The life and times of El Ruedo

I wrote in my first bullfighting book, Dialogues With Death, how, in my early teens, I discovered that the bookshop opposite the university in Bristol sold copies of the weekly bullfight magazine, El Ruedo. I bought the occasional copy and then success in my O Level exams was rewarded with an annual subscription, which I maintained until the publication’s eventual disappearance some 10 years or so later. The magazine was of key importance in my developing afición, as it involved my reading Spanish on a regular basis, learning about the history of bullfighting through many excellent articles, and forming my opinions on the toreros of the day by reading reports and studying photographs.

Now, the Fundación Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla and the Editorial Universidad de Sevilla have jointly published as part of their Colección Tauromaquias the doctoral thesis of José Luis Ramón (author of a number of bullfighting books and editor of 6Toros6 up until its closure) charting the magazine’s approach and contents from its launch in 1944, initially as a supplement of the daily sports newspaper Marca, to its demise in 1977, almost all of these years within the Franco dictatorship.

Ramón begins his monumental 799-page work by looking at the magazine’s birth as a supplement of Marca and then its evolution under its different editors. Although this eventually involved some outsourcing to the taurine Lozano family, for the bulk of its life El Ruedo functioned as one of 40 publications run by la Prensa de Movimiento, formed by a 1940 statute under which control of all the Republican publications and printing presses that had been seized by the Francoist State during the Spanish Civil War and in the immediate post-war period was given to the dictatorship’s sole political party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS. One advantage of this for niche publications like El Ruedo was that, economically, little attention was given as to how individual titles were performing as long as the group of 40 publications was solvent.

El Ruedo’s first editor, Manuel Fernández-Cuesta y Melero, was also the editor of Marca and a number of other Movimiento publications, but was only involved in the magazine for a year after its foundation in 1944 as he died in 1945. His successor, Manuel Casanova Carreras (editor from 1947-61 and Toledo’s Gobernador Civil from 1939-44), in a clear conflict of interest, was also, until 1957, the national head of el Sindicato del Espectáculo, responsible for a number of meetings of key players in the mundillo and for negotiating the convenio taurino with Mexico, a matter of some contention throughout this period. El Ruedo - no longer a supplement of Marca and now referring to itself as a ‘semanario gráfico de los toros’ - improved its design, with a particular emphasis on photographs, and took on an important writer, Don Antonio (Antonio Abad Ojuel, best known beyond Spain for his book on Antonio Ordóñez). The magazine had had a number of famous contributors from the outset, including Antonio Díaz Cañabate (taurine critic of ABC), José María de Cossío, Curro Guillén, Don Ventura, Camilo José Cela and José María Pemán (a poet and dramatist, also a wealthy landowner, who put himself forward as the official public orator of the Nationalists on the outbreak of the Civil War and who, despite being honoured later by King Juan Carlos, is described in the historian Paul Preston’s latest book Architects of Terror as “a fomenter of hate”, a man who advocated the extermination of the Left during the war and whose propaganda encouraged and justified the savage repression that followed). Amazingly, however, a subscription form was not included until 1959!

Casanova was killed in a car crash in 1961 and El Ruedo saw several changes under the editorship of his successor, Alberto Polo Fernández. Initially, the design of the magazine became more sensationalist (Ramón points out the photos, now given greater space, often tended towards the spectacular - cogidas, derribos - rather than focusing on toreo), while, in 1962, Abad and Francisco Narbona were announced respectively as Secretary General and Head of Information. Vicente Zabala and Alfonso Navalón began writing for the magazine and, by 1963, El Ruedo had become more serious in tone, with a greater emphasis on opinion than on reportage: the price of the magazine also rose by 60%! From the second half of 1964, with Navalón taking a lead role, El Ruedo began criticising the bulls that were appearing and some of the toreros too, although in the following year the magazine’s tone was more measured. However, at the start of 1967, Polo was dismissed. The reasons behind this remain unclear; there were rumours about his having conflicting business interests in the mundillo, but there was also a strange decision to start the year with a cover photograph of a child urinating with the heading ‘Los niños piden a los reyes un lugar en el tendido’, which may have been a comment on the recent referendum result approving a new constitution in the form of Franco’s Organic Law of the State (although El Ruedo had previously encouraged its readers to vote in favour of the proposed legislation). Whether for business or political reasons, or simply because the cover’s content offended the taste of someone high up in the dictatorship, the journalist Polo was removed and, after a couple of months with Abad in charge, a new editor was announced in the form of José María Bugella del Toro, a veteran member of la Prensa del Movimiento.

Under Bugella, the magazine focused primarily on news and reportage (although Ramón criticises the magazine throughout its history of failing to provide any analysis of contemporary toreo), but with increasing numbers of articles on the history of tauromaquia too. The magazine had a print run of 48,000 copies, probably the highest of its existence. Bugella’s editorship was short-lived, however, as he died of a heart attack in January 1970.

Antonio Abad Ojuel held the reins once more until the appointment as editor in December 1970 of Carlos Briones, who had previously served the Franco regime as Head of Press for the Ministry of Work and the Secretary General del Movimiento. The magazine returned to polemic, featuring the views of Alfonso Navalón once more until he fell out with El Ruedo in 1971 over a critical report of his performance as an aficionado práctico by someone Navalón accused of being “a supporter of political parties disaffected with the Régimen [who should] be dismissed from the body of contributors and die of hunger.” Two years later, Navalón was fined a million pesetas by the courts for writing an article in Pueblo which denigrated Briones and El Ruedo.

The magazine increased its page size in 1973 and celebrated its 30th anniversary a year later, but in 1975 the bosses of la Prensa del Movimiento decided to move Briones to Castellón de la Plana’s newspaper Mediterráneo. The faithful Abad Ojuel effectively became editor once more until his retirement later that year. Now, bigger changes were afoot - the running of the magazine (although not the ownership) was transferred to the Lozano family, managers of Sebastián Palomo Linares. El Ruedo, which had weekly sales of 22,000 copies under Briones, increased its price by 66% and undertook a crude ‘modernisation’, aiming to cover cinema, theatre, music and sport as well as bullfighting and introducing pin-up photos. Although it soon returned to primarily focus on the corrida, many aficionados had been alienated by these changes, which were to prove the beginning of the end of the magazine.

By the winter of 1976, the weekly went a whole month without publishing an issue. A 40% price increase occurred in January 1977, but the final issue - until a short-lived resurrection of the title by Manuel Molés in the 1990s - appeared the following month.

For most of its life, those involved in El Ruedo were primarily supporters of the Franco regime. Ángel Alcázar de Velasco y Velasco, for instance, had been an active member of the Falange (albeit one who had been briefly imprisoned as a suspect in a Falangist plot to assassinate Franco) and former spy. Gradually, however, contributions were accepted from Spaniards living in post-Civil War exile or even those who had sided with the Spanish Republic. The work of the exiled artist Ruano Llopis was covered as early as 1950, while the drawings of the similarly exiled Andrés Martínez de León were featured from 1954. César Jalón Clarito, who wrote articles from 1962, had been Ministro de Correos in the Second Republic. Eduardo de Guzmán, author of some excellent historical pieces in the magazine between 1971 and ‘75, was a former member of the CNT union’s national committee and a contributor to a number of anarchist publications, but had been imprisoned and condemned to death after the war, only to be released, albeit unable to resume work as a journalist, in 1943.

In addition to covering this history of El Ruedo, José Luis Ramón’s book examines how the magazine reported on bullfighting, its coverage of taurine culture and its ideology, both in terms of its attitude towards the Fiesta and in relation to franquismo. At its worst, Ramón’s coverage is simply a list of article titles (as tends to occur, for instance, in the book’s sections on the magazine’s handling of taurine art and literature), but the book contains lots of interesting information too, including many extracts from the magazine. To its credit, El Ruedo almost always campaigned against fraud in the Fiesta. It also largely championed the participation of women as toreros, something the Franco regime had prohibited in its early years but finally permitted a year before the dictator’s death in 1975.

Ramón also looks in detail at El Ruedo’s treatment of the two toreros who had most societal resonance during its life - Manolete and Manuel Benítez El Cordobés. The impact of Manolete (who was absent from the magazine’s pages for five months in 1945/46, seemingly because of the matador’s failure to send condolences following the death of El Ruedo’s founding editor, Manuel Fernández-Cuesta) lived on in its pages, with frequent articles about the Cordoban right up until 1976 and special editions published on the first, 15th and 25th anniversaries of his death and the 50th anniversary of his birth. While Manolete was consistently admired in the magazine’s pages, treatment of El Cordobés went through different phases - from being very much in favour of Benítez during his time as a novillero, under Polo’s new editorship, El Ruedo became critical of the torero from the end of 1961 and continued in this tone until the middle of the 1963 season, after which it tended to reflect the differing views amongst the afición as to the phenomenon’s merits. Indeed, some respectable critics, amongst them Antonio Abad Ojuel and Rafael Campos de España, wrote positively about the matador in the magazine’s pages. From 1970, with the arrival of Carlos Briones as El Ruedo’s editor, the polemic abated and the magazine stopped defending El Cordobés’ toreo and simply treated him as a popular figure.

Toreo y Sociedad en la revista El Ruedo is an important history of how attitudes towards bullfighting were expressed and shaped in the latter half of the 20th century. Perhaps a future generation of aficionados will, in time, receive a similar treatment of Ramón’s own magazine, 6Toros6?