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21-03-2026
MADRID: King Felipe of Spain appears to have helped thaw frosty relations with Mexico by acknowledging abuses carried out by his country during its conquest but in doing so he has reopened a fierce debate over the colonization of the New World.
The arrival of Spaniards in America from the late 15th Century spread Christianity and the Spanish language across the continent, while also causing the death of many thousands of indigenous people through military action and disease.
During a visit to an exhibition dedicated to indigenous women in Mexico in Madrid’s National Archaeological Museum, King Felipe said there had been “a lot of abuse” during the conquest of the territory that would become Mexico.
“There are things that, when we study them, with our present-day criteria, our values, obviously cannot make us feel proud,” he added on Monday.
The king made his informal observations as he commented on the exhibition in the presence of the Mexican ambassador to Spain, Quirino Ordaz.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has welcomed the comments as a major step forward on an issue that has caused diplomatic friction between the two countries in recent years.
“One could say that it is not everything we would have wanted but it is a gesture of reconciliation by the king in terms of what we were talking about; an acknowledgement of excesses, exterminations that happened during the Spaniards’ arrival,” she said.
The year 2021 marked the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the site of modern-day Mexico City and the capital of the Aztec empire, at the hands of Hernan Cortes and his small army.
They and other Spanish conquistadors went on to slaughter many thousands more indigenous people across the continent.
In 2019, the then-president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, demanded an apology from Spain for human rights violations during the conquest and colonization of his country.
In 2024, his successor, Sheinbaum, took the unusual move of not inviting King Felipe to her inauguration, arguing that neither he nor the Spanish government had responded to Lopez Obrador’s request.
However, last October, Sheinbaum praised comments by Spain’s foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, who said that there had been “pain and injustice” in the two countries’ shared history. Although Spain has not taken the kinds of steps some other countries have to reappraise their colonial past, in 2015 it pushed through a law offering nationality to the descendants of Jews who were expelled from the country in the 15th Century during the Spanish Inquisition.
Almost seven years ago, Mexico’s president had sent a letter to Spain’s King Felipe VI and Pope Francis urging them to apologies for human rights abuses committed during the conquest of the region 500 years ago. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the indigenous peoples of Mexico had been the victims of massacres.
Speaking in the ruins of an ancient city, he called for a full account of the abuses.
Spain rejected his call and called for a “constructive perspective” instead.
The territory which now makes up Mexico was under Spanish rule for some 300 years before gaining independence in the early 19th Century.
At the time of the conquest, Spain was a fiercely Roman Catholic country and saw as its mission the spread of Christianity to regions such as the Americas.
The man who became Mexico’s first leftist president in seven decades has been pursuing a radical agenda since being sworn in in December, promising to tackle corruption, reduce inequality and lift millions of Mexicans out of poverty. (Int’l News Desk)
