▲ The Conquest was a brutal process, of violence and dispossession, affirms the president in an exhibition brochure about Mexico in Madrid.Photo Presidency
Alma E. Muñoz and Alonso Urrutia
La Jornada Newspaper
Saturday, November 1, 2025, p. 5
President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo considered “a first step” that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation of Spain, José Manuel Albares, lamented the injustice committed against indigenous peoples during the Conquest in his opening speech to the four exhibitions of pre-Columbian art in Madrid, Half the world: Women in indigenous Mexico.
By highlighting that this is the first time that a Spanish government authority has spoken about it, the president said – as she also does in her book Diary of a historical transition– that former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador told him, given his decision not to invite the King of Spain, Felipe VI, to his inauguration: “you do not need to incorporate the discrepancies into the government, you are just starting, and I told him: ‘I am not doing it because you tell me or not, but I am doing it out of conviction.’”
Because, he stated in the book, “no president should allow another head of state to treat the people of Mexico with disdain,” pointing out that “not only did they not answer the very diplomatic and kind letter” that the former president sent them, “but they also carried out a campaign in Spain against López Obrador and the Fourth Transformation.”
He pointed out that the offense was not only directed at the former president, “but also towards the entire nation, the people of Mexico, and that is why I made that decision,” in addition to the fact that at the time there was “a fairly misogynistic narrative” for supporting the letter.
He maintained that “this grievance today begins to be settled” with Albares’ speech, which is why he welcomed the recognition that he made.
After showing the video with the words spoken by the Spanish official just an hour before in the Treasury Room of the National Palace, he expressed: “congratulations on this first step by the chancellor,” particularly in this Year of Indigenous Women.
“It is important. It is a first step, and it speaks of the importance of what we have always said: forgiveness magnifies governments and people. It is not humiliating, on the contrary; recognizing history, recognizing grievances, asking for forgiveness or regret, and recovering it as part of history, magnifies governments and people.”
Sheinbaum Pardo also read the prologue “Women of Corn and the Cosmos: Indigenous Art Then and Now,” which he wrote for the book about the pieces on display, a text that also opens the exhibitions in Madrid.
Among other things, in it he points out that “the Conquest was not a meeting between equals. It was a brutal process, of violence, imposition and dispossession. An attempt was made to destroy not only territories, but entire cultures, ancient knowledge, languages, ways of life. Indigenous women especially suffered this attack, they were silenced, displaced, violated. However, they resisted in silence and in action, individually and collectively, on the loom and in the word, in the ritual and in the community.”
It also mentions that “honoring this legacy implies recognizing the abuses of the past and present. Discrimination, racism and contempt towards indigenous peoples still persist. Eradicating them is an ethical duty if we aspire to a truly just world, where all cultures, all languages, all people, have the same value.”
Yesterday, the President highlighted that the exhibitions in Madrid emerged from a process to make indigenous peoples in Spain visible, as part of the request for forgiveness that López Obrador made at the time.
