resultant spinal cord and
cranial injuries leaving him paralyzed. Múnera has since become
a council member in his hometown of Medellín, a position from which
he advocates for the rights of the disabled and promotes anti-bullfighting
campaigns.

The widely circulated photograph displayed above purports to have captured
Múnera at the very moment, in the middle of a bullfight, when he
came to the realization that what he was doing was an injustice to animals
and decided to henceforth campaign against bullfighting. Although Múnera
did undergo such a conversion, this photo doesn't depict the instant of
his change of heart, for a number of reasons:

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 shownin 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.

In a 2008 interview, Múnera expressed that his conversion to an
anti-bullfighting animal rights defender did not occur at any one moment
in the ring, but was part of an ongoing process that began before, and
extended