The Last Bullfight? Mexico City Lawmakers Weigh a Ban Kevin Sieff - The Washington Post
go to original December 16, 2021

The world’s largest bullfighting arena was packed when the matador entered the ring. Forty thousand fans rose from their seats in Plaza Mexico, cheering a spectacle that has changed little since the city hosted its first bullfight to honor Hernan Cortes in 1526.

The bull charged at matador Diego San Román. He evaded its attempt with a flourish, arching his back.

If the crowd’s reaction on Sunday seemed outsize, perhaps it was because they knew they might be witnessing the last major bullfight in Mexico City’s history.

Local lawmakers this month proposed legislation that would prohibit the sport in the capital. The bill, slated for a vote early next year, follows bans in parts of Spain, Ecuador and several smaller Mexican states. But abolition here, in one of the world’s great centers of bullfighting, would be on a different scale entirely, perhaps the greatest blow the sport has suffered.

Outside the stadium on Sunday, anti-bullfighting protesters held signs with photos of mutilated bulls that read, “Don’t make their death your spectacle.” Before the corrida — or bullfight — was over, one of those activists would leap into the ring to scream his defense of the animals.

Mexican bullfighting fans see the legislation as not only an attack on their sport, but a new front in the country’s culture war, a willingness to discard history in the name of an imported wokeness.

“This is a movement that comes here from outside of Mexico and tries to take away an ancestral tradition,” said José Saborit Santa, director of the professional bullfighting association Tauromaquia Mexicana.

Mexico is one of a handful of countries where bullfighting is still permitted in its oldest incarnation. A bull is raised for the fight and usually dies in the ring, at the tip of the matador’s sword, called an estoque. That the spectacle remains unchanged is among its greatest draws here, making the Plaza Mexico one third of the holy triumvirate of bullfighting grounds, along with stadiums in Seville and Madrid.

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