Spiteful and stupid, the 4T disdains critics who are recognized abroad.
“Stop, oh mortal!” Eduardo Matos Moctezuma ordered me when, guided by him, I went to visit the Templo Mayor museum that had been inaugurated a few days before (October 12, 1987), on the ephemeris of a date that the 4T demonizes.
He led me and explained each sculpture, each container, each carved stone and each structure whose rescue he led after, in an excavation of electrical works (in Guatemala and Argentina streets), the workers discovered the enormous monolith of Coyolxauhqui (the daughter of Coatlicue) that Huitzilopochtli dismembered.
In the semi-darkness of the enclosure where indirect lights allow it to pass through, the researcher who will receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in Oviedo next October, pointed to the showcase that keeps the gold ingot in which vestiges of the pre-Hispanic rings with which it was cast, the only one that is preserved in the world among all the countless that the conquerors molded (as a birote) to be able to accommodate them under their trimmings, and that someone lost (where the SAT offices are today, in front of the Alameda) when he escaped heading to Tlacopan (Tacuba) in the flight of the sad night.
“It’s the yew tree you were asking me about, mortal,” boasted a Matos well aware of the history of the discovery and its rescue by engineer Sergio González Krag (reconstructor of the Tlatelolco Unit after the 1985 earthquake).
The memory of that meeting (we had others on the steps and excavations of the less ancient layers of the Templo Mayor) is refreshed and I am happy because the exceptional Mexican archaeologist and anthropologist –most likely related to one of the historical Moctezuma, Ilhuicamina or Xocoyotzin–, mestizo like me and critical of the ongoing reinvention of national history, has been recognized by the monarchy that refuses to offer the apologies that President López Obrador demands of him for what happened more than 500 years ago (in a territory that was not country and where none of us who inhabit Mexico and Spain today were or were conquered).
In contrast to my delight at Eduardo Matos, the silence of López Obrador for most of the day was deafening, but the Federal Ministry of Culture issued a concise congratulations at night (after the new ambassador to Spain did the same).
It reeked of another official mute because last July, when Enrique Krauze received the III Spanish Orders History Award from King Felipe VI, the government did not say a word.
The measure of quadrotheist pettiness was distilled by the discredited and sectarian Pedro Salmerón (aborted candidate for ambassador who rejected Panama for his history as a sexual harasser): “They chose the one with the Salinist vision of the meeting of two worlds,” he vomited on Facebook.
Day of balloons and confetti: it was also learned that three journalists who hate the 4T are, among ten on the planet, the most followed on Twitter: Carlos Loret de Mola, Joaquín López-Dórica and Carmen Aristégui…
#Pettiness #award #Matos