Every October 12th, Spain marks the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492 with what is known as Hispanic Day. But this year the date, which is a national holiday, has an awkward context as Madrid’s relationship with several former colonies is in crisis.
Despite Spain having close cultural and economic ties with Venezuela, Mexico and Argentina, the leaders of all three have taken aim at Madrid in recent months, accusing it, respectively, of insolence, arrogance and corruption and reopening a long-standing debate about colonisation.
This barrage of transatlantic clashes began in May, when the Socialist-led Spanish government became embroiled in a war of words with Argentina’s extreme-right libertarian president Javier Milei.
Transport minister Óscar Puente’s comment that Milei had “taken substances” drew an angry response from the Argentinian, who warned that the Spanish Socialist Party’s policies would bring “poverty and death” to the middle classes and that its immigration policy “has put at risk Spanish women”.
Milei also attacked Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez more directly, calling his wife, Begoña Gómez, “corrupt” because of a contentious legal investigation into her business dealings. Spain withdrew its ambassador in Buenos Aires for consultations.
Meanwhile, Venezuela’s political turmoil has had repercussions in Spain. In September, the Spanish Congress riled Caracas by approving a nonbinding motion calling for opposition politician Edmundo González to be declared president-elect of Venezuela. He ran in last year’s presidential election, which saw the incumbent, left-wing firebrand Nicolás Maduro, claim a widely questioned victory.
The Sánchez government has trodden carefully, refusing to acknowledge Maduro as the election winner but also aware, for example, of Spain’s substantial business interests with Venezuela. However, when defence minister Margarita Robles described Maduro’s administration as a “dictatorship”, there was a fierce backlash, with the Venezuelan foreign minister, Yván Gil, describing the comment as “insolent, meddling and rude”. He also summoned the Spanish ambassador for a reprimand.
But arguably the thorniest quarrel in which Spain has become embroiled has been with Mexico, because it goes beyond personalities and contemporary politics and its scope covers all former Spanish colonies.
[ Mexican snub of Spanish king reopens colonisation disputeOpens in new window ]
In an unprecedented move, the new Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum, did not invite Spain’s King Felipe to her inauguration on October 1st. Her argument was that neither the monarch nor the Spanish government had responded to a demand her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had made in 2019 for an apology for Spain’s human rights violations during the conquest and colonisation of Mexico five centuries ago.
This week, Sheinbaum returned to the issue, describing the conquest as “a violent act”.
“Obviously today’s Spaniards are not the same [as those who carried it out], but what does that mean?” she asked. “Rebuilding the past based on an acknowledgment that there were things that were not okay.”
Within Spain there are also those who feel the country is lagging behind other European nations when it comes to atoning for its imperial history.
The historian Pablo Batalla Cueto noted that Spain was a “normal” country when it came to the savagery of its colonial behaviour, which, he said, included the burning alive of indigenous people in America, using poisonous gas on civilians in the Rif region of Morocco, or “the horrors of the counter-insurgency” in 19th-century Cuba. However, he underlined that the monarchs of the Netherlands and Belgium had apologised for their countries’ brutality, as had France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, while Pope John Paul II had sought forgiveness for the Catholic Church’s use of violence, as the Church of England had for the slave trade.
In great part as a response to the rise of Catalan separatism, the political right is more inclined to celebrate the imperial past than express contrition over it
“But while all this happens, in Spain the situation is that the king doesn’t even reply to a letter in which the Mexican president proposes a solemn act of apology,” Batalla Cueto said.
Sánchez responded to the royal snub by not sending any government representatives to Sheinbaum’s inauguration, but he has been careful not to inflame the dispute any further, especially given the left-of-centre ideological ground he shares with her, and the two countries’ economic links. Yet for now, at least, the government appears unwilling to countenance any kind of apology.
In 2015 there was a gesture by Spain to redress grievances from its past: the conservative government pushed through a law offering nationality to the descendants of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from the country in the 15th century.
However, with Spanish nationalism mushrooming in recent years, in great part as a response to the rise of Catalan separatism, the political right has taken a particularly staunch stance regarding the New World and is more inclined to celebrate the imperial past than express contrition over it.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the conservative-populist president of the Madrid region, has said that Spain brought “civilisation and freedom to the American continent”. Santiago Abascal, leader of the country’s third-largest parliamentary force, the far-right Vox, said: “Spain will never apologise for its historic civilising achievement”.
As this year’s Hispanic Day approached, the right-wing Catholic Association of Propagandists put up posters across Madrid with a picture of a sword-brandishing Spanish conquistador next to the slogan: “1492: Neither genocides nor slave-traders; they were heroes and saints.”
Spain always carries plenty of historical baggage into October 12th. This year, however, it weighs more heavily than usual.
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