Protests at bullfights are now commonplace, and Colombians have flocked to Twitter to take part in the debate. Ahead of the Constitutional Court decision on Bogotá’s ban, anti-bullfighting tweets outnumbered their pro-bullfighting counterparts by the thousands. A 2012 poll reported on Colombian television news at the height of the debate in Bogotá found 87 percent of Colombians in favor of Petro’s ban. Some 43 percent of Colombians are younger than 25, and it’s from this younger generation that much of the opposition to bullfighting is drawn. This is also a generation that stands a chance of being the first in decades to see a major decline in the violence that has plagued the country, home to the world’s longest continuous civil war, for over half a century.

Lying facedown on the sweltering stone of Los Deseos Park in Medellín, one protester painted in red told me the story of going to her first bullfight with her uncle when she was 10. Now 17, she recalled the experience: “I thought it was horrible to see the suffering of the bull. It hurt me when the bull tried to get up and the matador kept taunting it. And the people applauded. It made a mark on me.” Of the uncle who brought her, she said, “He’s a very closed-minded person. He thinks that humans have no responsibility to animals. He doesn’t believe that the bulls feel pain.” She said her generation “will not torture for tradition.”

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Colombia’s most famous anti-bullfighting politician, Medellín city councillor Alvaro Munera, grew up in a family of bullfight lovers, or taurinos as they’re known in Spanish. He was 12 when he picked up his first capote (cape); at 18 he won a contract to be a matador in Spain—a major achievement for a boy from Colombia. In the 1980s, “I never entered an arena [as a bullfighter] and had people call me an assassin, a torturer,” Munera told me. “We were heroes. People wanted to take photos with us, get our autographs.” Munera said that changed with the rise of anti-animal cruelty movements in the 1990s; today, the matador is not the hero he once was.

But Munera had left the ring permanently long before animal rights became an international issue. On September 22, 1984, Munera was fighting in the Plaza de Toros de Munera in Albacete, Spain—an arena that, curiously enough, bore his last name—when a bull named Terciopelo gored him in the left leg and tossed him into the air. When he fell to the dirt, the bull hooked him again, damaging his spine and paralyzing him at the age of 18.

During his four-year physical rehabilitation in the United States, Munera also underwent what he calls a “spiritual rehabilitation” that changed his perspective on bullfighting. In Florida, a friend introduced Munera to his aunt as a former bullfighter who now had to use a wheelchair because of his injuries. “She stood there looking right into my eyes,” Munera said, “and without a tremble she said, ‘You know what? I love that you are in a wheelchair. I hope you never get up from there because you are a barbarian ... a cruel assassin.’”