![]() ![]() However, conservatives in Spain have been irritated by the Mexican president's insistence that Madrid apologize for the past.įILE - Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador speaks before the traditional military parade to mark the bicentennial of Mexico's Independence from Spain, at the Zocalo square in Mexico City, Sept. But what we have is an extraordinary future,” Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in an interview with CNN in June. “Mexico and Spain have a relationship with a long past, a very rich past which obviously on occasions we cannot agree on. Spain's government has refuted Mexico's demand for an apology for the conquest while praising the support Mexico gave Spanish leftist Republican exiles during and after the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Diaz del Castillo accompanied Cortés and notes that, with a force of 600 Spanish soldiers, defeated the Aztecs only by enlisting thousands of fighters among other indigenous people who were resentful of their Aztec oppressors and eager to cast them off.Īmong their tributaries, the Aztecs were notorious for their brutality, enslaving the populations they conquered and practicing human sacrifice, including of children, as part of their religion, according to historical accounts. Historical accounts, notably "The True History of the Conquest of New Spain" by Captain Bernal Díaz del Castillo, counter claims of cruelty but are also critical of Cortés campaign. Spain rejected this interpretation of history and instead said the conquest “cannot be judged in the light of contemporary considerations.” Modern historians say that conquest was marked by violence, subjugation, cultural suppression, and plunder. In 2019, Mexico's populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is known by the acronym AMLO, demanded that Spain's King Felipe VI and Pope Francis should apologize for abuses committed during the Spanish conquest. Its war for independence began in 1810 and was led by descendants of Spaniards, or criollos. It is the latest chapter of an ongoing dispute between the two countries which revolves around their shared past.Īfter the conquest, Spain governed Mexico not as a colony like those held by England or France but as a viceroyalty, or separate kingdom and an overseas territory known as New Spain. They lie in a chapel in an ancient hospital – the oldest in the Americas – that he founded and that is not generally accessible to tourists. His remains were re-buried in Mexico City at his own wish. ![]() Pozo, who represents the ruling Socialist Workers Party, said he feared that Cortés' remains, which lie in Mexico, may be desecrated and demanded “his repatriation to the people who saw him born.”Ĭortés was born in Medellín in 1485 and died in 1547, six years after returning to Spain. Valentin Pozo Torres, mayor of Medellín, the village in western Spain’s Extremadura region where Cortés was born, sent a letter to the Mexican ambassador in Madrid expressing his “deep concern” about the “anti-Spanish drift” of the current Mexican government. Five hundred years after Hernán Cortés conquered Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, a Spanish mayor is demanding the return of the conquistador's remains to his birthplace because of what he says are anti-Spanish sentiments in modern-day Mexico.
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