# A Spanish Politician Defended a Conquistador on a Visit to Mexico. Indigenous Mexico Told Her to Go Home. She Left.

### The ten-day tour collapsed in six, as President Claudia Sheinbaum, Indigenous protesters, and even Mexico's conservative opposition refused to play along with Spain's new colonial nostalgia campaign.

[Kahlil Greene](https://substack.com/@kahlilgreene)

May 11, 2026

Last week, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid and one of the loudest voices in Spain’s conservative Partido Popular, flew into Mexico City for what was supposed to be a triumphant ten-day tour pitching Madrid as a bridge for Mexican investment in Europe. Six days later, she was on a plane home, her schedule shredded, her Platino Awards appearance cancelled, and the president of Mexico publicly declaring that anyone trying to “vindicate Hernán Cortés and his atrocities” was, in her words, “destined for defeat.”

The trip detonated on its first full day. According to EL PAÍS, Ayuso appeared at an event grandly titled “Celebration for the Evangelization and Mestizaje of Mexico,” a tribute to Cortés and Queen Isabella I of Castile held at the Frontón México after religious authorities, sensing the storm coming, pulled the plug on an earlier plan to host it at Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral. From the podium, Ayuso called mestizaje “a message of hope and joy” and warned against “hate speech that divides us.” Outside the cathedral, Indigenous groups gathered to read a statement accusing Cortés of “crimes against humanity.” Inside, the writer Juan Miguel Zunzunegui defended the conquest with the line, as EL PAÍS reported, “I love it when they say ‘genocide…’ so why did we build hospitals?”

Spanish Politician Isabel Ayuso, who praises Conquistadors

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### The European Right’s “Reconquista” Goes on Tour

Ayuso did not arrive in Mexico City by accident, and she did not freestyle the Cortés tribute. She represents a wing of Spanish politics that has spent the last decade rebuilding its identity around what it calls Hispanidad, the notion that Spain’s empire created a grand, unified civilization rather than centuries of racialized violence. Vox, the hard-right party currently squeezing the PP from the right, openly campaigns on “Reconquer Spain” rhetoric, casting migrants, feminists, and the left as new “invaders” of a supposedly pure Catholic nation. Ayuso is not Vox, at least technically, but she has been steadily borrowing its themes and exporting them.

The columnist Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán, writing in EL PAÍS, argued that Ayuso’s slogan, “Evangelization and Mestizaje,” functions less like a historical description and more like shouting “¡Viva España!” Martínez-Bascuñán invokes the late essayist Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, who wrote that when mestizaje emerges inside a relationship of conquest, “the mixture does not express equality, only the social trace of domination.” Ayuso, naturally, was not interested in that conversation. She was selling a brand.

That brand has international distribution. As Martínez-Bascuñán notes, Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has already published her own ode to the “indissoluble bond” between Europe and the Americas as the “essence of the West,” and Donald Trump signed a proclamation last October celebrating Columbus for bringing “the principles of Western civilization” to the hemisphere. Ayuso’s Cortés tribute slotted neatly into that ecosystem.

### Mexico Was Already Having This Argument Without Her

Here is what Ayuso seems to have missed: Mexico has been litigating the meaning of the conquest in public, loudly, for years. In 2019, then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador sent letters to the Spanish crown and the Vatican demanding an apology for “the abuses committed during the conquest” ahead of the 500-year commemorations. Spain’s conservative establishment dismissed it as nonsense. Sheinbaum, AMLO’s successor, has continued the project with less letter-writing and more public confrontation.

So when Ayuso stood at the Frontón México praising mestizaje as joyful fusion, she was not introducing a daring new idea. She was walking into a country with state-level memory projects, ongoing Indigenous campaigns to rename streets and reinterpret monuments, and a sitting president who had already telegraphed exactly how she would respond. The next day, in a Cinco de Mayo speech in Puebla commemorating Mexican resistance to French invasion, Sheinbaum delivered the now-famous lines, as reported by EFE, that those reviving the conquest as “salvation” and those seeking to vindicate Cortés “are destined for defeat.” She did not need to say Ayuso’s name. Everyone heard it.

### Who Drove Ayuso Out?

By Wednesday, Ayuso had quietly wiped her afternoon schedule. By Friday, she was announcing the cancellation of the rest of the tour through a furious press release, claiming Sheinbaum’s government had threatened to shut down the hotel hosting the Platino Awards. The Xcaret resort group, which runs the venue, denied any such threats, though as EL PAÍS reported, the company did acknowledge asking organizers to rescind Ayuso’s invitation after her “unfortunate declarations” to prevent the event from becoming a “political platform.” Even the PAN, Mexico’s conservative party and the PP’s natural ally, declined to officially receive her. The deputy Germán Martínez told EL PAÍS the visit had been “complex,” which is the kind of diplomatic phrasing that means the building is on fire.

### The Era Is Over

For roughly five centuries, European powers could valorize conquistadors without much pushback from the people they conquered. The statues stayed up, the holidays stayed on the calendar, and the textbook chapters stayed sanitized. Ayuso flew into Mexico City expecting that arrangement to hold. It did not. Indigenous protesters showed up at the cathedral, the president used her largest platform of the year to publicly humiliate her, and the conservative opposition she had come to court refused to stand next to her in public.

History, for Gen Z and beyond, is not a museum label anyone is obligated to nod along to. It is a fight over who gets to speak, who gets named, and who, finally, gets told to go home.