Why is Mexico Demanding an Apology from Spain?
And how should Spain respond?
Ahead of the 2020 presidential election in the United States, a number of Democratic candidates—such as Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, and others—have brought up the topic of reparations for African Americans.
But this isn’t even the most high-profile demand, made in recent days, for a historical wrong to be made right. For that we must look south of the U.S. border.
In the early 20th century, Mexican President Porfirio Diaz famously pitied his own country for being “so distant from God, and so close to the United States.” Whatever becomes a trend with the gringos, the Mexicans inevitably follow it. If the American left is now focused on addressing the sins of the past, the Mexican left feels a compulsion to do the same. Yet with one key difference.
In the U.S. leftist politicians talk about past injustices mostly out of guilt, and in their mind, it is America itself who must repent for the damage done to its own mistreated minorities. By contrast, in Mexico leftist politicians talk about past injustices mostly out of a sense of victimhood, and in their mind, other countries (never Mexico) must repent for the damage done to Mexico’s own minorities.
Take Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s recent demand that Spain apologize for the Conquest of Mexico in the 16th century.
Spanish nationalists tend to get very defensive about allegations like this; whenever the abuses of Pizarro, Cortes, and other conquistadors are mentioned, they immediately claim that this forms part of the leyenda negra (the black legend), a propaganda campaign orchestrated by the English and the Dutch to dishonor Spain as an imperial rival in the late 16th century. While some of the crimes of the Spanish conquest of the Americas were indeed exaggerated (most notably by Bartolomé de las Casas, whose account was distributed by Dutch and English propagandists), make no mistake: the conquest was undeniably brutal, and no moral defense of some of its most important elements exists.
But who should apologize for it? The conquistadors are all dead, so who should speak on their behalf? López Obrador believes that the contemporary nation of Spain should apologize. But this leaves aside the fact that for the most part, conquistadors were rogue adventurers who mostly disobeyed orders from the government in Spain (which to a limited extent provided judicial protections for natives in the New World), and acted on their own.
A case could be made that the descendants of the conquistadors are in the contemporary nation of Mexico itself and not in contemporary Spain. Contemporary Spaniards are the descendants of people who chose to stay home and not participate in the Conquest, whereas many contemporary Mexicans are the descendants of those Spaniards who left Spain for the Americas. Unlike colonialism in North America, Africa, or Asia, in Latin America the conquerors intermixed with the conquered peoples to a far greater extent. Mexico does not resemble a country like Australia, where the white population almost completely replaced natives. But neither does it resemble a country like Nigeria, where the current population is made up almost entirely of the descendants of the conquered. Mexico lies in the middle of this spectrum, proudly seeing itself as mestizo, a country of mixed race. Mexicans must acknowledge that although they may be descendants of indigenous peoples, they are the true descendants of the Spanish conquistadors.
It is understandable that an impoverished, Maya-speaking, native peasant living in Chiapas would not buy the argument that he is the descendant of some conquistador from the 16th century. But for decades white Mexican politicians and intellectuals who very much look like Spaniards (including López Obrador), who speak only Spanish (perhaps they might also speak English, but never an indigenous Mexican language), and who possess accumulated wealth from colonial times, have tried to dissimulate their privilege by occasionally wearing feathers in public demonstrations, or naming one of their children Cuauhtemoc (the last Aztec emperor), as a way of suggesting they don’t owe anything to oppressed minorities in Mexico, whereas Spain must apologize.
Whether one agrees with American leftists on the topic of reparations, it’s notable that they’re taking collective responsibility as opposed to diverting blame to the British. The (mostly white) politicians propelling reparations into the news cycle are construing themselves as the descendants of the oppressors, rather than counting themselves among the oppressed.
López Obrador could make the case that what is really relevant is not genetic descent per se, but rather, the symbolic gesture of a political entity apologizing for its past crimes. As opposed to Italy, Germany, and a few other European nations, Spain has had continuity as a distinct political entity for more than five centuries. In that sense, even though Mexicans may be the descendants of conquistadors, Mexico is not a continuation of the 16th-century European nation in whose name atrocities were committed during the siege of Tenochtitlan.
There are complications with this argument. Since 1519 (the year Cortes arrived in Yucatan), Spain has undergone massive political transformations (at one point it was united with Portugal; there was a dynastic change; it was for years ruled by French invaders; etc.), so it’s not altogether clear that a continuity of the sort necessary for establishing historical guilt can still be claimed. But for the sake of argument let’s assume that 21st-century Spain is a continuation of 16th-century Spain, not least because they occupy the same territory (an important aspect when defining a nation).
But by that token aren’t Mexicans the descendants of the Aztec empire, then? Indeed, when a Mexican politician names his child Cuauhtemoc, that’s the message they’re trying to convey. As soon as Mexicans secured their independence from Spain in 1821, they chose to include, as their national symbol on the flag, the eagle sitting on the cactus while eating the snake. This was the Aztec symbol. The name “Mexico” refers to the Mexica, another designation for the Aztec people.
If Mexico descends from the Aztecs, then perhaps before it demands Spain offer an apology, Mexico itself must apologize. Recall that prior to the arrival of the conquistadors, the Aztecs conquered other peoples in central Mexico, with arguably even more brutality than any of the Spaniards’ deeds. Once in power, Aztecs waged the so-called Flower Wars in order to capture prisoners to be sacrificed to the gods in their pyramids. This was no trivial thing; about 20,000 victims were sacrificed each year in these gruesome rituals.
If Mexicans want to claim they’re neither the descendants of the Aztecs nor of the Spaniards, that still doesn’t get them off the hook. Even after independence, Mexico mistreated its own indigenous people. Since the time of the Mexican Revolution (beginning in 1910), white elites have dominated positions of power and have perpetrated seriously bloody conflicts; invariably, it’s been the native communities that have suffered the most. Yet these elites prefer to blame Cortes or the distant 16th-century Spanish king for many of Mexico’s troubles, thus finding convenient scapegoats in order to avoid their own responsibilities for Mexico’s failures.
Spain, itself, might wonder why it must apologize before other nations ask forgiveness for invading Spain throughout its long history. Should Italy apologize for the Roman conquest of Hispania? Must the Germans ask for forgiveness for the Visigoth invasions of the Iberian Peninsula? What about Morocco for the Muslim conquest? Perhaps Morocco could try to get off the hook by claiming that, although most invaders came from modern-day North Africa, at the time, this conquest was done under orders of the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus. Should therefore Syria put its current humanitarian crisis on hold to issue an apology?
Spain has its own brand of toxic nationalism, and some populists in that country fuss about Gibraltar still being under British control. But for the most part, Spaniards are not fixated on past conquests, and are not in the business of requesting other nations to apologize, even though historically, Spain has been conquered more times than Mexico.
During Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, Spanish children were taught that the conquistadors in the Americas were heroic people, and that they deserve only praise. This is of course preposterous—the Spanish conquest of Mexico was brutal, vile, and unjustified. But to ask contemporary Spain to apologize for the conquest of the Americas is nonsense.
