The above photo has been doing the rounds on the internet with claims it is Álvaro Múnera Builes, a Colombian animal rights activist who in his youth fought as a novillero, a ’novice bullfighter’, under the name ‘El Pilarico’ in Colombia and then Spain. In fact, not only is this not true, it could not be true.
First, this is how Múnera actually looked in his novillero’s ‘suit of lights’:
As you can see, this is not the same man. Also, the first photo is clearly too recent, the colours and grain being form the 1990s, while Múnera stopped fighting bulls in 1984. What is more, Múnera did not leave bullfighting because of some conversion in the bullring; quite the reverse. It was the bull that made him leave.
In 1984 a bull called ‘Terciopelo’, from the breed of Marqués de Villagodio, caught him in the foot and tossed him across the ring, fracturing the fifth cervical vertebrae in his neck - along with other injuries – which rendered him permanently paraplegic.
It was only later after he had been transferred from hospital in Spain to a recuperative facility in Miami to be closer to his relatives in Colombia that he developed a ‘moral’ problem with bullfighting. According to his own account, it was the doctors, nurses, other patients and their families treating him with contempt because of his bullfighting past which caused the change. In his own words, he converted to their point of view because “there are more of them, they must be right.”
Whatever you think of this as a reason for an ethical about-turn, it is clear that it was not the behaviour of a bull while dying that caused this man to end his run of 150 bulls killed.
One thing I can say with complete confidence is that matadors don’t reach that stage in their career – well beyond that of Múnera - and suddenly think it’s all a mistake in the ring. He will have killed hundreds and hundreds of bulls before that moment. Much like the matador Sebastian Castella in the photo above in a strikingly similar situation.
The reason for the similarity is that to sit on the ‘strip’ around the ring after the sword has been placed in the bull is a common desplante, or act of defiance, within the part-scripted, part-improvised spectacle that is the corrida de toros. Whatever the corrida is, it is certainly not a fight (the English word bull-fight derives from our foul old hobby of bull-baiting with dogs), and the concept of fairness or sport no more enters into the corrida than it does the slaughterhouse.
