In these times of seemingly contrasting views on la Fiesta depending on one’s political allegiance, it’s good to be reminded that people on the Left can be bullfight aficionados too, even if it’s taken the death of one such person to do so.

Juan Antonio Arévalo, who died earlier this month at the age of 87, was a member of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, representing Valladolid in the Senate from 1979 to 2000. At the start of that period, as El Cierre Digital recalls, a love of bullfighting was not seen to be in conflict with socialist ideals - at Madrid’s Feria de San Isidro, “it was common to see seated in a tendido or at a burladero the former socialist minister Enrique Múgica, together with his son, the writer Daniel Múgica, as well as outstanding socialist leaders such as José Luis Corcuera, Txiqui Benegas, Pepe Montilla or Joaquín Leguina.”

In 1983, the Senate established a commission, headed by Arévalo, to look into the state of la Fiesta. At that time, bullfighting was governed by a set of regulations adopted in 1962 under the Franco dictatorship, and there were concerns about fraud, particularly in relation to horn-shaving and the age and condition of bulls appearing in the rings.

Arévalo travelled the country attending ferias, talking with and listening to empresarios, toreros, ganaderos and veterinarios as well as aficionados. Helped, according to Antonio Lorca of El País, by that paper’s taurine critic, Joaquín Vidal, Arévalo then drew up Spain’s first-ever taurine law, la Ley de Potestades Administrativas sobre Espectáculos Taurinos, which was approved by Parliament in April 1991. Arévalo’s chief objective was to defend the integrity of the spectacle - as Article 8 of the law’s 24 articles put it, “Spectators have the right to be presented with an honest event […] sin manipulación, ni alteración, hasta que el toro fuera arrastrado." With this in mind, the law upheld the authority of bullring presidents, stipulated the conditions in which bulls should be transported from ganaderías to bullrings, and adopted a post mortem process of analysing bulls’ horns for signs of manipulation. Where fraud was discovered, a system of fines and sanctions operated and the outcomes published in Government bulletins.

This law, in turn, led to a set of Reglamentos Taurinos drawn up by fellow socialist José Luis Corcuera and issued by Spain’s Interior Ministry in February 1992. These contained some disappointments - the age branding of bulls was done away with; in contrast with the 1962 regulations, the description of a horn meant that some 2-3cms of a horn tip could be removed with complete immunity; and ganaderos were permitted to ‘improve’ damaged horns providing they asked to do this within 10 days of the damage occurring and not less than 15 days before the animal was due to appear in a bullring. Four years later, a modified version of these reglamentos was adopted, reintroducing the age brand and becoming the national regulations that Spain is still supposed to abide to today.

But times have changed. Antonio Lorca has commented, “The taurine sector’s opposition, the endless processing of the disciplinary proceedings, repeated decisions in favour of the alleged offenders, the galloping indolence of the authority responsible for enforcing the law, and the continuing decrease in the numbers of demanding aficionados have made [Arévalo’s] law, still in force today, a dead letter. [...] These days, not a single horn is analysed, and there is a widespread belief that shaving occurs more than ever, that a bull does not come out into the ring that has not been touched by professional ‘barbers’. There are no longer post-mortem examinations or records of sanctions, and the bullfighting sector works in a scenario of abuse and arbitrariness it had never previously dreamed of.”

It is high time for another legal intervention by someone of Juan Antonio Arévalo’s standing.