The tantrum formed by the aristocracy and more than a few commoners in Spain is a deplorable spectacle

by Guillermo Alvarado

Various social sectors, politicians and even, unfortunately, supposed academics have joined forces in Spain to defend the monarchy and attack the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, for not inviting King Felipe VI to the inauguration ceremony.

As we know, the incident originated in a letter sent by the current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, to the monarch of the Iberian country, suggesting that he apologize to the indigenous peoples of Mexico for the atrocities committed during the Spanish conquest and colonization.

The monarch did not deign to reply to the letter, but it was somehow leaked to the press, which is unseemly behavior between sovereign nations, and Sheinbaum decided not to invite him to the change of government ceremonies in the Latin American country.

The tantrum formed by the aristocracy and more than a few commoners in Spain is a deplorable spectacle, with attitudes as low as the serious insults uttered by subjects such as a representative of the extremist VOX party or, even worse, by the full member of the Academy of the Spanish Language, Arturo Pérez Reverte, whom, for the sake of elementary education, I will not reproduce here.

Ignoring the simplest lessons of history, these "realists" portray the Spanish crown as the founder of today's "civilization", the evangelizer and pacifier of a "wild and ignorant America" that saw the light of knowledge with the arrival of European armies.

They pretend to ignore the genocide perpetrated in these lands, where in 1492 there were 60 million people, with very advanced cultures such as the Maya or the Inca, and 100 years later only 6 million remained, hiding the fact that their religion, imposed with blood and fire, was responsible for a good part of these deaths, as it was also responsible for tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in Europe during the dark Inquisition.

 We are treated as ignorant when, before the catastrophe of the conquest, there were peoples here who developed complex systems of writing, mathematics and astronomy that Spain never dreamed of, and it was a Spanish religious, the Franciscan Diego de Landa, who, on 12 July 1592, in an act of faith, in the municipality of Maní, in today's Yucatán, burned Mayan documents that, if they had been protected, would have allowed the whole of humanity to progress in civilization.

What kind of faith was that? They forget that the development of Europe, and Spain in particular, was based on the immense riches stolen from this continent, which does not cultivate hatred, as they say today, but demands respect.