Mexico Demands Apology from Spain, Reviving Colonial Grievances

Mexico asks Spain for an apology and reopens the conquest wound

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum did not invite King Felipe VI to her inauguration. Spain viewed the gesture as a protocol slight; the Mexican government responded by demanding an "ceremony of redress" for the conquest. What was theoretically a matter of diplomatic etiquette has become the latest episode in a centuries-old standoff: the black legend, the narrative of good and evil, and animosity that is rising online.

The trigger is recent, but the fuel has been accumulating for years. On social media and comment sections, any issue touching Spain—from dubbing a series to the figure of the monarch—activates a response that observers from outside describe as disproportionate. The underlying question is not whether it exists, but where it comes from and who benefits.

What do the violence figures exchanged in the reproach say?

When the discussion is filled with slogans, each side presents its accounting. Against mutual disdain, the data repeated most insistently appears: an average of 40,000 homicides annually in Mexico, contrasted with the 336 recorded in Spain in 2023, a year considered bad in the country itself. The exercise transferred to the debate is the index: if Spain had the Mexican rate, it would have recorded around 10,500 homicides in a single year.

The comparison is an uncomfortable mirror for both. Mexico lives with territories controlled by incivil groups and episodes marking its recent history, such as the disappearance of 40 students in 2014 by local police. Spain, in turn, has not known violence of that scale in democracy. But measuring countries by their homicide rate and extrapolating it without further ado is, precisely, the type of argumentative shortcut that deserves close scrutiny.

Why is indigenism pointed to as the origin of the rejection?

Much of the analysis blames education. It is argued that for decades the Mexican national narrative has been built on an Americanist and indigenist axis that presents the conquest as the original sin of all subsequent evils. Spain functions there as a convenient scapegoat: if backwardness, corruption, or inequality have an external culprit, internal responsibility remains blurred. The irony is that those who defend this usually live in a country, Spain, that has not made a comfortable exercise of reviewing its own history.

The practical consequence is that indigenism has ceased to be a historiographical current to become a political tool. Mexico and Jamaica, according to one circulating reading, feel closer today to the United States than to Spain. And not precisely out of affection.

The 1939 exile and its attributed legacy

Another argumentative line goes back to 1939. After the Civil War, Mexico hosted a large part of the republican exile: politicians, judges, professors, and artists who occupied positions of influence in Mexican society. It was, furthermore, the only country that did not recognize Franco's regime nor maintain an embassy during those years, a gesture repeated as proof of a long-standing antagonism.

From this arises one of the most repeated theses: hostility toward Spain is not spontaneous, but inherited from that exile and today mixed with indigenism in the same ideological cocktail. The objection is evident: attributing today's conversation to exiles from nearly a century ago requires explaining why the message has taken root in generations that did not know them.

Is it the same throughout Latin America? The cases of Peru and Argentina

No. The contrast serves to calibrate the phenomenon. Peru is described as the exception: it was one of the most loyal strongholds to the crown and one of the last to fall, and today its treatment of Spaniards is perceived as less strained. Argentina, for its part, maintains the pride—however questionable today—of having been one of the wealthiest economies in the world between 1880 and 1950.

The difference, according to this reading, lies in the relationship with the mirror itself. Those who know their country is going through difficulties argue less with ghosts of the past. Those who believe they have nothing to envy anyone else, on the other hand, find in historical reproach a comfortable place to position themselves.

The exact point where the analysis gets stuck

And here we reach the knot. Some see in the slight to the king a political operation with internal returns: pointing to Spain distracts from one's own problems. Others read it as the legitimate claim of a historical debt never settled. Between the two positions remains a detail that no one manages to explain: why a dispute settled in textbooks from five centuries ago continues to set the bilateral agenda in the twenty-first century.

Perhaps because the reproach, in the end, is not about Spain. It is about what each country wants to tell about itself.