A fight dating back more than five centuries re-emerged on Wednesday as Mexico’s incoming president defended a decision to not invite the Spanish king to her inauguration next week after the monarch declined to apologize for colonial-era abuses.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez also weighed in earlier in the day, describing the snub as “unacceptable,” less than one week before Mexican president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum’s swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday next week.
In a rare rebuke on Tuesday, the Spanish government announced it would not send any representative to the event.
Photo: Reuters
The diplomatic spat threatens to cast a pall over Sheinbaum’s inauguration in Mexico City, once the seat of Spain’s vast colonial holdings in the Americas after Spanish invaders and their native allies toppled the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521.
Mexico City was built over the ruins of the Aztec metropolis.
In a two-page letter posted to social media on Wednesday, Sheinbaum wrote that only Sanchez had been invited, in part because Spanish King Felipe VI did not directly respond to a personal letter that the outgoing Mexican president sent the monarch in 2019.
In that letter, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a close Sheinbaum ally, asked the king to “publicly and officially” recognize the abuses committed during the conquest of Mexico in order to chart a friendlier new course between the countries.
“Unfortunately, that letter did not prompt any direct answer,” Sheinbaum wrote, adding that she spoke with Sanchez a few days earlier.
In 2019, Lopez Obrador was seeking to organize an event in 2021 that would mark the anniversaries of the conquest, Mexico’s 19th century independence from Spain, as well as the founding of Tenochtitlan in the 1300s.
At the time, he also sought a similar apology from Pope Francis for atrocities committed against Mexico’s indigenous population, as well as the repatriation of pre-Hispanic books and other artifacts held in European museums and libraries.
Francis did not respond to Lopez Obrador, but has previously apologized for the “many grave sins [that] were committed against the native people of America in the name of God.”
After Lopez Obrador reiterated his request for a formal apology shortly after his letter was made public, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected it.
The conflict should not be “judged in light of contemporary considerations,” it said.
The outgoing Mexican president has often invoked the Spanish conquest to rally nationalist sentiment, stressing that Mexico is no longer any country’s colony.
Asked by reporters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday if Spain should apologize, Sanchez sidestepped the question.
“We can’t accept this exclusion, and that’s why we informed the Mexican government that the absence of any diplomatic representative of the Spanish government is a sign of protest,” he said.
“Not only do we consider it unacceptable, its inexplicable,” he added.
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