When Empires Apologise: Spain’s Regret and the Long Shadow of the Conquest of Mexico
On November 1, 2025, Spain publicly expressed “regret for the injustices suffered by Mexico’s Indigenous peoples during the Conquest.”
For some, the headline felt overdue. For others, insufficient. But for everyone paying attention to international history, diplomacy, and memory, it marks a rare moment: a former imperial power acknowledging—however cautiously—the violence that made the modern world possible.
The statement didn’t come out of nowhere. It sits at the crossroads of 500 years of colonial legacy, 200 years of nation-state storytelling, and a growing international demand for historical accountability.
So what does it mean when an empire apologises? Is regret enough? And what does this moment reveal about the politics of history, identity, and power today?
The Conquest Was Not Just a “Past Event.” It Built the Modern World
When Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519, the encounter that followed did not only reshape the Aztec Empire, it reshaped the future of global power.
- The conquest led to the deaths of millions through violence, enslavement, and disease.
- It triggered the extraction economy that fueled Spain’s rise and Europe’s later dominance.
- It established racial hierarchies, land dispossession, and institutional inequality still visible today.
- And it ignited a cultural fusion that produced modern Mexico… at a traumatic cost.
History books sometimes flatten this into a “civilizational encounter.” Indigenous communities remember it differently: as loss, erasure, and survival.
That memory has never disappeared. It has lived in language, ritual, oral history, and activism—and now, increasingly, in diplomacy.
Mexico Has Been Asking for Recognition for Years
In 2019, Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador formally asked Spain and the Vatican for an apology for the conquest and forced conversion of Indigenous peoples.
Spain refused, calling the request “anachronistic.”
Six years later, the tone has shifted. Regret isn’t a full apology, but it is movement.
Why now?
- Growing global conversations on colonial reparations (Caribbean, Africa, Australia, Canada).
- The rise of Indigenous political power in Mexico and globally.
- The reputational cost of remaining silent in an age of memory politics.
- A shift in diplomatic culture: states are now expected to respond not only to the present, but to history.
This is international relations not as treaties and territory, but as contested narratives of the past.
What Does an Empire’s “Regret” Actually Mean?
There are three levels of acknowledgment in diplomatic apologies:
| Level | Language | Meaning | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regret | “We acknowledge suffering” | Symbolic distance | Low |
| Apology | “We recognize responsibility” | Moral admission, no legal obligation | Medium |
| Reparation / Restitution | “We must repair what was taken” | Material & legal consequences | High |
Spain is currently at Level 1.
Why not Level 2 or 3?
Because formal apology opens the door to compensation claims, especially when land, heritage, or cultural artifacts are involved.
Which means: the barrier is legal and economic.
Why This Moment Still Matters
Even without legal consequences, symbolic gestures shift the international field in real ways:
They validate the historical memory of victims
They weaken national myths of “glorious conquest”
They set precedent for other former empires (Britain, France, Portugal, the U.S.)
They strengthen Indigenous diplomacy and transnational alliances
They mark a transition from dominance to dialogue
History doesn’t disappear. It either becomes weaponized or reconciled. This moment signals a tentative move toward the second.
Diplomatic Forgiveness Work: The Next Frontier
If transitional justice applies between states and their own people, what happens when history requires reconciliation between states and peoples across centuries?
That potentially emerging field has a name: diplomatic forgiveness work.
It asks questions like:
- Can a state apologize for actions it did not commit but inherited?
- Can a people forgive on behalf of ancestors? Who has that authority?
- What does forgiveness look like when the harm is intergenerational?
- Is reconciliation symbolic, legal, economic — or all three?
- Can there be peace without acknowledgment?
In this framework, Spain’s statement is not the end of a story, but the first step of a negotiation about memory, responsibility, and future coexistence.
What Happens Next?
There are three likely paths:
- Spain upgrades regret into formal apology — if pressure rises and the cost falls.
- Mexico uses this opening to push for material restitution (archives, artifacts, education rights, land claims).
- Other former empire-colonies begin referencing this moment as precedent, especially in Africa and Latin America.
And beneath all of it, this truth:
The international system was built on conquest. The 21st century may be judged by how it confronts that inheritance.
Another interesting aspect of this happening is that the news reports put ‘injustice’ in quotes;
A Note on Language: Why “Injustice” Appears in Quotes
It is worth noticing that several headlines (including the Guardian’s) place the word “injustice” in quotation marks when referring to Spain’s statement. In academic and media writing, quotation marks around a word can serve different rhetorical functions:
- To signal direct citation — meaning the term reflects the speaker’s exact wording (“Spain expresses regret for ‘injustice’…”).
- To create distance — the author subtly indicates that the term is disputed, contested, or not fully owned by the writer.
- To imply irony or doubt — sometimes used when the writer is unsure whether the word is accurate, or wants to highlight its insufficiency (e.g., calling colonization merely an “injustice”).
In this case, the quotation marks likely reflect both (1) direct quoting and (2) the unresolved debate over what word is appropriate: injustice, atrocity, genocide, cultural destruction, original sin, or something beyond language.
That single set of quotation marks quietly reveals the tension:
Spain is acknowledging harm but still controlling the vocabulary of that harm.
Closing Reflection
Some say history should stay in the past.
But the past isn’t buried. It lives in identity, law, wealth, trauma, borders, museums, languages, and maps.
Spain’s “regret” won’t undo colonization.
But it does something quietly world-changing:
It signals that the story can be re-told, not just repeated.
That is the real beginning of accountability.
Not erasing history.
But finally facing it.
Reference:
Jones, S. (2025, 1 noviembre). Spain expresses regret over ‘injustice’ suffered by Mexico’s Indigenous people during conquest. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/01/spain-expresses-regret-over-injustice-suffered-by-mexicos-indigenous-people-during-conquest
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