“Hernán Cortés had separated four hundred men who were going to fight and had them all killed; and Those who remained, women and children, up to three thousand, he had branded with iron as slaves.“. This passage is part of an edict that King Charles I of Spain ordered written in 1548, a text that has now recalled the , so that even the then monarch recognized the “atrocities” of “one of the cruelest invaders.”
This Thursday, during her usual morning conference, Sheinbaum highlighted the “little knowledge of the history of Spain” of the president of the Community of Madrid, in addition to the “little knowledge of the PAN members [el PAN es el partido de la derecha mexicana que ha invitado a la presidenta madrileña] who decide to bring it to vindicate what they think.” “And what do they think?” the Mexican president asked herself to answer: “That, that was characterized by ordering massacres or marking children on the forehead like animals”.
This week, during a several-day tour of Mexico, Ayuso has claimed, as on other occasions, the Conquest and the figure of Hernán Cortés. In an event held with Nacho Cano, the latter went so far as to claim that Mexico must “give Cortés his place, because without him” the country would not exist. “Without Christ there would be no Christianity, without Cortés there would be no Mexico. That’s how it is, whether you like it or not,” he said..
Ayuso has not referred at any time, however, to the facts that the edict of Charles I (Charles V) did reflect. In fact, a few weeks ago the president of the Community of Madrid He even censored the words of the current king of Spain, Felipe VI, after he admitted that “abuses” occurred. during the invasion of what is now Mexico. The regional leader of the PP contradicted him and said that the abuses were committed “by the Aztecs against the natives.” “We of the cross arrived and established a new order and, above all, a way of understanding that life is sacred and that we had to civilize and transfer a different way of living to the new world. It is what I am very proud of and have always claimed,” Ayuso defended.
The president’s tour of Madrid has received criticism not only from the Mexican Government or indigenous groups, but also from the country’s feminist movement. According to reports, the group Las del Aquelarre Feminista have pointed out that it is “particularly worrying that in a country like Mexico, spaces of legitimation are opened for political profiles that have minimized social struggles and promoted ideological alliances with European far-right sectors“.
The feminist group has also referred to the controversy regarding Hernán Cortés and has denounced that “Spanish colonization did not represent a harmonious encounter, but rather the brutal imposition of a system of racial, economic and religious domination whose consequences are still alive. in the inequality, structural racism and exclusion faced by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Latin America.
