Mexico asks Pope to apologise for atrocities during Spanish conquests

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wrote an open letter to Pope Francis on Saturday and called on the Roman Catholic Church to apologise for atrocities on indigenous people of Mexico during the Spanish conquest in 1500s. Spanish conquest of Latin America including Mexico had wiped out indigenous population and religion. Spanish Conquistadors, who were Catholic, equated the local relgion to devil worship and destroyed cultural symbols, book, places of worship etc. There were widespread killings. The local Aztec Empire soon fell.

"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 from the Mexican president states.

In the same letter, Obrador has requested the Vatican to lend some ancient and pre-Hispanic Mexican and colonial-era documents.

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One of the three codicies, 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 codicies 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 requests the Vatican return the Codex Borgia, two other ancient codicies as well as its maps of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan for a one-year loan in 2021.

The Vatican has not yet responded to the request, but its museums and archives have in the past lent out various manuscripts and works of art after similar requests from other countries.

(With inputs from Reuters)