The President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaumencouraged Spain to take advantage of October 12, a national holiday, which in this Latin American country is now commemorated as the day of indigenous resistance, to begin to publicly apologize to Mexican indigenous peoples for the abuses of the conquest.
“We are going to show a video about all the public apologies given by presidents or leaders of different places. of the world to see if tomorrow Spain is encouraged to begin this process of public apology to the indigenous peoples of Mexico”, explained the president during her morning conference.
The Mexican ruler reiterated his position after not inviting the King of SpainFelipe VI, during his inauguration last week, for not responding to the letter sent to him by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024) in 2019 asking him to apologize to the indigenous peoples of Mexico for the abuses of colonization.
For this reason, he showed a video with examples of other public apologies, such as that of Japan, which since 1990 has apologized for the abuses committed in Korea and China, or that in 2000 the German president of at the time, Johannes Rau, asked for forgiveness in front of Parliament. . of Israel for the Jewish holocaust.
He also cited that in 2008 Italy apologized to Libya for colonialism and promised to pay $5 billion, that in 2013 the Netherlands apologized for the executions in Indonesia in the 1940s and that Portugal had accepted its responsibility for slavery in 2024. other cases.
“These examples confirm that Apologizing for Past Grievances Allows You to Resolve Historical Hurts and liberates both those who offer forgiveness and those who grant it”, concluded the narrator of the video. From the government of López Obrador, Mexico commemorates October 12 as the Day of Indigenous Resistance. Therefore, Sheinbaum criticized the fact that this date was celebrated in other countries as Christopher Columbus Day, on the initiative of the Spanish minister Faustino Rodríguez-San Pedro at the beginning of the 20th century, or as Hispanic Heritage Day.
“They used to call it Columbus Day, which has nothing to do with race because races don’t exist in human beings, we are one species and there are no races, biologically proven , now they call it Columbus Day,” Sheinbaum pointed out. The president affirmed that “recovering the sense of the homeland, the sense of the nation, the historical sense, is a fundamental element of the Fourth Transformation”, the political movement launched by López Obrador.
