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What Changed their Minds

Matador.jpg Múnera didn’t undergo his epiphany against bullfighting in the middle of a bullfight; he stopped participating in that activity only when he was forced out of the ring for good after a goring permanently paralyzed him. The posture shown in the photograph is not one of a torero collapsing or expressing contrition; rather, it’s a common posture of desplante (defiance), a bit of showmanship in which the torero indicates his total domination of the bull by taking up what appears to be a dangerous position in front of the animal’s horns. (Also, the quotation that accompanies the photograph was not spoken by Múnera; it is the work of Spanish writer Antonio Gala, who was not himself a torero.) As detailed at The Last Arena blog, this photograph isn’t a picture of Múnera at all, but rather a photo of some other torero.