S CRATCH MANY a Latin American and you will find, not far below the surface, resentment against Spain and its conquistadors. The resentment is often focused on the tons of gold and silver the Spaniards carried off. More recently it has been directed at their ill treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas.

So Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s new president, who is also a keen amateur historian, was on solid political ground when last month he demanded that Felipe VI, Spain’s current king, and Pope Francis publicly apologise for the conquest. “The offences that the original peoples suffered should be recognised,” he said. “Thousands of people were killed…one culture, one civilisation imposed itself on another.”

He was speaking on the 500th anniversary of Hernán Cortés’s first landing in Mexico, in Tabasco, his beloved home state. As always with AMLO (as Mexicans call him), his tone was soothingly moderate. His intention, he insisted, was to seek a historic reconciliation. He, too, would apologise for the abuse of Amerindians by the independent Mexican republic. He did not dispute the official Mexican myth, carved in a monument in the Square of the Three Cultures in the heart of Mexico City, that the conquest was “the meeting of two cultures” that produced a third, mestizo one. But it was also, he rightly said, “an invasion” involving acts of “subjugation”.

His remarks caused a storm in Spain, partly because a defensive Spanish nationalism has been revived by Catalan separatism and partly because they came in the midst of an election campaign. Josep Borrell, the Socialist foreign minister, said Spain “obviously” was not going to offer an “extemporaneous apology”, just as it would not ask France to say sorry for “what Napoleon’s troops did when they invaded Spain”. Pablo Casado, the leader of the conservative opposition, said that AMLO ’s call was “a real affront to Spain”, which should celebrate its historical role in Mexico “with pride”.

Nevertheless, AMLO ’s demand is a fashionable one. Both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton apologised for their countries’ role in the slave trade. Visiting Bolivia in 2015, Pope Francis himself asked for forgiveness “for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest”.

Yet AMLO ’s call is a mistaken one, for two reasons. First, it begs the question of who should apologise to whom. The peoples in Mexico in 1519 were not the “original” ones but later arrivals. They, too, committed what nowadays would be called crimes against humanity—systematic human sacrifice in the case of the Mexica (Aztecs). And modern Mexico is above all a mestizo nation, of mixed Amerindian and Spanish descent. Having worked with the Chontal Indians of Tabasco, Mr López Obrador can certainly claim to be closer to his country’s indigenous peoples than were many of his predecessors. But as his name betrays, his forebears were mainly Spanish. Rather than today’s Spaniards, “it is AMLO and Mexicans who are descendants of the conquistadors”, wrote José Álvarez Junco, a Spanish historian, in El País, a Madrid newspaper. “Explain to me, please, why I have to apologise for something that my forefathers didn’t do to someone whose forefathers surely did?”

Second, it is one thing to apologise for crimes within memory, another for the distant past. In a critique of the cult of “historical memory” David Rieff, an American writer, points out that psychological evidence shows that the trauma suffered by survivors lasts at most for four generations. Beyond that, history should simply be understood on its own terms and in its temporal context rather than be rewritten by governments or recruited for political purposes.

The record shows that Spain’s colonial empire was not Mr Casado’s spotless creation, but nor was it uniquely bad. Most of the Amerindians who died did so from diseases to which they had no immunity. Shortly after Cortés, Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar, denounced ill-treatment of Amerindians, prompting an anguished debate at the Spanish court. Compared with Britain’s North American empire, which largely exterminated or excluded natives, the Spanish colonial order was “inclusive”, giving Amerindians “at least a limited space of their own”, as J.H. Elliott, a British historian, has noted.