Abstract
Comparative analysis of the antibullfighting agenda in Bogotá, Lima, and Quito sheds light on the relation between new social movements and left parties. It suggests that, although a social movement is important to the visibility of the agenda, the key variable in achieving a ban on bullfighting in the three capitals has been a decisive left leadership that is not shy about confrontation with traditional elites.
Un análisis comparativo de la agenda contra la tauromaquia en Bogotá, Lima y Quito devela la relación entre los nuevos movimientos sociales y los partidos de izquierda. Sugiere que, aunque la existencia de un movimiento social resulta importante para visibilizar dicha agenda, la variable clave para lograr la prohibición de la tauromaquia en las tres capitales ha sido un liderazgo decisivo por parte de la izquierda, que no se ha mostrado tímida cuando se trata de confrontar a las élites tradicionales.
On January 22, 2017, at least 1,000 people surrounded the bullring of Bogotá to prevent the traditional bullfight festivities. The police had to intervene between protesters and spectators, and the day ended with 30 injured and 18 arrested. The confrontation was so intense because of a ban on bullfighting during Mayor Gustavo Petro’s administration (2011–2015) that was later ruled unconstitutional. Petro’s successor, Enrique Peñaloza (2016–), had upheld the decision and arranged for the return of bullfighting. Petro, about to be the 2018 presidential candidate at the time, headed the movement against bullfighting’s return. Given the intense press coverage, this high-profile conflict forced most Colombian political figures to take sides. The debate over bullfighting polarized the country’s most important institutions and politicians, the press, and public opinion, and Petro reached the second round of the Colombian presidential election a year later.
Postmaterial conflicts like this one are increasingly relevant in Latin American politics. Abortion and reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, the environment, and gender equality have emerged as highly polarizing issues (Molyneux, 2002; Siegel, 2016). Animal rights—particularly opposition to bullfighting—is another such issue and one that has remained unexplored in the political science literature. The emergence of these new social movements relates both to challenges to societies’ values and to the way traditional political vehicles can represent them.
In this article we dig into these relations by examining the antibullfighting agenda in three Andean capitals: Bogotá, Lima, and Quito. Empirically, we analyze the main drivers of success or failure of the animal-rights agenda. Our cases are well suited to the task in that the three capitals we compare present distinct outcomes regarding the current legal situation of bullfighting: (1) Quito banned the killing of bulls during fights, and this resulted in no fights’ taking place since 2012; (2) after four years of prohibition, Bogotá reinstated bullfighting in 2017; and (3) in Lima the efforts of activists have not translated into any limits on bullfighting. 1 The explanation of these outcomes relies on a theoretical framework that articulates the relation between postmaterial values, social movements, and representative politics in contemporary Latin America. Our comparative assessment suggests that, rather than social movements’ being the main driver of success, the prevailing type of representative left can be decisive for the advance of this agenda.
We compare the three cases in terms of the following dimensions: (1) the emergence of values against animal abuse and bullfighting, (2) the relevance of animal-rights social movements, and (3) the type of left representation that has carried the antibullfighting agenda. Our analysis shows that antibullfighting social movements succeed when they march with a left leader who does not hesitate to confront traditional elites. In Colombia and Ecuador the social movements were fortunate to have Gustavo Petro and Rafael Correa, two prominent national, populist, and polarizing figures, on their side. A “moderate” left is, by definition, uninterested in confronting elites, and therefore the agenda lacks political muscle and the social movements do not have much room to push the agenda beyond giving it some visibility.
The article draws on 20 interviews with key actors in Bogotá, Quito, and Lima and is structured as follows: First it frames the theoretical debate relating postmaterial issues, social movements, and political representation. Then it lays out the conflict over bullfighting in general and in our three cases. It concludes by explaining the differences and similarities between the outcomes and discussing their implications for an understanding of the relation between contemporary new social movements and the representative left.
Postmaterial Values, Social Movements, and Representation
The nature of the relation between postmaterial attitudes, social movements embodying them, and the institutional politics representing them has a long history. A classic instance of an issue combining these dimensions was the ecological agenda in the industrial countries. Some writers pointed to a “silent revolution” at the level of social and political values including the environment (Inglehart, 1971); others focused on the progressive development of social movements concerned with the ecological and antinuclear agenda (Touraine, 1981), and still others highlighted the development of green parties in charge of introducing the ecological agenda to the state representative arena (Kitschelt, 1989; Kolinsky, 1993; Müller-Rommel, 1989). Behind these perspectives lay the assumption that peaceful and prosperous postwar and postindustrial Europe had shifted from “material” concerns around military and economic security to “postmaterial” ones such as feminism or ecologism (Inglehart, 1971). From a more political-sociological perspective, these changes were read as the dissolution of the all-encompassing cleavages (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967) that had structured twentieth-century politics, giving way to narrower conflicts uninterested in and incapable of fundamentally altering the distribution of power (Touraine, 1985).
While European theorists were acknowledging a fragmentary postmodern fin de siècle shaped by the 1968 movements against military and bureaucratic elites, 2 in Latin America the political class and social movements concentrated their efforts on material issues. During the 1970s and 1980s, the struggle for democratization took center stage in contentious politics. By devoting their efforts to making democracy possible, social movements and political parties fundamentally altered the way power was distributed in the continent (Castañeda, 1993; Foweraker, 1993; Hammond, 1999). During the 1990s and early 2000s, neoliberal reforms gave way to a new and invigorated framing of social and political agendas. Both social movements and parties challenged neoliberalism (Rénique, 2009). Among them were the Zapatistas in Mexico (Stahler-Sholk, 2001; 2010), whose struggle was launched on January 1, 1994, the same day Mexico joined the North American Free Trade Agreement; the coca growers in Bolivia, who resisted efforts at the eradication of coca by several Bolivian administrations (Lora, 2007; Toussaint, 2008); and the Argentine piqueteros (Epstein, 2003; Rossi, 2013), who in the early 2000s played a key role in destabilizing the neoliberal arrangements that Menem had introduced at the end of the 1980s. Therefore, these decades in Latin America were defined by struggles seeking to alter the way material power was distributed.
This went even deeper when the “pink tide” swept the region (Cameron, 2009), and in many countries classic material cleavages were politicized by the state rather than just by a mobilized civil society. With the so-called left turn, social movements and political leadership merged in solid platforms. As a result, scholars devoted much of their research, for instance, to the relation of coca growers, the Movimiento al Socialismo, and the Morales government, the role of civil society in the participatory Partido dos Trabalhadores and Lula’s government, and the participation of unions and other social movements in the Uruguayan Frente Amplio administration (Hunter, 2010; Luna, 2007; Van Cott, 2005). Because of decades of turmoil driven by big political and economic issues, the literature on social movements and political representation revolved around the pursuit of fundamental change in the distribution of political and economic power.
This is not to say that there were not movements that adopted some of the postmaterial issues. For instance, early manifestations of the feminist movement were interlinked with leftist parties (Chinchilla, 1992), and in several instances material grievances were intertwined with postmaterial agendas. In Argentina, social movements were not only seeking to dismantle neoliberal policies but also defending an agenda of “dignity” and “respect.” While the Zapatista movement in Mexico, the coca growers in Bolivia, and the indigenous movement in Ecuador were deeply concerned with reshaping the distribution of economic power in their countries, a new agenda on cultural differences and distinctive identities was emerging (Hellman, 1997; Jameson, 2011; Stahler-Sholk, 2001).
In this article we deal with more urban new social movements with fewer linkages to traditional party politics and material politics. This is unsurprising after the recent decade and a half, in which new social policies and a supercycle of commodities enlarged the Latin American middle class to unprecedented levels (de la Torre, Filippini, and Ize, 2016; Reid, 2017). Behind these macro political, economic, and demographic processes, a history similar to the one Europeans told four or five decades ago may have emerged unnoticed. Several recent works have stressed the emergence and consolidation of social movements revolving around postmaterial and identity issues 3 such as LGBTQ rights (Encarnación, 2016) and the environment (Eisenstadt and West, 2017), while others have focused on the way postmaterial values affect elite decision making in legislative institutions (Cámara Fueres, 2009; Gatto and Power, 2016). Social movements and protests dealing with these issues are no longer mainly or solely driven by underprivileged groups but also adopted by the middle and even the upper classes (Rucht, 2007). 4
Our work in analyzing the animal-rights agenda and the struggle against bullfighting in three Andean countries allows observation and analysis of new important social grievances unrelated to traditional material issues. We do not argue that these new grievances and movements are more important than the traditional ones or that they have replaced them. Instead, we suggest that they deserve to be examined. Although narrower issues than the distribution of economic and political power, they can translate into contentious social movements and fruitfully relate to institutional politics.
We identify three factors behind the development of the antibullfighting agenda: (1) changes in social values, (2) the presence of social movements capable of transforming these values into concrete agendas, and (3) effective political representation that can translate social agendas into policy. While these factors are not necessarily sequential—social movements may change values (Rochon and Mazmanian, 1993)—they often constitute an empirical cycle and provide a useful analytical frame for comparing our three cases. Using this framework will allow us to single out the dimensions that can explain the success or failure of the antibullfighting agenda and provide hints about the relation between these new social movements and their left representation. This is especially important because, except for some green parties and others that emphasize minority rights, no new political parties have emerged around postmaterial issues in Latin America (Kernecker and Wagner, 2019) and therefore they must be addressed by the existing parties. Most of these social movements and their activists tend to align themselves with left values and vehicles. Yet, since these issues do not belong to the traditional core of the left-wing agenda, making room for them will be a challenge. For politicians, paying attention to salient issues is a matter of self-interest (Hill and Hurley, 1999). The more salient the issue, the greater is the degree of political responsiveness to it (Jones, 1994). This is especially clear in the case of postmaterial issues such as bullfighting. These issues may lie dormant in large portions of society, but groups of protesters can activate political interest if they succeed in attracting public attention.
Bullfighting and its Enemies
Bullfighting (corridas de toros) came to Latin America during the colonial period and developed a particularly strong presence in Mexico and the Andean countries. Fights take place during an afternoon in which six bulls enter the arena one at a time to face three bullfighters (toreros). Bullfighting has been a continued source of moral controversy. Its apologists argue that bullfighting is a cultural event that invokes a moral aesthetic around the relationship between human beings and nature. In turn, its opponents stress the violence and cruelty committed against the bull and its ultimate death as unacceptable in a civilized world. Currently, only eight countries allow bullfighting: Spain, Portugal, France, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela. In this article we make no attempt to resolve the moral controversy around bullfighting; rather, our objective is to explore the determinants of the success or failure of the antibullfighting agenda. We focus on bullfighting in capital cities because the emergence of strong postmaterial issues is linked to urbanization and the emergence of middle classes. Bullfighting as an instance of these postmaterial concerns is no exception. It is in the capitals that attitudes and social movements against bullfighting have spread. Outside the capitals, bullfighting remains widely popular (Martínez, 2018).
For a long time, sporting events involving animals have been a contested arena and performed important social functions. As Norbert Elias and Eric Dunnin (1986: 191) wrote, “The excitement of hunting and killing animals had always been to some extent the peacetime equivalent of the excitement connected with killing humans in times of war.” If, as they saw it, the civilization process is defined by extracting violence from the public sphere, it is to be expected that a spectacle like bullfighting will have furious detractors. The fact that bullfighting is directly associated with colonization is a crucial ingredient of this contentious issue in every capital. In symbolic terms, the dispute over bullfighting looks like a struggle against the heirs of the Spanish colonizer, usually associated with the upper classes. This is not an objective social cleavage, since members of the middle class may make a special effort to attend bullfights and members of upper-class families may choose to stay away. Yet, ticket prices guarantee that the spectacle is reserved for the upper echelons of society, 5 and all the activists (mostly young people, especially middle- and lower-class women) see their efforts as being opposed by the traditionally privileged classes. Therefore, the overlap between bullfighting and class divisions in Andean countries is a recurring theme in the arguments of bullfighting’s opponents. In the words of the journalist César Hildebrandt, one of the most outspoken opponents of the practice in Peru,
“When the show begins, hundreds of heirs of the Colony and some of their reincarnated servants go to Acho to watch a man . . . slowly torture a magnificent beast” (Hildebrandt, 2009). 6 According to the Colombian anthropologist Jorge Jaramillo, it is a spectacle inherited from the colonial period that “continues to place us in that era. [Spectators] believe themselves to be so white, so European, so modern because they enjoy and know so much about bullfighting, and ultimately it is this violent impulse of Colombians that is reflected in the bullring” (Revista Semana, February 10, 2017). In summary, the emergence of new social attitudes and movements overlaps with old social divisions. This is the case in the three capitals under analysis.
Bogotá
Of the three capital cities under study, it is in Bogotá that the debate has been most heated. Supporters and opponents have clashed in the streets, in the political institutions, and in the courts. Postmaterial values have taken root in Bogotá as elsewhere, and the widespread rejection of bullfighting is a manifestation of these new concerns. In 2015, a survey revealed that 81 percent of Bogotá’s residents were against bullfighting. At the lower and middle social levels, rejection rose to 83 percent and 84 percent, respectively, in contrast to 50 percent at the upper level. Bullfighting was rejected by 96 percent of young people between 18 and 25 in contrast to only 69 percent of people 55 and over (Ipsos, 2015). In keeping with the literature on postmaterial values, the younger generations and the middle class have rapidly developed values rejecting spectacles involving blood and animals.
In Bogotá several social movements have emerged around animal-welfare issues. Among the three social movements under study in this article, the Colombian movement is the strongest. The Movimiento Antitaurino de Colombia (Colombian Antibullfighting Movement—MAC) was founded in 1996, when individuals and organizations came together to hold their first protest against the practice. In 1999 it organized the first national antibullfighting congress in Latin America, and the following year it staged its first major rallies, which brought it to wider public attention. Since then, several other groups have emerged to create a movement capable on certain occasions of mobilizing 30,000–40,000 participants. As the activist Natalia Parra (interview, October 22, 2015) has pointed out, though there are no more than 70 hardcore animal-rights activists in Bogotá, the various networks and organizations can convoke thousands when important issues are at stake.
Concurrently, the growth of the antibullfighting movement in Bogotá has also spurred bullfighting’s defenders. In 2004, with extreme haste, the Congress, dominated by President Álvaro Uribe, promulgated Law 916 to regulate bullfighting in Colombia, with significant consequences for the whole controversy. The law provided for the preparation, organization, and staging of bullfights, which it declared “an artistic expression of human beings.” It is very likely that this unprecedented law had its origins in Uribe’s close relations with Colombian cattle breeders (Gutiérrez Sanín, 2014). It brought the regulation of bullfighting back under state control—removing from local governments a power they had enjoyed since decentralization in 1991 (Sebastián García, lawyer for the bullfighting defense, interview, October 20, 2015). Thus the law became the last resort of bullfighting’s defenders: national law had to prevail over any local initiative.
In 2009 the organization Anima Naturalis called upon the Colombian Constitutional Court to rule on bullfighting. The following year, the court issued Ruling 666, which, while stopping short of repealing the 2004 law, imposed a number of conditions upon the continued practice of bullfighting. In particular, it introduced the criterion of arraigo (roots), whereby bullfighting can occur only where it is rooted in the local culture. 7 The notion of “roots” relativized the legality of bullfighting. Since the court did not clearly define what was meant by it, both sides attempted to define it to suit their own ends. The antibullfighting side pointed to the broad public rejection of bullfighting, while supporters focused on the historical strength of the tradition. This in turn delineated the type of institution that each side would attempt to use in the defense of its position. Antibullfighting activists prioritized the majoritarian institutions of democracy (elections, collection of signatures for petitions, and referendums) while bullfighting supporters, aware of the lack of widespread support, opted for the courts—a classic liberal institution for protecting minorities.
In the 2011 mayoral elections in Bogotá, the candidate of the leftist party Movimiento Progresistas, Gustavo Petro, announced that he would enforce Ruling 666 and ban bullfighting in Bogotá because of its lack of roots there. Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla and prominent senator, won the elections with a discourse that was in tune with the leftist governments that dominated Latin America at the time. His administration was characterized “by pursuing campaigns that generated many controversies . . . with very strong clashes when the traditions did not allow these changes” (Martha Zamora, interview, October 23, 2015). His motto of a “humane Bogotá” chimed perfectly with his fight against bullfighting. This battle became another instance of his confrontational approach, in which he clashed especially with the traditional elites. In the Plaza Bolívar in the center of Bogotá, he declared (El Espectador, December 10, 2013): I want the young animal-rights activists, those who know what it means for a bull to be killed amid applause and joy, . . . to gather in the plazas of Colombia so that we can produce a movement that is capable of stopping the enemies of peace, those who perpetuate a culture of violence sponsored by the country’s oligarchy and traditional elites.
Thus the antibullfighting agenda served a political career fueled by plebiscitary and populist vocabulary and practices, making Petro the indisputable leader of this platform.
Upon taking office, Petro, invoking Ruling 666, terminated the contract with Corporación Taurina, which organized bullfights in the Plaza de Toros Santamaría. According to Felipe Negret (interview, October 20, 2015), the firm’s president, this was “a rigged interpretation of Ruling 666.” In addition, as part of the Humane Bogotá development plan, the municipality sought new uses for the bullring, opening it up as a space for concerts and cultural activities. Petro announced that it was no longer a plaza de toros but a plaza de todos (plaza for all) (Laud Stereo, 2012). He swore that under his administration there would be no bullfights in Bogotá. According to José Miguel Sánchez (interview, October 18, 2015), Petro’s adviser and another former M-19 guerrilla member, this was an effort to rally the young, since the old leftist discourses were no longer enough. Progressive youth were looking for a city that had bicycles, the Internet, and no violence against animals. When in 2014 Colombia’s procurator removed Petro from his position because of problems related to trash collection, antibullfighting activists mobilized thousands of supporters in favor of the ousted mayor, and in the end he was restored to office. The animal-rights movement helped him to build a broad constituency, providing him with the capacity for street mobilization. In fact, when Petro won the election, many of these activists began to work for the municipality of Bogotá, which drew criticism and divided the movement. In summary, it was the arrival of a leader who recognized a political asset he could exploit that gave the antibullfighting agenda unprecedented strength in Bogotá.
While the antibullfighting sectors used majoritarian political and institutional mechanisms, the probullfighting sectors appealed to the courts. After the closure of the Plaza Santamaría in 2012, the Corporación Taurina and others sued, arguing that bullfighting did in fact have roots in Bogotá and that the municipality was infringing upon the rights of bullfighters as a minority group (Felipe Negret, interview, October 20, 2015). The court’s Ruling 889 established that mayors and municipal councils could not ban bullfighting where the tradition had previously existed. Subsequently, in 2013, it issued Writ 296, which recognized the fundamental right of free artistic expression, found the bullfighting regulation constitutional, and ordered the municipal government to permit the resumption of traditional bullfighting. In September 2014 it “ordered the competent district authorities to make the necessary provisions for the resumption of bullfights in the Plaza de Toros de Santamaría through the adoption of contractual and other administrative mechanisms that guarantee the continuity of artistic expression in bullfighting and its dissemination.” In 2015 it ratified the judgment, giving the municipality six months to comply with it. To ensure that no bullfights took place under his administration, Mayor Petro ordered renovations of the plaza, citing structural and security problems (Martha Zamora, interview, October 23, 2015).
The politicization of the issue was a result of its interlacing with class division: the public defenders of bullfights were perceived (not entirely unfairly) as representatives of the economic and traditional cultural elites, which weakened their position. To combat this perception, the probullfighting camp gained exposure and some media sympathy when workers at the plaza went on strike to protest the loss of their jobs. At the same time, as in the case of Spain, where the Partido Popular provides political representation to bullfighting supporters, representation was restricted to conservative politicians. During the dispute former president Uribe tweeted, “I hope there is no coincidence between the antibullfighting spirit and the proclivity toward impunity with regard to terrorism” (January 4, 2015). For antibullfighting activists, this tweet was a threat in regions where, especially among the traditional and livestock-raising sectors, the voice of Uribe was attended to and the consequences of being linked to the guerrillas were fatal.
By the end of 2015, Enrique Peñaloza was elected mayor of Bogotá. On the day of his election he announced that, although he did not like it, he was forced to respect the Constitutional Court’s decisions regarding bullfighting. Thus, in January 2017, the practice returned to Bogotá after a decade of conflict. The dispute was far from settled, not only because of the thousands of people that rallied and protested against bullfighting in 2017 and 2018 but also because the court struck down a law against animal abuse of which bullfighting was only one of several activities excluded. This meant that the Congress had two years to enact a new law against animal abuse. 8
In the dispute over bullfighting in Colombia, postmaterial values gained visibility in public opinion because of a modest but consistent social mobilization over the issue, but only effective political representation of this agenda allowed it to advance to the policy arena. Political actors and social movements establish strategies according to the institutional context. The antibullfighting agenda advanced much faster when a politician with a confrontational antielite profile embraced and politicized it. Gustavo Petro perceived that the antibullfighting agenda would gain him thousands of mobilized supporters in a context where the classic left material issues had lost their appeal among young activists. In addition, leading the antibullfighting movement solidified his position as the natural popular leader. In 2018 he reached the second round of the presidential elections and was elected to the Senate with a vote total second only to Uribe’s. The antibullfighting agenda advanced because of the positive relation between a populist candidate who saw that the issue could help to establish him as the antielite champion and a mature agenda and social movement looking for decisive political representation.
Quito
In Ecuador, the most important bullfighting festival was always Jesús del Gran Poder, which since 1960 had been the centerpiece of the celebrations marking the Spanish founding of Quito. Of the three Andean capitals, it was in Quito that bullfighting was most popular and best-established. Given this, Quito’s decision to abolish bullfighting was counterintuitive. According to the leading international antibullfighting activist Lorenzo Anselmi (interview, October 22, 2015), its roots in the city should have made it unlikely to be eliminated. As have the other capitals, Quito has seen an increasingly public rejection of bullfighting and support for its prohibition. A 2008 survey found that 78 percent of respondents considered bullfighting torture, and 57 percent agreed that it should be banned (Diabluma, 2010), but, as in other cases, converting this discontent into action has been difficult. The antibullfighting movement is weak, with no more than 20 full-time activists (Felipe Ortiz, interview, October 23, 2015).
Whereas in Bogotá Petro realized that certain antibullfighting values and organizations could help him, in Ecuador it was President Rafael Correa who said he felt called upon by the young activists of Diabluma, the main antibullfighting organization in the country. He supported the idea of a referendum on the issue and, declaring himself to be against torture, came out in favor of prohibition. As did Petro in Bogotá, Correa saw in the animal-rights movement an asset that he could count on in Quito, where there had been demonstrations against him. On Correa’s initiative, a question on bullfighting was included in a national referendum held in 2011 about constitutional changes and legislative issues: “Do you agree that spectacles that have the goal of killing animals should be prohibited in the canton [administrative division] where you live?”
Suggesting that bullfighting supporters in Bogotá had made the right move in appealing to the courts to prevent a referendum, 129 of Ecuador’s 221 cantons voted to prohibit the killing of animals in public spectacles. The consequences of the referendum were strictly local, and Quito was among the cantons that voted for prohibition. Consequently, the municipality of Quito had to amend Ordinance 106, which regulates bullfighting, to include the prohibition of bull killing. Strictly speaking, what the amendment prohibited was not bullfighting but the killing of animals. However, when CITOTUSA, the Quito-based bullfighting organizer, arranged fights without the death of the bull, the shows were a failure. According to bullfighting’s opponents, spectators had no interest in attending an event that did not conclude with the animal’s demise. According to bullfighting’s supporters, harassment of the organizers by the political and administrative authorities blocked the events. Whatever the reason, CITOTUSA stopped organizing fights after 2011, and they have been absent from Quito ever since.
However, the discussion reopened in 2014 following the election of a new mayor, Mauricio Rodas, an opponent of Rafael Correa. Despite having said during the campaign that he would respect the referendum results, once he assumed office he reconsidered. In the context of his dispute with the Correa administration, he created a bullfighting commission with the objective of authorizing bullfights in city celebrations. The main goal of the commission was to allow bullfighting in Plaza Belmonte, two hours from the capital, rather than in the more traditional Plaza Quito. Thus, from 2014 onward, bullfights have taken place in Plaza Belmonte but without the death of bulls. Even so, this has inspired antibullfighting protests seeking to shut down the performances.
Diabluma and other animal-rights groups acknowledge that they regarded Correa as a means of securing political representation for their cause, but his subsequent political behavior created unease within the movement. “The guy used us. He saw that it was an issue that mobilized a lot of people . . . he saw that it was a popular issue and he took advantage of it” (Felipe Ogaz, interview, October 21, 2015). In general, the activists were disenchanted with Correa, but it was not clear whether this disenchantment was a product of his reluctance to ban bullfighting or of the divisions in the movement that its alliance with Correa created.
Despite their deep roots linked to traditional celebrations and the weakness of the antibullfighting movement, traditional bullfights are no longer held in Quito. The only fights that take place are in the small Plaza Belmonte, and they do not feature the bull’s death. As in Bogotá, the key to the success of the antibullfighting agenda was its adoption by a confrontational antielite left leader. Since the new postmaterial issues contain elements of a clash with the traditional elites, they can be helpful to leaders who benefit from social and political polarization.
Lima
The Plaza de Acho in Lima, where the Señor de los Milagros festival takes place every year, is the oldest bullring in the Americas, having hosted fights for over 250 years. In Peru, despite a similar evolution of public opinion regarding bullfighting to that of its Andean peers and the existence of a stronger social movement than Ecuador’s, bullfights still occur. Public demands and pressure groups languish because of a lack of political representation. Public opinion in Peru is largely against bullfighting, and mounting support for a ban is evident. A University of Lima survey showed an increase in opposition from 63.2 percent to 73.5 percent between 2003 and 2007 (Grupo de Opinión Pública, 2007).
The emergence of animal-rights values in Lima has multiplied the number of organizations that oppose bullfighting. Three have become particularly prominent: Perú Antitaurino, Frente Antitaurino del Perú, and ALCO Perú (whose Fuerza Toros campaign was notable). Since 2009, these organizations have routinely held significant protests against bullfights. The movement was strengthened in 2011, with Perú Antitaurino receiving support from foreign activist groups. According to Leonardo Anselmi, the movement in Peru is as large as that in Colombia and clearly more robust than its Ecuadorian counterpart but has two important problems: its aggressive and uncompromising discourse limits its political appeal and its severe fragmentation makes it difficult to mobilize supporters and mount sustained campaigns. For example, Perú Antitaurino and the Frente Antitaurino del Perú are constantly quarreling. In one demonstration against bullfighting in Lima they gathered at different places in the Plaza de Armas and marched separately to the Plaza de Acho and back again. Even so, attendance at protests is increasing. Since 2016 the police have put up a fence around the bullring to prevent violence from protesters.
In addition to the fragmentation of the movement, the agenda lacks political representation. No politician of national standing has adopted the antibullfighting agenda. Congressman Yohnny Lescano attended one rally and promised to support the cause, but his backing proved short-lived. In addition to the lack of representation, legislative initiatives to regulate or prohibit bullfighting have suffered from the antibullfighting movement’s division. The lack of coordination has caused different groups to present initiatives to different institutions. The movement’s legislative initiative prohibiting animal abuse in public and private spectacles was delivered to the agricultural committee, which in 2014 declined to consider it, and then transferred to the cultural committee, where it was never debated. As a result, bullfighting has continued in Lima without interruption. During bullfighting season, television programs may include a debate on the issue but little more. In 2010 the Constitutional Court defined bullfighting as a cultural tradition (Ruling 017-2010), and in 2016, when the new Law against Animal Abuse was approved, bullfighting, cockfighting, and other spectacles involving animals were deemed exceptions.
The main opportunity to push the antibullfighting agenda in Lima came after the election of a left-wing mayor, Susana Villarán, in 2010, but she expressed no interest in it. She declared that, although she respected those opposed to bullfighting, her childhood attendance at corridas with her family was a factor in her disinclination to represent the cause (interview, November 26, 2015). The antibullfighting agenda requires a confrontational and antielite form of leftism that regards the prohibition of a spectacle of the traditional elites as a triumph. Villarán, instead, was a textbook case of a moderate social democrat with links to the traditional elites.
The Peruvian case therefore reveals that a postmaterial agenda does not establish itself spontaneously. In Peru the evolution of certain postmaterial values collided with two well-known features of Peruvian politics: the fragmentation of civil society (Melendez, 2012) and a crisis of representation that failed to produce populist leaders who seek to attack elite interests (Levitsky and Zavaleta, 2016). In this scenario—and echoing the general diagnosis of “continuity by default” in Peru (Vergara and Encinas, 2016)—the bullfighting status quo has remained unchallenged.
Conclusions
The study of the conflict around bullfighting allows us to highlight three major ideas. First, symbolic and postmaterial disputes have become increasingly relevant in Latin America. Our research suggests that conflicts between elites and other social strata may emerge over symbolic as well as material and redistributive issues. Second, the emergence of widespread opposition to violence against animals was similar in the three countries in that it did not manifest itself politically by itself. Social movements are important but not decisive for the resolution of the issues they support (Giugni, 2007; Goldstone, 2003; Goodwin and Jasper, 2004; King, Bentele, and Soule, 2007; Meyer, Jennes, and Ingram, 2005; Soule and Olzak, 2004). Their main contribution is to generate visibility for the agenda in the streets and the media.
The crucial difference between Lima, where bullfighting persists, and Bogotá and Quito, where it is limited or prohibited, rests in the kind of left that came to represent the agenda. In Colombia and Ecuador, national figures came out against bullfighting and were able to ban it, if only to a degree or for a time. In both cases, the existence of a social movement attracted leaders who saw a potential for mobilization in their favor. This means that the view that stresses the “strategic” behavior of activists in luring politicians to represent their agendas in a specific “structure of opportunity” (Tarrow, 1998) must be complemented by recognition of politicians’ strategies seeking and succeeding in the use of the social movements for their own interests.
Since attacking bullfighting in the Andean capitals provokes a reaction among economic and cultural traditional elites, this agenda may be attractive to leaders looking to antagonize these elites (see Knight, 1998) and reap electoral support from the confrontation. Correa and Petro were leaders of this kind. In contrast, Villarán was a moderate social democrat who grew up in Lima attending bullfights with her upper-class family, and for reasons of ideology and social origins she was less likely to adopt an agenda that would have upset her relationship with the traditional limeño elites. New postmaterial issues overlap with old social tensions in highly unequal societies. Therefore the theorists who point out that “new” social movements are never completely new are mainly right (Edwards, 2004; Tucker, 1991). Not only do activists have earlier experiences and assets that have been used in previous protests but structural distances can be resignified with new issues and content.
The relation between new social movements and left parties also raises a generational issue. For traditional left cadres from communist or social-democratic parties in the Andes, being a left-wing person and attending bullfights was not a contradiction. For older left activists the left-right cleavage tends to be defined by economic, material issues. Bullfighting, same-sex marriage, and abortion do not belong to the core leftist values. For younger activists, in contrast, these issues are as important as the material ones, and therefore left parties are challenged to harmonize their traditional platforms with new issues that these activists see as core elements of a contemporary left platform.
Thus social change poses a serious challenge to political representation. The “detachment” between parties and society in Latin America (Hagopian, 1993) is more than a party crisis; it is part of a slow and sizable transformation of society’s demands and sensibilities. Generally, this transformation is described as a challenge or a threat to political parties, but our research suggests that it is also an opportunity. The left is being forced to rethink its relationship to postmaterial dynamics that, while irrelevant in the twentieth century, are more or less inherent in any new progressive agenda. At the same time, right-wing parties must reevaluate the benefits of choosing the status quo in these controversies. Finally, these new agendas are being presented by new actors who formerly had no public representation (youth, the new middle class, women, the LGBT community, etc.), and parties must not only learn to represent them but first understand them. As Bernard Manin (1995) explained, in the early twentieth century political parties had to survive the demise of the nineteenth-century politics of notables and move to the new politics of parliamentarism. That change, like the current one, was perceived as a huge crisis of representation, but in the end they adapted.
Footnotes
Notes
Alberto Vergara is a professor in the Department of Political and Social Science at the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, Peru. His latest book, coedited with Hillel Soifer, is Politics after Violence: Legacies of the Shining Path Conflict in Peru. Viviana Baraybar is a MPhil. Candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford. She is a member of Nuffield College and a Clarendon Scholar. They thank Eduardo Dargent, Paula Muñoz, Omar Manky and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article and Paulette Chamorro, who conducted the interviews in Quito.