AMLO Apologizes to the Maya People Over Historical Abuses

Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador apologized on Monday to the Indigenous Maya people for all the abuse they endured during the Spanish conquest and the discrimination they have suffered afterward.

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"We offer the most sincere apologies to the Mayan people for the terrible abuses committed by individuals and national and foreign authorities in the conquest, during three centuries of colonial domination and two centuries of an independent Mexico," the president said during an event in Quintana Roo state.

Obrador highlighted the repression against the Mayan people long after the conquest in modern history, as they survived the mass extermination carried out by former president Porfirio Díaz, who ruled for 34 years.

"The Yaquis and the Mayas have been, to the shame of all, the worst treated, the victims of the greatest cruelty. They resisted the extermination that was committed in the Colony, the Independence and with greater brutality in the Porfiriato," the president recalled.

"The dominant ideology of that time held that indigenous people should work as laborers and be handed over like land, water, and forests to businessmen and thus achieve the long-awaited progress of the country," Obrador explained.

The Mexican president, also known as AMLO, is the first head of state to apologize for these crimes, a symbolic act long pursued by the Maya people. However, Obrador had become an activist for Indigenous rights since he started his political career in Tabasco.