Mexico’s president has sent a letter to Spain’s King Felipe VI and Pope Francis urging them to apologise for human rights abuses committed during the conquest of the region 500 years ago.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the indigenous peoples of Mexico had been the victims of massacres.
Speaking in the ruins of an ancient city, he called for a full account of the abuses.
Spain rejected his call and called for a “constructive perspective” instead.
The territory which now makes up Mexico was under Spanish rule for some 300 years before gaining independence in the early 19th Century.
At the time of the conquest, Spain was a fiercely Roman Catholic country and saw as its mission the spread of Christianity to regions such as the Americas.
The man who became Mexico’s first leftist president in seven decades has been pursuing a radical agenda since being sworn in in December, promising to tackle corruption, reduce inequality and lift millions of Mexicans out of poverty.
On Monday, he tweeted a video address from an archaeological site in Comacalco, Tabasco, where he is shown speaking alongside the First Lady, Beatriz Gutierrez.
“I have sent a letter to the Spanish king [Felipe VI] and another letter to the Pope so that the abuses can be acknowledged and an apology can be made to the indigenous peoples for the violations of what we now call human rights,” Mr López Obrador says.
“There were massacres… The so-called conquest was done with the sword and the cross. They raised churches on top of temples.”
“The time has come to reconcile but first they should ask forgiveness,” the president says.
Mexico has the world’s second biggest Roman Catholic population, after Brazil.
Just over a fifth of Mexicans consider themselves to be indigenous but studies suggest many more have some pre-Hispanic ancestry.
When Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited Mexico in January he presented President López Obrador with his grandfather José Obrador’s Spanish birth certificate, from 1893, AFP news agency reports.
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BBC
