Colombia, a country in the Americas with the longest bullfighting tradition led since 2022 by the left, voted on Tuesday to ban bullfights from 2027, thus joining the list of abolitionist South American countries.
The bill on an initiative of green deputies, which will only come into force in three years, was adopted in Parliament by 93 votes in favor and two against.
During this “transitional” period, the State will have to guarantee alternative jobs for people who depend directly or indirectly on bullfighting and adapt the country’s arenas for sporting and cultural activities.
“It’s a historic step,” green MP Juan Carlos Losada, who supported the bill, told AFP. Colombia “leaves the sad list” of countries “where bullfighting, animal torture, is still considered a cultural element”.
President Gustavo Petro sent his “congratulations to those who finally managed to make death not a spectacle” on X.
In 2018, the Constitutional Court authorized bullfights in towns and villages with a bullfighting tradition and left it to mayors to apply possible restrictions. Thus, in Bogotá and Medellin (northwest), bullfights have no longer been authorized since 2020.
On the other hand, in Cali (southwest), the third city in the country, and Manizales (central-west), bullfights are at the heart of traditional festivals. Outside of urban areas, cattle breeding occupies a very important place in Colombia, populated by 52 million inhabitants.
Colombia thus joins the list of South American countries which prohibit bullfighting, such as Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Guatemala. They are authorized in Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador and Mexico.
In Mexico City, bullfights resumed in January in the largest arena in the world, with a capacity of more than 40,000 spectators, after more than a year of a ban finally overturned by the Supreme Court.
Four of Mexico’s 32 states ban them and the debate remains lively in the country as in Europe, where bullfights are permitted in Portugal, Spain and France when an “uninterrupted local tradition” is justified.
Dividing subject
In France, a heated debate on a proposal to ban bullfighting came to an abrupt halt in November 2022 in Parliament when the MP behind the text, Aymeric Caron (La France insoumise, radical left), withdrew it. by railing against hundreds of “obstructionist” amendments.
In Colombia too, the subject divides. Opponents of abolition, mainly from right-wing parties, are accused of responding to the private interests of the organizers.
The bill adopted Tuesday was put on the table in 2020, under the presidency of Ivan Duque (right) but the vote was ultimately postponed.
The deputies argued that bullfighting was one of the most controversial cultural legacies of Spanish colonization, “contrary to other constitutional rights such as a healthy environment, human dignity and the recognition of animals as human beings.” sensitive and subject to special protection against ill-treatment and violence.
Green Party representative Alejandro Garcia, one of the authors of the text, claimed that “85% of Colombians” were against bullfighting, citing an independent poll.
“I am proud to be a bullfighter and to defend” bullfighting, “a symbol of identity,” Johan Andrés Paloma, a 22-year-old bullfighter, told AFP a few days before the vote.
He says that 35,000 people in the country depend directly on bullfighting shows, not counting indirect and informal jobs. According to him, some 300 bullfighting events in more than 70 locations are organized each year in the country.
The debate which preceded the vote in Parliament was preceded by hearings from mayors, representatives of the livestock sector, organizers of bullfighting shows and multiple animal rights groups.