Claudia Sheinbaum will travel to Barcelona next week for a meeting of a group of progressive governments. This is the first visit by a president of Mexico to Spain since the cooling of diplomatic relations in 2019, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor, sent a letter to Spain in which he demanded responsibility for the abuses with the indigenous peoples during the Conquest. The president will be in Barcelona on April 18, she announced during her daily press conference. Sheinbaum has assured that the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will be there; that of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, that of Uruguay, Yamandú Orsi, and, “obviously”, the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez. This trip takes place in a context of recent rapprochement between both countries, with several diplomatic gestures from both sides of the Atlantic.
Aware of the commotion that her words were going to cause, President Sheimbaun announced that she was going to “give a note,” as they say in Mexico to the news. “I’m going to Barcelona,” he said with a half smile, “on the 18th, next week.” “I’m going to go to a meeting of a group of progressive governments,” he explained. The last visit by an active president of Mexico to Spain was in 2018, when Enrique Peña Nieto concluded his last working tour of Europe in Madrid.
During his visit, King Felipe VI said that “there was a lot of abuse” and “ethical controversies” in the colonization of America by the Spanish conquistadors. It was in an informal conversation with the Mexican ambassador to Spain, Quirino Ordaz, and other authorities. “There are things that, when we study them, we know them, you say: well, in our criteria today, with our values, well obviously they cannot make us feel proud, but we must know them and in their correct context, not with excessive moral presentism, but with an objective and rigorous analysis,” the Monarch is heard in a video released by the Royal House itself.
With this gesture, which was interpreted as a precision maneuver by recognizing the pain of the native peoples without reaching the formal request that Mexico demanded, Felipe VI abandoned an institutional silence on a complex issue in the relations between the two countries. Shortly after, the president publicly invited the King. Although the offer was made on February 3, Sheinbaum did not make it public until after the King’s words.
The origin of the diplomatic disagreement between the two countries was a letter that former President López Obrador sent to Felipe VI in March 2019. In it, López Obrador demanded from the Spanish Crown a gesture of reparation towards the indigenous peoples of Mexico for the events that occurred during the Conquest and the viceregal era. Although the letter was private, the rejection “with all firmness” by the Spanish Executive was public. Since then, diplomatic relations were in a hiatus that has been broken in recent months with small gestures from the cultural world, such as the meeting between the Ministers of Culture of both countries for the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico or the Princess of Asturias award to the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico.
The meeting Sheinbaum is attending is called Global Progressive Mobilization and, according to its website, it is “a necessary alternative to conservative and far-right forces” and “aims to make progressive solutions visible and credible, demonstrating that they are the key to the prosperity of humanity.” There will be 116 speakers from more than 40 countries, including current and retired top politicians, activists and academics.
