Young animal rights activists took to the streets in central Mexico City on Sunday, chanting “Corridas de toros — vergüenza nacional (bullfights — a national shame).” They were protesting the hundreds of bullfights that take place here in Mexico.

The march was attended by about 800 people, most of them in their late teens or early 20s. It began at the Hundido Park on Avenida Insurgentes at midday, a few blocks from the Plaza de Toros Mexico, the biggest bullfighting venue in the country and one of the largest in the world with capacity to seat 48,000 people.

The protesters walked just a few blocks north, taking up a lane of traffic. Many of the motorists driving by honked in support.

Mariana Hernandez, a 20-year-old biology student clutching a sign that said “Ya Basta! (Enough, already)” said, “The bulls that they kill are living things. They shouldn’t kill them for fun.”

“The more of us that are here, the better,” said Manual Hernandez, 19, another protester. “This is the second year that I’ve come here and there are more of us every time.”

Many of the activists that we spoke to mentioned 11-year-old apprentice matador Michel “Michelito” Lagravere, who in January killed six calves in the bullring in Merida, southern Mexico.

“It’s such a cruel act and that a child of this age is promoting this type of activity and being treated like a hero is really bad. He killed six calves — in reality, that’s six children,” said 28-year-old Israel Arriola, another activist taking part in the march.

The protest was organized to coincide with the 63rd anniversary of the Plaza this week. Bullfighting was brought to Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s and nowhere is it more popular outside of Spain than in Mexico.

Claudia Ortega, 25, a coordinator at Animanaturalis.org, one of the organizations behind the march, said a survey conducted by the nonprofit group found that 75% of Mexicans are against bullfighting, but that very few act on their views.

“Each year, 250,000 bulls or horses die in bullfighting or related activities” worldwide, she said. Ortega expressed hope that protests such as Sunday’s might encourage more Mexicans to speak out.

Click here for more bullfighting coverage from 2008.

– This post was created for La Plaza.

See photos here on Flickr.

My loyal readers may remember the Huamantlada from last year – the film we made has proved one of our most watched and the coverage was one of the earliest missions of MexicoReporter.com – then known as NewCorrespondent.com. Well, this year I was back – for the Los Angeles Times this time around – and I wanted to apply my new video training to the event which had proved entertaining 12 months ago, although a little hard to watch. One man had died and there were 24 injuries during the 2007 event.

Everything was for sale as Ulises and I made our way through the throng of men, women, children and babies come to watch the show: tacos, tequila glasses, hats for the sun, balloons, toy torros, headbands with horns attached, cigarettes, sweets and lollipops, chewing gum, t-shirts, pulque (Mexican moonshine), tamales, corn-on-the-cob, beers made into spicy micheladas (condimented with chile, Tabasco sauce, Worcester sauce and other ingredients that can work their way through the walls of one’s stomach), caramelized peanuts, chopped fruit, ice-cream, ink-stamps of bulls for children’s faces, bright squishy toy balls and even mouth organs.

The sound of hammering could be heard all around as the men from the town constructed the make-shift bleachers / stall seating that lined both sides of the streets that would transform into temporary (torture) pens for the bulls later that afternoon. Most of the seats were just thick planks of wood lain along wooden scaffolding. Sol beer branded boards ran along their front – protecting the families behind them from the frenzied street activity to come.

The incessant chatter of friends and family mixed with the hammering, along with the drunken chanting and laughter of the inebriated. The woman at the taco stand, fruit-sellers, a boy selling tequila glasses and a boy who proffered toy torros were all happy to be filmed, and there was lots of environmental action to catch on tape before midday, when the bulls were released.

Francisco Hernandez Villera was hanging out in the street with his friends, bending his knees and practicing postures with an old and faded pink cape that had no doubt seen more glorious days than today would prove to be. Slight of build and 24 years old, this was his eighth year at the Huamantlada, but luckily he had yet to acquire the scares to prove it. It’s a big adrenalin rush, he told us, because of the audience more than anything.

“They apply a lot of pressure,” he said.

Come eleven, the stalls were filling up and we needed to bag a seat. It proved difficult – most of them were already full. We ended up on the third row back on the north side of the street Juarez, flanked top and bottom by a group of girls and then boys respectively hell bent on having a good time. I was annoyed with our positioning, and wanted to be closer to the action. Ulises chatted with Laura Pimentel, a young teacher who befriended us and – who despite being a vegetarian for moral reasons came to watch the show for fun with her mates. She said many of them had been coming to the feria since they were children. But I was distracted, looking around for a better place to be.

A firework sounded and a rowdy roar came up from the crowd. It was close to kick-off. From where we were, I could see up and down the street at least 200 yards each way, and the people still in the street drinking and laughing suddenly parted like the red sea as men tried to jump into the stalls out of the path of the 500 kilo black bull who ran through the masses. The enormous animal shone magnificently in the sun and looked utterly confused.

And so the games began.

Contrary to last year, when I have to admit I spent the first 15 minutes hyperventilating, I adjusted pretty soon to the risk factor and the knowledge that everyone standing around in the street was only five seconds away from a violent and painful death. My sympathies were a hundred per cent with the animal, who was surrounded by humans mad with booze and testosterone. I cringed internally as I watched a man kneel down, arms outstretched, in front of the confused animal as the crowd egged him on. The bull would only have to step forward a meter and toss its horns to change this man’s life forever.

I was annoyed with my limited angles for shooting – where we were positioned allowed me very little movement because of the groups of people above and below us.

I was pondering a move down into the street when the bull tore past once again, men scattering every which way in front of him. Once of them tumbled to the ground but the bull – too distraught to focus – passed him by. Girls screamed hysterically. The whole thing gave me the creeps in a way it hadn’t last year.

I looked towards the opening in the wall that separated the stalls from the street – maybe I could slip through there and just run out of the way when things got hairy? But the entrance was blocked by drunken men, smoking and watching for the bull to tear by again at which point they piled through the gap out of harm’s way. I didn’t fancy the challenge, nor my expensive new LATimes camera’s chances of getting safely out of the way in time.

So I stayed put – this story simply wasn’t one worth risking my life and my gear for.

After tormenting the bulls for a couple of hours, they were roped in and dragged, pushed and beaten into the metal crates from which they had emerged. Pimentel, our friend in the stalls, told us that they would be taken away to be killed. Once a bull has been in the ring with a human, he can learn how to charge and fight – these bulls had already had too much experience now to be ‘safe’ to torrear (bullfight). The name matador – that given to professional bullfighters – suddenly made sense. It means, literally, ‘killer.

The results of the shooting you’ll see in a day or so once the film is done in editing.

The Huamantlada, which is often compared to the running of the bulls event in Pamplona, takes place every year in this small rural town. The comparison to the event in Spain is inaccurate – the bulls didn’t run anywhere. The town’s 17 central streets were transformed into huge pens for the half-ton animals, which were mercilessly taunted by the crowd and pelted with plastic bottles and beer cans.

Many of the men who challenged the bulls, matador-style, knew what they were doing and approached the animals with caution and capes. But many didn’t. The combination of alcohol, a screaming crowd and poor judgment was too much: 23 people ended up being carried away on stretchers by the Red Cross.

But all of those men who survived the wrath of the bulls- scathed or unscathed – were treated like homecoming heroes.

“Give me another beer — it didn’t hurt” shouted Armando Ortiz, a 25-year-old student who earned a standing ovation from the crowd after one of the bulls rushed at him and knocked him down.

The festival is a big family event, and mothers sat with tiny babies in the makeshift bleachers that had been put up around the town. The Huamantlada is a legacy of the Spanish settlers, who used to bring their bulls through this city to be quarantined on their way to bullfights in Mexico City. The locals caught the Spanish passion for bullfighting, and the tradition stuck.

“It’s a tradition that’s very much ours,” said Laura Pimental, a 30-year old teacher sitting safely in the stands.” “But take care!”

She and her three friends were staying well above the action.

“Like this – observing and nothing more because it’s very dangerous. We prefer being up here, watching, saying hello to friends, and having a good time.”

Not everybody was so cautious, but at least nobody lost their lives. Last year, there were 24 injuries and one death — Pimental saw the whole thing. The victim was an older man, and very drunk, she said. He didn’t want to sit with his family — he wanted to touch the bull.

“The animal took out his insides,” Pimental recalled.

Watch La Plaza for a video dispatch on this weekend’s event.

– Deborah Bonello in Huamantla, Mexico

Photos: An amateur bullfighting festival in Mexico sees men with varying experience take on 1,000-pound bulls. Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times

This post was written for La Plaza

Click here for the NYT story.

See here for stories on bullfighting from MexicoReporter.com

One man died and 24 people, including one women, were injured in Huamantla’s amateur bullfighting festival in Mexico this weekend.

Each year, the small town of Huamantla in the state of Tlaxcala celebrates the day of the Virgin Mary by creating brightly-coloured designs and draping the streets in colour. But it’s the amateur bull-fighting event that follows the solemn religious procession rather than the local craftsmanship which makes the headlines.

Thousands of Mexicans – both locals and tourists – flock to the town either to sit in the stalls and watch their fellow country-men tempt death, or to challenge the bulls themselves.

The smell of wet paint is still in the air from the wooden hoardings which were erected the night before to protect the crowds from the marauding bulls, two of which are let into each of 18 streets in the town. Entire families from old men and women through to tiny babies made themselves comfortable before the spectacle began and paid for prime position.

Street vendors paced along the outside of the hoardings selling umbrellas to keep off the sun, nuts, soft drinks, ice-cream souvenir T-shirts, sweets, hats and fake, fuzzy bull’s horns.

Next to me, a couple of young men discussed some business matters as they supped from enormous, special edition bottles of Sol, one of the sponsors of this annual event. The heady mix of alcohol, hot sun and adrenalin creates a dangerous environment in which it’s very easy for things to go badly wrong, and many of the young men and women milling around in the midday sun are already drunk.

Suddenly a scream goes up, and the bulls are upon us – or so it feels. It’s the first time your humble correspondent has been so close to a 500 kilo, angry panting bull that is being mercilessly taunted by the frantic crowd, and with every pass its sweaty flanks brushed against the wooden hoardings – 50 cm between me and certain death.

The black beauty began by pacing the road, sizing up its adversaries. As it trotted along the side of the hoardings, people standing in the road scattered in every direction, some of them leaping onto the hoardings, others finding tiny gaps to squeeze through in the wooden barriers to get themselves out of harm’s way.

Taunters are all around – every man and his wife screamed at the animal as it stood bewildered and sweaty in the centre of the road. The first serious adversary arrived, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt sporting a silhouette of a proudly standing toro. He dragged his feet behind him in the dusty road as he eyed his challenger, the bull switching his eyes from the solitary Mexican to the crowd and back again – unsure of who to focus on.

The aspiring matador opened his old, dusky pink cloak – probably passed down to him from a former glorious matador family member, or perhaps picked up in a junk shop – and the battle begins. The bull, already tired from running, plunged for the cloak and the Mexican matador moved graceful to the side. This exchange went on for some time, the bull alternating his attention between his adversary and the maddening crowd.

Finally, in an act of triumph, the Mexican kneels whilst making eye-contact with the enormous animal standing before him, reaching out and to the side to touch the tip of the bull’s horn before retreating in victory.

He will live to boast the tale – others won’t be so lucky.

See here for more pictures: