After announcing it two years ago, the president of Mexico offered an apology to the Mayan peoples in the Yucatan peninsula, a symbolic event that no other Mexican president had done. But it is also a politically complex event, because many see in the gesture more political opportunism than a sincere apology. "If [the Mayan rebel leader] Jacinto Pat were alive today, I would be ashamed of this whole act," shouted a young man outside the event, accompanied by a group of protesters, minutes before it began. "Because forgiveness is not being asked from the Mayans, and especially from the young people who have been abandoned."
The protesters' shouts were like a background noise throughout the event at the Caste War Museum, in the municipality of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, a distant voice that those present ignored. “The reconciliation we seek is to understand once and for all that we are one voice: Mexico. The recognition of that voice, of course, involves listening to all voices, ”said the Secretary of the Government, Olga Sánchez Cordero, at one point about the importance of listening to indigenous nations, a somewhat paradoxical phrase when they sounded in the background the screams that were left out.
"Here, due to an imperative of government ethics, but also out of our own conviction, we offer the most sincere apologies to the Mayan people," President Andrés Manuel López Obrador finally said in his speech. He apologized "for the terrible abuses committed by individuals and national and foreign authorities in the conquest during the three centuries of colonial rule, and in two centuries of independent Mexico."
López Obrador, as announced, focused on the Caste War that occurred from 1847 to 1901, when the Mexican nation was already independent, but some rebel groups rose up against creoles who sought to deprive them of their lands or keep them in situations of slavery. A war in which both conservative and liberal governments massacred indigenous peoples, and in which Mayan groups were divided on both sides of the war. In his speech, President López Obrador even cited editorials in the newspaper
El Universal
–one of which he frequently criticizes in his press conferences– by old editorials in which slavery was spoken of as “a necessary evil, since it was a form of Economic progress".
The Mexican president's speech, however, focused on the violence committed by Porfirio Díaz in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "As was done during the recent neoliberal period," said the president, during the Porfiriato the worst colonization laws were passed, and the worst massacres occurred. More than apologizing for all the liberal and conservative governments during the war, López Obrador was in Quintana Roo to apologize for Porfirio Díaz, his enemy in the political history of Mexico.
"We cannot say that the present is like the past, disgraceful, porfirista," said the president.
“Now there are freedoms, they are public, notorious, they are expressed without censorship.
And above all there is a new will to do justice for the people, as in the times of the Mexican revolution.
That is why we are here offering forgiveness and stating that we will never forget the inhabitants of the deep Mexico ”.
The forgiveness event was completely bilingual - all speech was translated into Mayan - and the president was accompanied by both the Secretary of the Interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, and the governors of Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Chiapas, Campeche and Yucatán - governors of the states through which The great megaproject of the presidency in the south, the Mayan Train, which is opposed by several environmentalists and also indigenous Mayan groups, will pass.
Hours before the event, López Obrador visited the Mayan ruins of Chicanná, where "we are supervising the construction of the Mayan Train, there are 1,500 kilometers of railways for this train." He assured that it will be built "taking care of nature, without destroying, without affecting the environment" and that it will promote tourism in the area - in his imagination, the thousands of tourists who travel to Cancun every year will move through the region, but they stay close to the sea of the peninsula.
The presidency of Mexico organized this public apology as part of the 15 events planned this year to commemorate the 500 years since the fall of Tenochtitlán and 200 years since independence. These events of the president also have a diplomatic aspect: in the first, about the first Afro-Mexican president Vicente Guerrero, the presidency invited one of the sons of Martin Luther King; in the second, on the Pact of Iguala, he invited the president of Argentina Alberto Fernández; in the third, on the battle of Champotón, was the president of Bolivia Luis Arce. In this act of forgiveness to the Mayans, the guest was the president of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, who gave a very brief speech in which he celebrated López Obrador's forgiveness and spoke of having overcome, as a region, “slavery, internal wars,and the open confrontations between the peoples ”.
Also among the special guests was Ana Karen Dzib Poot, Mayan representative in Yucatán. "We recognize the humility and sincerity of your Government, as a genuine act, based on good faith," he said, regarding the forgiveness offered. But he also asked him to commit to three initiatives, so that the words "become concrete facts": 1) create a memorial commission for the Mayan people; 2) recognize the leadership of indigenous dignitaries to discuss a Mayan development plan; 3) recognize inalienable rights in the country's constitution for indigenous peoples.
"It is true that we are no longer slaves on the haciendas," wrote the group of Mayan historians Chuunt'aan Maya, from Yucatán, in a letter to the president and published this Monday on social networks.
"But there are many things that continue: they continue to cut down the mountains to plant them with soy, they continue to take away the mountains and cenotes that we have defended and cared for since time immemorial."
The group of signatories says that perhaps this "request for forgiveness could be the opportunity to sit down and talk about what we have been asking you for."
A request that requires more political will than apologizing, and that has not been fulfilled for five centuries: "That our right to self-determination be respected."
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