Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Saturday published an open letter to Pope Francis calling on the Roman Catholic Church to apologize for abuses of indigenous peoples during the conquest of Mexico in the 1500s.
“The Catholic Church, the Spanish monarchy and the Mexican government should make a public apology for the offensive atrocities that indigenous people suffered,” the letter says.
Lopez Obrador asked the pope to make a statement in favor of Miguel Hidalgo, Mexico’s 19th-century independence leader who was once believed to have been excommunicated by the church for his involvement in the uprising.
Photo: AP
However, researchers later said it appeared that Hidalgo had confessed his sins before he was executed and thus was not excommunicated.
“I think it would be an act of humility and at the same time greatness” for the church to reconcile posthumously with Hidalgo, Lopez Obrador said.
He also asked Francis for the temporary return of several ancient indigenous manuscripts held in the Vatican library.
The letter was posted on Lopez Obrador’s Twitter account on Saturday, but was dated Oct. 2.
It was delivered to the pope by Lopez Obrador’s wife, Beatriz Gutierrez Muller, who met with him at the Vatican following a meeting she had on Friday with Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
One of the three codices, or books, requested is the Codex Borgia, an especially colorful screen-fold book spread across dozens of pages that depicts gods and rituals from ancient central Mexico.
It is one of the best-preserved examples of pre-conquest Aztec-style writing that exists, after Catholic authorities in colonial-era Mexico dismissed such codices as the work of the devil and ordered hundreds or even thousands of them burned in the decades following the 1521 conquest.
In the letter, Lopez Obrador asked that the Vatican return the Codex Borgia, two other ancient codices as well as its maps of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan for a one-year loan next year.
The letter comes as Mexico struggles with how to mark the 500th anniversary of the 1519-to-1521 conquest, which resulted in the death of a large part of the country’s pre-Hispanic population.
Last year, Lopez Obrador asked Spain for an apology for the conquest.
Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell said at the time that Spain “will not issue these apologies that have been requested.”
China has possibly committed “genocide” in its treatment of Uighurs and other minority Muslims in its western region of Xinjiang, the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China said in a report on Thursday. The bipartisan commission said that new evidence had last year emerged that “crimes against humanity — and possibly genocide — are occurring” in Xinjiang. It also accused China of harassing Uighurs in the US. China has been widely condemned for setting up complexes in Xinjiang that it describes as “vocational training centers” to stamp out extremism and give people new skills, which others have called concentration camps. The UN says that
A racing pigeon has survived an extraordinary 13,000km Pacific Ocean crossing from the US to find a new home in Australia. Now authorities consider the bird a quarantine risk and plan to kill it. Kevin Celli-Bird yesterday said he discovered that the exhausted bird that arrived in his Melbourne backyard on Dec. 26 last year had disappeared from a race in the US state of Oregon on Oct. 29. Experts suspect the pigeon that Celli-Bird has named Joe — after US president-elect Joe Biden — hitched a ride on a cargo ship to cross the Pacific. Joe’s feat has attracted the attention
The Polish Supreme Court on Friday quashed a lower court’s green light for the extradition of a businessman to China for alleged fraud, a charge he has denied, saying that he is being targeted for supporting Falun Gong. Polish authorities took Chinese-born Swedish citizen Li Zhihui, now 53, into custody in 2019 on an international warrant issued by China for alleged non-payment in a business deal, Krzysztof Kitajgrodzki, his Polish lawyer, told reporters. Following the Supreme Court ruling, the case would return to a lower appellate court for review. Kitajgrodzki told reporters that it was still not a given that his client
DELIVERING HOPE: The Japanese PM pledged to push ahead with plans to stage the Games, despite polls showing about 80% think they will not or should not happen Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga yesterday vowed to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control and hold the already postponed Olympic Games this summer with ample protection. In a speech opening a new session of parliament, Suga said that his government would revise laws to make disease prevention measures enforceable with penalties and compensation. Early in the pandemic, Japan was able to keep its caseload manageable with nonbinding requests for businesses to close or operate with social distancing, and for people to stay at home, but recent weeks have seen several highs in new cases per day, in part blamed on eased attitudes