Yet again hosted at Tordesillas, and hand in hand with the PSOE, the Torneo del Toro de la Vega (Meadow Bull’s Tournament) was performed last September. A bull was chased by about fifty people, both on foot and horseback, speared and tortured to death.
Last year the attendees assaulted a journalist that was reporting on the tournament, Juan Postigo from the Tribuna Valladolid newspaper, whom they fell and battered with kicks in order to silence and censure any negative coverage of the macabre ritual that is annually performed at this town in the Valladolid province. His fellow reports relate the experience in the following article.
Once the tournament is over, the participants cover the animal, now mortally wounded, so that the cameras cannot capture its last agonizing minutes alive. In past celebrations other journalists have also been assaulted.
The Guardia Civil (Spanish gendarmerie) prevented the many protestors that came from getting near the tournament’s staging area, reputedly in order to curtail their ability to take any photos that could help broadcast to the world the cruelty of this ritual, which has the support of both the PP and the PSOE. Recently, in an interview with Cadena SER, the socialist mayor of Tordesillas, José Antonio González Poncela, defended the tournament declaring that “it is a clean tournament, the bull suffers but does not feel pain, and that banning these kinds of practices would directly lead to the extinction of the Spanish Fighting Bull race,” absurd and ridiculous arguments for the vast majority of the population.
Last year the attendees assaulted a journalist that was reporting on the tournament, Juan Postigo from the Tribuna Valladolid newspaper, whom they fell and battered with kicks in order to silence and censure any negative coverage of the macabre ritual that is annually performed at this town in the Valladolid province. His fellow reports relate the experience in the following article.
Once the tournament is over, the participants cover the animal, now mortally wounded, so that the cameras cannot capture its last agonizing minutes alive. In past celebrations other journalists have also been assaulted.
The Guardia Civil (Spanish gendarmerie) prevented the many protestors that came from getting near the tournament’s staging area, reputedly in order to curtail their ability to take any photos that could help broadcast to the world the cruelty of this ritual, which has the support of both the PP and the PSOE. Recently, in an interview with Cadena SER, the socialist mayor of Tordesillas, José Antonio González Poncela, defended the tournament declaring that “it is a clean tournament, the bull suffers but does not feel pain, and that banning these kinds of practices would directly lead to the extinction of the Spanish Fighting Bull race,” absurd and ridiculous arguments for the vast majority of the population.
The attendees
also berated and assaulted the activists, throwing sticks and stones at the
peaceful protesters.
An
anti-bullfighting Catalonian activist who was protesting the tournament along
200 others was pelted with stones, resulting in head trauma.
Representatives
of the Animalist Party (PACMA) visited today the entrance to the Spanish
Congress to turn in 85,000 signatures collected during the ‘Break a Spear’
campaign to abolish the Toro de la Vega.
First
available recording of the speared animal:
Sources: Tribuna de Valladolid
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