Ben Pawlowski
A DIPLOMATIC row between Mexico and Spain has erupted after the Latin American nation’s left-wing president-elect refused to invite King Felipe VI to her upcoming inauguration.
Claudia Sheinbaum, the protege of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who won June’s presidential election in a landslide, says she snubbed the Spanish monarch and head of state because of his refusal to apologise for crimes committed against Mexico’s indigenous people during the Spanish colonial conquest over half a millennium ago.
In 2019, current president Lopez Obrador wrote to both King Felipe and Pope Francis, asking them to apologise for Spanish colonialism.
At the time, he said: “I have sent a letter to the king of Spain and another to the Pope calling for a full account of the abuses and urging them to apologise to the Indigenous peoples for the violations of what we now call their human rights”.
However, Spain refused to apologise, saying: “The arrival of the Spanish on Mexican soil 500 years ago cannot be judged in the light of contemporary considerations.
“Our closely related peoples have always known how to view our shared history without anger and from a shared perspective, as free peoples with a common heritage and an extraordinary future”.
That response failed to please the Mexican government, leading Sheinbaum to refuse to invite King Felipe for her inauguration ceremony on October 1.
Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez has been invited, but he will no longer attend following what he described as an ‘unacceptable and inexplicable decision’ to exclude the King.
Speaking at the UN general assembly in New York, Sanchez said: “Spain and Mexico are brother countries – and that’s why the exclusion of our head of state seems unacceptable”.
He added: “Let’s not forget that this head of state has taken part in all the swearings-in – all of them – as a prince and then as a king and a head of state. That’s why we can’t accept his exclusion and that’s why we’ve told the Mexican government that there will be no Spanish diplomatic representation whatsoever”.
“Behind all this is an enormous sadness because we’re two brother countries that can’t enjoy the best political relations because of a certain person’s political interests”.
The new government has, however, invited hundreds of other delegations and heads of state from around the world – including Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Mexico was conquered by Spanish forces – who were armed with devastating diseases including smallpox – in 1519, killing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and converting the population to Catholicism.
The nation was freed from Spanish colonial control following the Mexican War of Independence between 1810 and 1821.
