The 500-year-old
wounds of the Spanish conquest were ripped open afresh on Monday (March 25)
when Mexico's president urged Spain and the Vatican to apologise for their
"abuses" - a request Madrid said it "firmly rejects."
Spain's centuries of
dominance in the New World, backed by the Catholic Church, leapt from the
history books to the headlines when Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador called on Spanish King Felipe VI and Pope Francis to apologise for the
conquest and the rights violations committed in its aftermath.
"I have sent a
letter to the king of Spain and another to the pope, calling for a full account
of the abuses and urging them to apologise to the indigenous peoples (of
Mexico) for the violations of what we now call their human rights," Lopez
Obrador said.
He made the remarks in
a video, filmed at the ruins of the indigenous city of Comalcalco and posted on
Facebook and Twitter.
"There were
massacres and oppression. The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and
the cross. They built their churches on top of the (indigenous) temples,"
added the anti-establishment leftist.
"The time has
come to reconcile. But let us ask forgiveness first."
Spain's rejection was
immediate and blunt.
"The government
of Spain deeply regrets that the letter the Mexican president sent to his
Majesty the King, whose contents we firmly reject, has been made public,"
it said in a statement.
"The arrival, 500
years ago, of Spaniards to present Mexican territory cannot be judged in the
light of contemporary considerations," it said.
"Our two brother
nations have always known how to read our shared past without anger and with a
constructive perspective."
300-year reign
Lopez Obrador made the
remarks during a visit to the Mayan pyramids of Comalcalco, in his native
Tabasco state, in southern Mexico.
He later visited the
nearby city of Centla, the scene of the first battle between Spanish
conquistador Hernan Cortes and the indigenous peoples of the land now known as
Mexico, on March 14, 1519.
With the help of
horses, swords, guns and smallpox - all unknown in the New World at the time -
Cortes led an army of fewer than 1,000 men to defeat the Aztec empire, the
start of 300 years of Spanish rule over Mexico.
The abuses continued
until independence from Spain in 1821, and beyond, Lopez Obrador said.
"Thousands of
people were murdered during this period. One culture and civilisation imposed
itself on another," he said later in a speech.
"There are still
open wounds. It's better to recognise that abuses were committed, and mistakes
were made. It's better to ask forgiveness and seek to be brothers in a historic
reconciliation."
He added that he, too,
planned to offer an apology, "because the repression of indigenous peoples
continued after the colonial period."
It's complicated
Mexico has a
complicated relationship with its colonial past.
Its history, culture,
food and the Mexican people themselves are the product of
"mestizaje," the mixing of the Old and New Worlds.
According to a
government study, 98 per cent of Mexicans have some combination of indigenous,
European and African ancestry.
But although that
mixture made modern Mexico - and gave the world the gifts of chocolate, tacos
de carnitas and Day of the Dead - it is also a past tainted by violence, rape
and oppression.
Lopez Obrador, 65,
took office in December after a landslide election win that represented a firm
break with Mexico's traditional political parties.
A folksy populist, he
pulls no punches in going after traditional elites, and has sought to cast
himself as a champion of Mexico's indigenous peoples.
But he had so far
cultivated cordial relations with Spain and the Vatican, including during a
visit to Mexico City by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez earlier this year.
Sanchez, a fellow
leftist, marked the occasion by presenting the Mexican president with his
grandfather Jose Obrador's Spanish birth certificate, from 1893.
