” to attempt to prevent corridas from taking place.
Perhaps an examination of attendance figures at Cali’s feria provides the final word on the likely future for bullfighting in Colombia. Following some remodelling carried out in 2019 and ‘20, Cali’s Plaza Cañaveralejo holds just over 14,000 people, while the city’s population amounts to almost 2.4 million. The only event in the recent feria for which the plaza was full was the corrida featuring Roca Rey. Just over 3,000 people attended the novillada and the Corrida de la Oportunidad, while the ring was around half full for the remaining festejos. If Colombia’s Chamber of Representatives does decide to prohibit bullfighting, the proposal is that the empresas involved be given three years to cease putting on corridas and to find alternative occupations, but one suspects Alberto García may well conclude that his best course of action will be to withdraw from Colombia straight away.