Pressure to reshape festival in Pamplona
Ending sexual assaults, bull fights drive discussions
PAMPLONA, Spain — The topics of sexual abuse and animal cruelty are dominating this year’s San Fermin festival in Pamplona, which kicks off Friday for nine days and eight nights of round-the-clock alcohol-soaked partying, traditional celebrations and dangerous bull runs.
It’s not a full-blown identity crisis yet, but the festival in northern Spain popularized by American novelist Ernest Hemingway and seen by critics as a macho proving ground with a violent streak is slowly adapting to the social awarenessbroughtby anew generation.
Sexual assaults reported during the festival went fromtwo in 2008— the year a local woman was murdered after she refused to have sex with her killer— to 20 in 2016, when five men cornered an 18-year old, filmed themselves sexually attacking her and left after stealing her phone. The figures, from a study by the Public University of Navarra, rose to 22 last year amid growing public outrage.
Authorities have been able to identify suspects in nearly 95 percent of the cases in Pamplona, where the 2016 “Wolfpack case”— named after the WhatsApp group the perpetrators used to share their abuse videos — marked a tipping point that galvanized Spain’s own #MeToomovement.
Outrage fueled protests in the streets after a provincial court cleared the five men of rape charges and sentenced them to nine years behind bars on a lesser charge of sexual abuse.
The city’s left-wing mayor, Joseba Asiron has also raised eyebrows ahead of this year’s festival by questioning the future of bullfights, a tradition at the core of the festival.