AMLO apologizes to the Maya people for centuries of oppression

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The president of Mexico apologized for the violence against the Maya peoples during the conquest, a symbolic act and a demand that still demands from Spain.

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, offered an unusual gesture, politically, for a man who almost never acknowledges a mistake: he apologized. A historical and symbolic offering of forgiveness to the Maya peoples, but also tailored to him: he pointed out those he considers to be the guilty, designated those he considers to be the victims, and spoke of reconciliation but less of reparation. A very political apology to heal a very deep wound.

On Monday, May 3, the president traveled to the Yucatan peninsula – to the Felipe Carrillo Puerto municipality, in Quintana Roo – to ask the Maya people of the south of the country for forgiveness.

“What prevailed in our country, unfortunately, was extermination to deprive indigenous peoples of their lands,” said AMLO, an apology that no Mexican president has offered before.

But López Obrador did not travel to apologize for something that his presidency has done but for events that occurred in the second half of the 19th century, during the so-called ‘Caste War’, and for what his enemies in history such as the Conservative President Porfirio Díaz.

He apologized for those others because he says, he wants 2021 “to be the year of reconciliation.”


“This forgiveness simply ended up being an act of the Mexican State for maintaining relations with a sector of the Maya people that, since the beginning of the 20th century, even in the years of the Porfiriato, allied themselves with the state,” says May May, a Yucatecan historian member of the Maya K’ajlay collective.

“I think that talking about the Caste War is talking about the diversity of the Maya warriors, because there were always very different caciques and not a homogeneous block,” explained another member of the group, researcher José Ángel Koyoc Ku.

Source: El País

Mexico Daily Post