Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico, pointed out this Friday that “the pause continues” in relations with Spain because he considered that “there is no attitude of respect” when the Spanish authorities did not respond to his claims.
“The pause continues because there is no respectful attitude on their part. I sent a respectful letter to the head of state, to the king of Spain, and he didn’t even have the attention to answer me,” the president claimed during his morning press conference from the National Palace.
Last February, the president requested a “pause” in relations with Spain after he demanded an apology for the abuses committed during the Conquest of present-day Mexico.
That call from López Obrador caused friction between the two countries.
“When we ask you to start a new phase in the relations between Mexico and Spain, we consider a gesture of humility important, offering forgiveness, apologies for the extermination, the repression, the murders of the original peoples, and they say that we have to thank them for coming to civilize ourselves,” he said.
Until before that request, the Mexican government had maintained a perspective of history that emphasized miscegenation with the Spanish, while López Obrador defends a direct relationship that links current Mexico with pre-Hispanic cultures.
“We are not going to ask them to return everything they took, just to acknowledge the abuses, the massacres, that the original peoples were repressed and that we, after independence, also committed those excesses,” he said.
However, López Obrador reiterated that this “is not a break, it is a pause” while noting that all Spaniards “are welcome”.
López Obrador’s statements come just one day after the Mexico-Spain Binational Commission was held in Mexico, with the participation of Marcelo Ebrard, Secretary of Foreign Relations, and José Manuel Albares Bueno, Spanish minister, in which both underlined the relaunch of bilateral relations.
Source: OEM
