Culture is being the great crutch to sustain the battered diplomatic relations between Spain and Mexico, which became strained in 2019 when the then newly elected Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, demanded from the Spanish Crown a gesture of reparation for the excesses of the Conquest and the viceroyalties. The letter then sent to the monarch was private, but the matter was resolved publicly with a forceful rejection by the Spanish Executive and a breakdown in relations that continues to this day. The gestures to unblock the issue are now also public and most of them are limited to the cultural sphere: the Guadalajara Book Fair (FIL), the Princess of Asturias awards, the great tourism event in Madrid, Fitur, with Mexico as a guest country, and several exhibitions of pre-Hispanic art such as the one that this Monday served as a framework for Felipe VI to recognize the “abuses” of the conquest of America. The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has been interpreting all of this as “steps” or “little steps” in the required direction, but will the King’s latest statements be enough for the government that declared itself aggrieved?
“It will not be enough,” says the historian of the Colegio de México Humberto Beck. The Mexican Government will value it, without a doubt, but will receive it “as a substitute for the official apology,” says the academic, a veteran analyst of current Mexican politics. “Conditioning relations between both countries on that apology has been a mistake by the Government of Mexico,” he says. “They have given this request for forgiveness a central place that distracts from the deeper issues, which is a reflection, a continuous process of memory and recognition by both societies,” he adds by phone. In his opinion, the Mexican government has turned this public apology by the Spanish monarch and Hispanic people into a “fetish.” “This has been presented as if the problem were the Spanish State and Mexico the aggrieved State, and it is something that goes through both,” he reflects. So no, Beck does not believe that the King’s words will close this matter that has the embassies busy. “They wanted a ceremony of redress and the Monarchy cannot do that because it would go against a sector of Spanish politics that has put the empire at the center.”
If in 2019 it was López Obrador who requested that gesture from the Monarchy and a leak moved the debate with virulence to the public sphere, the arrival to power of Claudia Sheinbaum in 2024 put another nail in relations that were privately struggling to mend. The president did not invite Felipe VI to her investiture and once again dust covered the path that had been becoming clearer. In Mexico, the controversy found political profitability among some sectors of the left and great rejection on the right, which saw no reason why Spain should apologize for events that occurred centuries ago. Nor was President López Obrador’s proposal very popular among the many descendants of the Republicans exiled in Mexico. Some, like the renowned historian and constitutionalist Fernando Serrano Migallón, son of exiles, considered that request to be out of tone and an unnecessary dart, even though he, who could have Spanish nationality, rejected it for not swearing loyalty to the King that these procedures require.
From that same republican sphere, the president of the Spanish Ateneo of Mexico, Juan Luis Bonilla, responds to this newspaper that the presence of the King at the exhibition of Women in indigenous Mexico, which is exhibited in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, and his statements “show the interest on the part of the Government of Spain to maintain a close relationship with Mexico, as it had been before López Obrador.” Bonilla also mentions previous statements in the same sense, condemning the excesses of the Conquest, by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and the president himself, Pedro Sánchez. They are, he says, “winks toward Mexico trying to resolve diplomatic conflicts that hinder the relationship between both countries,” a very sensitive issue precisely among the descendants of the Spanish exile.
With King or without him, the children and grandchildren of those Republican Spaniards come to say, Mexico and Spain are brother countries and must behave as such. They are the ones who have kept alive that brotherhood that since the end of the Civil War intertwined the destinies of both peoples and those who have wanted, also now, to put heat on this diplomatic crisis. The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, did so when he met with his Mexican counterpart, Claudia Curiel, on the occasion of the Guadalajara International Book Fair in November 2024, with Spain as the guest country and the Republican exile at the center of the event. The Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, also did so five months earlier, when he went to Mexico to recognize the role in democratic history of those exiled Spaniards. After that, there have been statements and gestures of unequivocal healing desire for open wounds. “Whether or not all of this is enough, Claudia Sheinbaum will have to say,” says Bonilla, but “Mexico requested a pardon, that is, the assumption of responsibility for an event, and it seems to me that the King’s statements are clear in the sense that he has no responsibility for those events,” she says.
Of course, the monarch’s words were not an official apology: “There was a lot of abuse” and “ethical controversies” about the conquest, he noted. He has referred to the current view of what happened centuries ago, but has framed it in a “context” that requires “an objective and rigorous analysis.” But “obviously,” he stressed, that “cannot make us feel proud.”
The historian Beck considers that the Mexican Government “has to rethink what a fair reparation will be. If it is the King assuming historical guilt, that is not going to happen,” he ventures. He adds: “There must be a rethinking of what historical memory means.”
