Amid threats of U.S. military intervention and U.S. Department of Justice indictments of ruling party politicians accused of collusion with drug cartels, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has often spoken of a controversial figure from Mexico’s distant past: Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror of Tenochtitlan, seat of the Aztec empire and site of modern-day Mexico City.
In May she re-litigated the historical depiction of Cortés after a Spanish far-right politician, Isabel Ayuso, traveled to Mexico to attend a Mass celebrating the legacy of the conquistador. While many Mexicans consider Cortés a rapacious historical villain, Hispanophiles, both in Spain and across the Americas, lionize him for bringing Catholicism and Spanish culture to Mesoamerica.
“To those who revive ‘the Conquest’ as salvation, we say: You are destined for defeat,” Ms. Sheinbaum told the nation on Cinco de Mayo, when Mexico celebrates the anniversary of an improbable victory over the French in the 1863 Battle of Puebla. “To those who believe the people are foolish: You are destined for defeat. To those who seek to vindicate Hernán Cortés and his atrocities: You are destined for defeat.”
She has continued the anti-Cortés discourse for weeks afterward, jousting with Ms. Ayuso and unnamed “conservative” political opponents from the bully pulpit of her morning press conferences. They are held daily in the Palacio Nacional, a contemporary government site built on the ruins of the palace of Montezuma, one of the last of the Aztec rulers.
Ms. Ayuso, a Madrid regional governor and head of an organization of political parties in Spanish-speaking countries known as the Foro Madrid, offended Mexican sensibilities from the start of her journey. She spelled the country’s name with a “J”—Méjico—rather than with the customary “X.” She then defended the concept of “mestizaje,” which refers to peoples of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, as an embodied “message of hope and joy” in the Americas, downplaying a narrative of violence and exploitation that typified the Spanish encounter with Mexico’s Indigenous people.
Ms. Ayuso had planned on attending a Mass to commemorate Hernán Cortés at the Metropolitan Cathedral in central Mexico City. But the Archdiocese of Mexico City canceled the event—promoted as a “Celebration of Evangelization and Mestizaje in Mexico: Malinche and Cortés”—amid controversy and protests, saying organizers had failed to complete the necessary permits for filming in the cathedral.
The archdiocese added: “The Eucharist is not a symbolic act to exalt people or historical events.” Church officials have otherwise remained silent on the Cortés controversy, perhaps unwilling to be drawn into a dispute that would inevitably revive attention to the church’s historical role in the “conquest.”
In the end, Ms. Ayuso cut her trip short, claiming to have been disinvited from an event to be held on the Mayan Riviera—a claim denied by the site in question. But she kept fanning the flames upon her return to Spain: “‘Mexico did not exist until the Spanish arrived,” she told members of the media, explaining, “It was another civilization.”
The legacy of Cortés and the Spanish conquest of the Americas have loomed large on both sides of the Atlantic in recent decades, as “decolonial” interpretations of history have cataloged the excesses of early conquistadores.
Indigenous Mexicans have long considered the Spanish conquest an unmitigated disaster, with disease and displacement decimating native populations—though many of the Indigenous nations at odds with the Aztecs, most notably the Tlaxcalans, allied with Cortés in sacking Tenochtitlán. (Tlaxcala State, to the east of Mexico City, later gained a privileged place during the Spanish colonial period, bringing its residents a reputation as Indigenous traitors that persists to this day.)
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, elected president as a left-wing populist in 2018, often spoke of the wickedness of Cortés and the Spanish conquest, while idealizing pre-Hispanic civilizations.
“Mexico was founded more than 10,000 years ago. With all due respect, buffalo were still grazing in what is now New York, and Mexico already had universities and printing presses. This is a country with a great culture,” AMLO, as the former president is often called, said in a 2019 claim that historians dismissed as dubious.
He also wrote a book in 2025, Grandeza, insisting the Méxica—as the Aztecs were known and from whom Mexico gets its name—did not carry out human sacrifices, though historians dispute the president’s historical reinterpretation.
Ms. Sheinbaum, who is of Jewish ancestry but identifies as nonreligious, has embraced the country’s Indigenous traditions. She declared 2025 the Year of Indigenous Women. The image of an Indigenous woman serves as the logo created for the Sheinbaum government. The Mexican president wears blouses and dresses adorned with intricate Indigenous embroidery—drawing rave reviews from the fashion press and from Melania Trump, the first lady of the United States.
The Spanish right and many Hispanophiles, meanwhile, have championed Cortés as a great man of history, who brought Christian civilization to Mesoamerica and founded Mexico. Ms. Ayuso has charged: “Indigenism is the new communism.”
The Spanish right-wing Vox Party celebrated the 500th anniversary of Cortés sacking Tenochtitlán with a post on X in 2021, saying, “Spain succeeded in liberating millions of people from the bloody and terrifying regime of the Aztecs. Proud of our history.”
“Both sides use history to justify identity politics,” said Harim B. Gutiérrez, history professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City. “To gain legitimacy for their cause they have to resort to history to say, on the one hand, ‘We are the legitimate heirs of Cuauhtémoc and Montezuma’—the final Aztec leaders—and on the other hand, ‘We are the heirs of Cortés, those who civilized the Indigenous peoples, the native peoples of America.’”
Waiting for an apology from Spain
Both Mr. López Obrador and Ms. Sheinbaum have demanded that the Spanish crown apologize for the 16th-century conquest of the Méxica. Mr. López Obrador filmed a video three months after taking office at the ruins of the Indigenous city of Comalcalco, where he urged Spain and the Vatican to seek forgiveness for the violations of the Spanish Conquest.
“There were massacres and oppression,” he said then. “The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the [Indigenous] temples.”
“The time has come to reconcile,” he added. “But let [Spain] ask forgiveness first.”
Spain rejected his call and pointed to an 1836 friendship treaty with Spain that recognized the independence Mexico had achieved 15 years earlier. Mr. López Obrador continued pressing the demands of Spain throughout his administration—even symbolically suspending relations with the country. Notably, King Felipe VI of Spain was not invited to Ms. Sheinbaum’s inauguration in October 2024.
Figures affiliated with Ms. Sheinbaum’s ruling party, Morena, have called for Cortés’s remains to be sent to Spain. Legend has it Cortés’s Indigenous translator and mistress, La Malinche, gave birth to the first Mexican, Martin Cortés. La Malinche’s name gave rise to the word malinchista, used as an epithet meaning “traitor.” The Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, meanwhile, described Mexicans as “children of the rape.”
“It’s like I’m reading [a history] textbook when I hear Claudia talk about that,” Diego Petersen Farah, a columnist with the Guadalajara newspaper El Informador, said of the president’s frequent discourse on Indigenous themes.
Analysts also say the anti-Spanish discourse fits with populist politicians’ preference for focusing on the past—even the distant past—to legitimize their political movements in the present.
“All populist movements are nostalgic for the past. They don’t really offer you a vision of the future, but they do tell you there was a glorious past,” said Luis Antonio Espino, a Mexican political communications consultant. “It’s the same in Mexico, only with different characters.”
He explained that as president, Mr. López Obrador weaponized beliefs, “and he incorporate[d] them into his narrative, which is that there was a glorious past that the elites always sought to betray. And the elites were always foreign-influenced; they always wanted Mexico to be different, to be like the United States or like Europe.”
The two Mexican presidents’ anti-Spanish discourse coincided with pressure from the Trump administration on drug interdiction and immigration enforcement, along with threats to take unilateral military action in Mexico against drug cartels.
Mexico has wanted to preserve access to the U.S. market through the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is scheduled for review in July. Analysts believe Mexico will make concessions ahead of the treaty review, like allowing drone flights over Mexican territory, stepping up drug interdiction and bypassing the extradition process to hand over drug cartel bosses to the Department of Justice.
Both Mr. López Obrador and Ms. Sheinbaum have also been careful not to criticize Mr. Trump—even as the U.S. government goes after politicians from their own party indicted on U.S. drug charges, like Rubén Rocha Moya, governor of Sinaloa State.
Ms. Sheinbaum has rebuffed U.S. calls to hand over Mr. Rocha Moya and seven other public officials, including a ruling party senator. (Two officials have surrendered to U.S. authorities.) On May 31, she told a packed Morena rally, without mentioning Mr. Trump by name: “When it becomes accepted that another country can intervene in matters that are the responsibility of Mexicans, we’re no longer talking about cooperation; we’re talking about interference.”
Mr. López Obrador broke his retirement silence on June 3 with a letter calling for a return of “the other Trump” that he got along with during the U.S. president’s first term.
Analysts say attacks on Spain gin up domestic support at a time when Ms. Sheinbaum hesitates to express anti-American sentiments. U.S. products are popular in Mexico, remittances from Mexicans in the United States support communities and households, and manufacturing for the U.S. market keeps the Mexican economy afloat. She has also learned that Spain and Cortés just make safer targets than the mercurial Mr. Trump.
“It’s like a piñata they can hit at a party, and it serves them as a symbol of defending the real people,” Mr. Espino said. “It’s a much cheaper piñata than taking on Trump.”
And an apology from Rome
Mr. López Obrador had also demanded that the Vatican seek forgiveness for its part in the “so-called conquest.” The Vatican did not openly respond to Mr. López Obrador’s original video. His wife, Beatriz Müller, met with Pope Francis at the Vatican in late 2020, where she delivered a letter urging an apology.
Some in the Mexican church grumbled at the request.
Bishop Miguel Ángel Alba Díaz of La Paz countered in a video uploaded to social media that it was the Mexican government that should ask forgiveness “for the laws, for the constitution…that violated the religious liberty of 90 percent of the population…which forced Christians to live clandestinely” and led to the Cristero uprising of the 1920s.
But conflict with the Vatican quieted some as Mr. López Obrador expressed fondness for Pope Francis. Ms. Sheinbaum has also expressed admiration for Pope Francis and read from his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” when criticizing the “neoliberal period” that preceded her party’s arrival in power.
For his part, Pope Francis addressed the church’s role in the colonization of the hemisphere. He said in a 2015 address in Bolivia: “I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”
Pope Leo expanded on his predecessor’s remarks while addressing the Congress of Deputies on his June trip to Spain. “It must be acknowledged that society and the church itself did not always live up to the intuitions that resonated within their own Christian tradition,” he said of Spanish and Catholic actions during the conquest.
King Felipe VI, meanwhile, tried to lower the temperature in March by acknowledging “many abuses” against original peoples while touring a Mexican archaeological exhibition in Madrid.
Ms. Sheinbaum recognized the “gesture,” though she said: “It wasn’t everything we would have liked, but [it’s] an acknowledgment of the excesses and exterminations that occurred during the arrival of the Spanish. So I think we must recognize it and continue to move forward with the dialogue.”
The dialogue will continue later this month when the king visits Mexico—albeit for the World Cup as Spain faces Uruguay on June 26 in Guadalajara.
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