Ayuso's Mexico trip exposes the populism behind Spain's conquest narrative

Isabel Díaz Ayuso arrived in Mexico with a script that had worked perfectly well in Madrid theaters and political rallies back home. She came to explain to Mexicans who the Spanish were, and more ambitiously, to help Mexicans understand themselves as the beneficiaries of a conquest that had civilized them and shown them the path of Christian redemption. She brought Hernán Cortés in her briefcase and the theatrical sensibility of Nacho Cano's musical in her luggage. The words flowed with confidence: evangelization, mestizaje, the grand narrative of cultural synthesis. It all made sense from a distance, the way historical complexity tends to when you're watching from a comfortable seat in a theater, where the lighting is forgiving and the music swells at precisely the right moments.

But Mexico is not a theater. In Mexico, Cortés is not a figure you can rehabilitate with proper staging. He is debated in classrooms and dinner table arguments, in presidential morning briefings and street conversations, in monuments and textbooks. The history of conquest is not something Mexicans have filed away—it is something they actively live with, argue about, and refuse to let settle into comfortable mythology. When Ayuso arrived with her paternalistic framework, speaking of evangelization and mestizaje as though these were simple goods to celebrate, she collided with a society that understands these words differently. Mestizaje may describe cultural mixing, but it also carries the weight of inequality baked into that mixing. Evangelization may invoke spiritual teaching, but it arrived with demands for obedience. Ayuso preferred the version without sharp edges, the one where Spain appears as a stern but ultimately well-meaning mother who did everything for the children's own good. Every empire has told itself that story.

What made the trip particularly consequential was not just its tone but its nature. A regional president can travel abroad to promote investment, to pose with business leaders, to recite growth statistics. That is the legitimate work of regional diplomacy. But crossing an ocean to relitigate five centuries of colonial history, to defend conquest as a civilizing force, belongs to a different category of action entirely. It requires a different kind of authority and a different kind of restraint. Ayuso confused the regional government building with a foreign ministry. She brought the temperament of Madrid politics to a relationship between two nations that already carries considerable historical weight and contemporary complexity.

The response came swiftly. Where she had expected applause, she encountered memory. The trip shifted genres entirely. What had been framed as a vindication of Cortés became a narrative of persecution. The focus moved from conquest to boycott, from historical argument to political antagonism. Ayuso cut the visit short and returned to Madrid, where she could reframe the retreat as an act of patriotic resistance. In Madrid, there is always an audience for that kind of story. Grievance travels cheaply. It costs less than prudence.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum did not need much skill to capitalize on what had been handed to her. Mexico has spent years managing the legacy of conquest as an active political matter, sometimes with genuine historical insight, sometimes with a persistence that borders on performative. But Ayuso had delivered something almost too perfect: a Spanish conservative from Madrid, a defender of Cortés, convinced that Mexico was waiting for another lecture on Spain's civilizing greatness. Any textbook on polarization would recognize the setup immediately.

Beneath the spectacle lay something more serious: an institutional disloyalty. When a regional leader travels internationally and speaks as though representing an alternative foreign policy, the damage extends beyond her own agenda. Mexico does not always distinguish between a regional government's misstep and Spain's diplomatic incompetence. The relationship between the two countries is already complicated enough without adding a vanity tour dressed up in the language of viceroyalty.

The incident fits into a larger pattern emerging across the international right. Conquest has become an emotional repertoire. Trump invokes Columbus as a misunderstood founder. Meloni speaks of the West as though polishing a family heirloom. Ayuso contributes the Madrid variant—louder, less solemn, with Nacho Cano as an adjunct professor. The more nostalgia, the less future. What is curious is that they invoke the West while rejecting what the West learned painfully over centuries: doubt, limits, awareness of harm to others. That education took centuries to acquire and still skips class regularly. Ayuso decided to skip it on an official trip.

She returns with a defeat converted into a narrative of conspiracy, exposing herself to have been in danger. There will be radio debates, declarations of solidarity, posters of patriotic grievance, and tearful dinner table speeches about national honor. All of it will serve to obscure a simple fact: Mexico existed before Ayuso, before Cortés, and certainly before conquest needed explaining on the Gran Vía with theatrical smoke.