Spain expresses regret over ‘injustice’ suffered by Mexico’s Indigenous people during conquest

Spain has acknowledged and expressed regret over the “pain and injustice” suffered by the Indigenous people of Mexico during its conquest of the Americas, heralding a shift in tone after six years of diplomatic spats over the abuses of the colonial period.

In March 2019, Mexico’s then president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador wrote to King Felipe VI and Pope Francis, who was then the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics, urging them to apologise for the “massacres and oppression” of colonialism and the conquest.

The letter drew an angry response from the Spanish government, which said Spain’s actions in Mexico 500 years ago could not be judged “in the light of contemporary considerations” and that the two countries’ common history should be viewed “without anger and from a shared perspective”.

On Friday, however, the Spanish government signalled a more conciliatory and penitent approach. Speaking at the inauguration of an exhibition in Madrid dedicated to the Indigenous women of Mexico, Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, reflected on the countries’ joint history.

“It’s a very human history and, like every human history, it’s had its light and its shadows,” he said. “And there has also been pain – pain and injustice towards the Indigenous people to whom this exhibition is dedicated. There was injustice and it’s right to recognise that today and to be sorry for that, because it is also part of our shared history, and we can neither deny nor forget it.”

His words came four days after Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, renewed calls for an apology. “We agreed with the letter that was sent by president López Obrador and we are still waiting for a reply,” she said.

Sheinbaum welcomed Albares’s comments, saying they went some way towards recognising the wrongs of the past.

“It’s a first step and it speaks to the importance of what we’ve always said: that apologies ennoble governments and peoples,” she said. “It’s not humiliating, it’s just the opposite. Congratulations to the foreign minister of the Spanish government, particularly in this Year of the Indigenous Woman.”

The conquest of Mexico began in 1519 when Hernán Cortés led hundreds of soldiers, equipped with horses, carrying diseases such as smallpox and abetted by Indigenous groups at odds with the Aztecs, to Mexico City, then known as Tenochtitlán.

The Spanish sacked the city two years later and proceeded to convert the Indigenous populations to Catholicism.