[DAWN] The 500-year-old wounds of the Spanish conquest were ripped open afresh on Monday when Mexico's president urged Spain and the Vatican to apologise for their "abuses" ‐ a request Madrid said it "firmly rejects."Spain's centuries of dominance in the New World, backed by the Catholic Church, leapt from the history books to the headlines when Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called on Spanish King Felipe VI and Pope Francis to apologise for the conquest and the rights violations committed in its aftermath.
"I have sent a letter to the king of Spain and another to the pope, calling for a full account of the abuses and urging them to apologise to the indigenous peoples (of Mexico) for the violations of what we now call their human rights
...which are often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless...
," Lopez Obrador said.
He made the remarks in a video, filmed at the ruins of the indigenous city of Comalcalco and posted on Facebook and Twitter.
"There were massacres and oppression. The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the (indigenous) temples," added the anti-establishment leftist.
"The time has come to reconcile. But let us ask forgiveness first."
Spain's rejection was immediate and blunt.
"The government of Spain deeply regrets that the letter the Mexican president sent to his majesty the king, whose contents we firmly reject, has been made public," it said in a statement.
"The arrival, 500 years ago, of Spaniards to present Mexican territory cannot be judged in the light of contemporary considerations," it said.
"Our two brother nations have always known how to read our shared past without anger and with a constructive perspective."