• Mexico López Obrador rewrites the history of Tenochtitlán

  • Mexico López Obrador criticizes Spain for not asking forgiveness for the Conquest: "They lacked humility"

The Mexican government has commemorated the 500 years of the Conquest of Mexico with a protest event that renames what happened as '500 years of Indigenous Resistance.' From the Zócalo of Mexico City, the heart of the old Mexican capital of Tenochtitlán, the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has described the Conquest as "a resounding failure" and

has asked forgiveness "from the victims of the military catastrophe caused

by the Spanish occupation of Mesoamerica and the rest of the territory of the current Mexican Republic."

"What civilization can one speak of if the lives of thousands of human beings and the nation are lost, and the empire or the dominant monarchy does not manage to recover the population that existed before the occupation in three centuries?" AMLO asked in half of a square decorated with allegorical motifs to the indigenous past and in front of a 14-meter replica of the Templo Mayor of

Tenochtitlán.

The Mexican president has justified this reasoning in that, while in 1518 there were around 11 million inhabitants in the Mexican territory, in 1605 it was reduced to just over a million, mainly due to diseases such as smallpox.

AMLO has confessed that "it is not easy to carry out an objective analysis of the military occupation and colonization" because there are few "primary sources" of the native peoples, while the Spanish ones "tend to justify the invasion in the name of freedom, faith , racial or civilization superiority ". On

August 13,

1521, the forces led by Hernán Cortés and made up of 1,300 Spanish soldiers and nearly 200,000 natives at odds with the Mexica, completed the conquest of the Aztec capital after 80 days of siege. López Obrador has not hidden that reality, but maintains that "these gestures

should not serve to justify the massacres

carried out by the conquerors, nor does it detract from the cultural wealth of the vanquished."

The Mexican president has insisted that

Hernán Cortés should not see himself "as a demon",

since he was simply "a man of power, a military man, with courage and poise, a soulless military man, and a politician audacious and ambitious of fortune." It recognizes that the Spanish colony contributed positive aspects, such as the construction of palaces, beautiful temples, universities or the arrival of the printing press, but that "all this and more is not enough and less if it is taken into consideration that it was not for the benefit of all ".

Regarding human sacrifices and cannibalism practiced by the Mexica - widely documented by the Spanish conquerors and also denounced by rival native peoples - López Obrador considers that it is, to say the least, exaggerated: "I consider it even offensive and idle in these times to return to the old controversy that the natives of Mesoamerica, and in particular the Mexica, were barbarians, because, among other things, they ate human flesh ". The Mexican government has given transcendental importance to the

historical

review

and commemoration of three key events that have, in 2021, a round anniversary: ​​700 years of the founding of the Mexican capital, 500 of the Conquest and 200 of the Independence of Spain .

In addition to the letter sent to Felipe VI demanding a pardon from the Spanish Crown for the abuses committed during the Conquest, López Obrador has taken advantage of these anniversaries to extract lessons from the past and try to apply them in the present:

"Let's make the commitment not to repeat the horrors,

to put an end to those atrocities and to banish classism, racism, discrimination ". The head of government of the Mexican capital, Claudia Sheinbaum, has indicated that the purpose of these celebrations is to resignify the Conquest and offer another interpretation of what happened, not only from the side of the victors: "the so-called Spanish conquest represented the beginning of the colony, the imposition of a vision, but also the resistance of the peoples ".

As soon as the official event ended, the capital city police had to block access to the historic center of the city to prevent the advance of a

demonstration

called by different indigenous organizations that, in addition to claiming their origins on this anniversary, wanted to access the Zócalo to demand that López Obrador cancel the infrastructure megaprojects that he is promoting - such as the Mayan Train - and that seriously erode his territory.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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