The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Alicia Bárcena, conditioned this Friday (27) the normalization of relations with Spain – in a diplomatic impasse for not inviting King Felipe VI to the inauguration of the elected president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, next Tuesday (1st) – a “reparation ceremony” will take place.
“In Mexico, when an archaeological ruin was discovered, for example in Petén or Palenque, the communities asked for a reparation ceremony because we were entering their territory, land and culture. That’s what Mexico was asking for,” Bárcena said at a press conference at the United Nations.
Following Sheinbaum’s decision not to invite Felipe VI to his inauguration ceremony on October 2, the Spanish government refused to participate in the event, in a new diplomatic disagreement between the two countries during the administration of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Bárcena stated that “the most important thing” is that “this issue is not recent”, but the result of a letter that the Mexican president sent to the Spanish government in 2019 requesting “a meeting and recognition of the indigenous peoples of Mexico” and that he did not receive response.
“That was somewhat the tone, inviting the king [Felipe VI] and the Spanish authorities to come to Mexico, to sit down and talk”, added Bárcena, who, however, said that, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, she has an “excellent” relationship with the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares.
The next environment minister in Sheinbaum’s government said that she “understands the problem from Spain’s point of view”, whose officials, according to her, she met during the UN’s high-level week, but that both countries have “the solution” and “it needs to be taken forward”.
Bárcena described the relationship between Mexico and Spain as one of “great political and economic dynamism”, after different historical moments in which there were “complaints during the colonial period”, but later the Latin American country “received more than 40 thousand Spaniards during the season of [Francisco] Franco.”
Last Tuesday, the Spanish government sent a “verbal note” (the normal channel of written communication between embassies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) to express its formal complaint about King Felipe VI’s non-invitation.
The Spanish government, which will not participate at any level in the transfer of power ceremony in Mexico, made clear its position in the face of an unprecedented event in the relationship that Spain and the Crown have maintained with the countries of Latin America and in the representation of the monarch in the inauguration ceremonies of the respective presidents of the region.
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