The Diplomat
The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, defended this Monday the relationship between Spain and Mexico despite attempts to “pretend a confrontation” between the two countries.
“In Madrid, when Spaniards and Mexicans meet here or in any other corner of the world, joy arises like a spark,” said Ayuso during her participation in the event Mexico and Spain, friends forever, organized by the Neos Foundation to strengthen ties between the two countries. “It is worth asking why they want to take it away from us, who wants to prevent it. In Madrid they do not deceive us, we know who we are,” she added.
“We know we are brothers of the Mexicans and of the other Latin Americans. They have been falsifying our common past for too long and, however, we have always said it: we have to be very proud of everything we have achieved together,” she continued. “The best thing that has happened in recent centuries has undoubtedly been the arrival of the Latin Americans. It is a gift from the past and the present and it is in our hands to receive and enhance that today those who come from Mexico can come to Madrid and all of Spain and feel at home,” she concluded.
At the end of September, the Government of Spain described as “unacceptable” the exclusion of King Felipe VI from the invitation to the inauguration of the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, and announced, through a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that the Government of Spain had decided “not to participate in said inauguration at any level.”
That same day, Claudia Sheinbaum reported in a statement that the King had been excluded from the guest list for not having responded to a letter from the outgoing president, Andrés López Obrador, in which he was urged to apologize for the Spanish conquest.
Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador had several diplomatic clashes with Spain in relation to the memory of the conquest and the colonial period, to the point of proposing, in February 2022, a “pause” in relations between the two countries.
