On October 15, 1940, at 6:30 in the morning, 86 years ago today, at the Santa Eulàlia moat, a firing squad killed President Lluís Companys. On November 8, 1940, three weeks after the assassination of Companys by order of General Franco, the government of the Republic of Mexico sent its heartfelt condolences to his widow, Carme Ballester. This is demonstrated by a letter, hitherto unpublished, which the Associació Memòria i Història de Manresa is publishing this Thursday. In the missive, the secretary of the Mexican legation in Paris, Bernardo Reyes, expressed to her a message of solidarity and recognition:

A year ago, the image illustrating this piece would have been impossible. It is from June 25, when half the world was watching the football World Cup, which was being held, in part, in Mexico. The country's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and Felipe VI appear in it, and it was taken during the Spanish monarch's visit to the National Palace of the Latin American country, in a meeting that was "very cordial," according to the Mexican leader. It represented the culmination of a process of rapprochement between the Spanish crown and Mexico, and left behind years of tensions over the Spanish colonial past after some advances that remain far from the demands that motivated the clash.

The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, once again claims the need for housing opportunities to be guaranteed in Catalonia and throughout the State, after the death this Wednesday of Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old woman who became a symbol of the fight for the right to a home following her eviction in Madrid. During a meeting with BBVA and Mexican businessmen held this Thursday at the Pedralbes Palace in Barcelona, Illa equated the current situation in the housing sector with the impact suffered by the productive sector after the outbreak of COVID-19.

At the desert border between Mexico and Texas, animal smuggling has ceased to be just a livestock offense to become a large-scale threat. The illegal sale of horses, without veterinary controls or quarantines, has opened a gap for the New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax). This carnivorous parasite, which devours the live flesh of animals, puts the livestock economy of the entire geographic area at risk. In this photo essay, we propose a graphic journey between the immensity of the Rio Grande and the routes controlled by Mexican cartels, the lack of inspections turns each clandestine convoy into a dangerous Trojan horse.

Mexican authorities arrested on Thursday the alleged person responsible for the murder of Claudia Tacoronte, a 21-year-old Spanish student who was stabbed on September 12 in the municipality of Cuautla, in the state of Morelos. The detainee is Francisco Javier, known as El Trompas, against whom the Morelos Prosecutor's Office had issued an arrest warrant.

A 21-year-old Spanish student was murdered this Saturday in Mexico. The victim, originally from Gran Canaria, was on a university exchange in the state of Morelos, in the center of the country, and the Prosecutor's Office is investigating the crime as a femicide, according to local authorities.

More than 9,000 kilometers from Barcelona, Bruna Vilamala (Borgonyà, 2002) is looking to make a place for herself in one of Mexico's top teams, Club Amèrica. The Catalan forward was transferred last summer after a season on loan at English side Brighton. “It’s a project that attracts me because it reminds me a lot of Barça a few years ago. It’s very nice when you start to grow, to win…, and here things are being done very well. They bet a lot on us, they give us everything we need, and right now, I think Amèrica is already the best team in Mexico,” explains Bruna after winning the treble (Clausura, Copa de Campeones de la Concacaf, and Mexican League Championship Cup) with the American team.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso has arrived at the month of August more cornered than ever. The controversial trip to Mexico a few months ago, the judicial investigation against her partner, and the management of the serious fires that have affected the Community of Madrid are added to the latest controversy that has shaken her figure. This is the purchase and subsequent hurried sale of a luxury attic in Chamberí with a value of 6.6 million euros — the Community of Madrid published the sale announcement this Friday — surrounded by contradictory statements and unconvincing justifications. Initially, the Madrid government maintained that it had to be converted into a temporary office – even though it is not enabled as such – during the works on the Royal House of Correos, headquarters of the executive. But 24 hours after the information was made public, it hurried to sell the property, claiming that it would be used to rebuild the Western Sierra after the fires.

It was sold as a concentrated vanilla, in liquid form, ideal for adding a few drops to coffee, accompanying some desserts, and even, now that it's summer, for combining with good ice cream. But it wasn't just any vanilla: it came directly from Mexico, the territory where this product originates and from which colonizers exported it to Europe five hundred years ago. It was twelve tons of vanilla making the same journey: leaving Jalisco and traveling on board a maritime container to France, then boarding a truck and being transported to a logistics center in Barcelona, the last stop before the final destination, an isolated farmhouse in Almenar, in El Segrià. But what were twelve tons of Mexican vanilla essence doing on a farm far from everything and with a swimming pool in a Lleida town of 3,000 inhabitants?

Mexico's National Seismological Service registered a magnitude 7.4 earthquake on the Richter scale this Friday in the south of the country with its epicenter 135 kilometers southeast of Ciudad Hidalgo (in the state of Chiapas), near the border with Guatemala. Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, stated in a social media message that no material damage or human casualties have been registered. In contrast, in Guatemala, one person has been hospitalized, and there is material damage.

The new round of the World Cup round of 32 has once again confirmed that France is one of the main candidates to lift the title. Didier Deschamps' team authoritatively defeated Sweden (3-0) and signed another demonstration of offensive potential, with Mbappé as the absolute reference of the squad, well supported by Olise and Barcola. The French imposed their rhythm from start to finish and did not suffer at any moment.

In mid-March, positions between Mexico and Spain and its monarchy had significantly approached, but the trip by the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, last May seemed to have taken some steps backward in the relations between the two countries —Ayuso ignited relations when she praised the conqueror Hernán Cortés—. Early this morning, a meeting between King Felipe VI and the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in Mexico has served to signal that bilateral relations between the two states are on the path to normalization.

The World Cup, the most important and anticipated sporting event of the year, is now entering its final phase. From now on, there is no room for error for the 48 teams that, from Thursday, June 11, are competing with a single objective: to be in the final on Sunday, July 19 (9 p.m.) which will be played at the MetLife Stadium located in New Jersey (near New York).

Isabel Díaz Ayuso further tightens the noose with Mexico. The Madrid president doesn't seem to have had enough of the controversy over her trip to the country, in which she claimed the conqueror Hernán Cortés, and this Thursday she made another statement with a clear provocative intent: 'Mexico did not exist until the Spanish arrived,' she said in the plenary session of the Madrid Assembly. 'It was another civilization,' she added in response to criticism from the PSOE over her stay in Mexico.

The anthropologist and sociologist Roger Bartra Murià (Mexico City, 1942) is an authority in Latin America in the field of social sciences. Son of the poet Agustí Bartra and the writer Anna Murià, he was born and raised on the other side of the Atlantic, far from Catalonia, due to the forced exile of his parents, persecuted by Francoism. Throughout his life, in Mexico, but also in Venezuela, the United States, London, and Paris, he has forged a career as a professor and intellectual, with notable contributions in areas such as exile or the construction of national identity. This week he is in Girona, invited by the Ferrater Mora Chair of the University of Girona (UdG), to give five lectures at the Faculty of Arts and a conference open to the public, on Thursday at the Centre Cultural La Mercè, on exile and travel.

A man shot at tourists visiting the Pyramid of the Moon, in Teotihuacan, a popular tourist and archaeological site on the outskirts of Mexico City, on Monday. The shootings killed a woman of Canadian nationality and left six more people injured, according to local media. After opening fire, the attacker allegedly committed suicide, according to the Security Cabinet.

King Felipe VI's gesture toward Mexico—in which he acknowledged the "abuses" committed during the conquest of the Americas—has had an initial, palpable effect on thawing relations. According to the Royal Household, the monarch has received an invitation from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to attend the World Cup, which her country will host from July 11 to 19. In a letter, Sheinbaum expresses that this sporting event "provides the perfect opportunity to highlight the depth and unique character of the ties between Mexico and Spain, forged by a historical brotherhood." The invitation was welcomed at the Zarzuela Palace "within the framework of the fraternal relationship of friendship between the two countries." At a press conference this Tuesday, Sheinbaum indicated her willingness to accept the monarch's invitation and welcomed his remarks earlier in the week during a conversation with the Mexican ambassador to Spain while visiting the exhibition.Half the world. Women in indigenous Mexico. The Mexican government had been demanding for years an apology to Spainbecause of its colonial past. Although Felipe VI did not apologize, the Mexican president interpreted his words—in which he admitted that there are behaviors that, viewed through the lens of current values, are not something to be "proud of"—as "a gesture of rapprochement" within the framework of a process that "must continue to be worked on."

The US Congress passed two formal resolutions in 2008 (the House of Representatives) and 2009 (the Senate) apologizing to African Americans for slavery and racial segregation. In 2022, Belgium also apologized in the Congo for colonial abuses. Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom have also made similar gestures. In contrast, in Spain, every step in that direction infuriates the right wing. This is precisely what happened after King Felipe VI said on Monday, at the opening of an exhibition on indigenous women in Mexico, that during colonization there was "much abuse" and "ethical controversies." In response to these words, the leader of the People's Party (PP), Alberto Núñez Feijóo, called it "nonsense" to pass judgment on what happened in the 15th century. And Vox spokesperson Pepa Millán asserted that the colonization of America is "the principal evangelizing and civilizing work in universal history" and that the rights of the "subjects" were always respected. Feijóo's words demonstrate a complete lack of empathy for the peoples of the American continent, where the legacy of colonialism is still visible today. And Millán's are simply false and lack the slightest historical rigor. However, both harbor the outdated vision of Spanish national Catholicism and an undisguised Western supremacism, which considers the indigenous peoples of America to have been culturally inferior and in need of being "civilized" by Europeans.

For several years, Spanish state nationalism breathed a sigh of relief: it had found in Felipe VI a king even more suitable and more devoted to the unyielding principles of Spain's sacred unity than his father, Juan Carlos, who was too frivolous and too fond of money, women, and the high life. More austere and more preparedAs they often repeated (nationalisms always tend to thrive on believing their own lies), Felipe VI ascended to the throne in 2014, precisely as a consequence of a scandal involving skirts, elephants, and money starring his father, and had his baptism of fire—perhaps it would be more accurate to call it that—in 2017, when he delivered an infamous speech criminalizing Catalan independence just after the equally infamous police actions of October 1st. It was, as it has been called countless times, one How scary! pronounced by the head of Spain, which kicked off the judicial and police persecution, and the media and social breakdown of Catalan separatism, which has taken place during the following years (and to which a part of the separatists themselves have collaborated, with idiotic fervor).

The Spanish royal household has posted a video on social media showing and featuring Felipe de Borbón. Recorded standing in a circle with the Mexican ambassador to Madrid, he informally comments that yes, during the Conquest, there were "many abuses" and "controversies." Pope Francis has already apologized to Mexico for the atrocities committed in the name of the Catholic Church during evangelization, not to mention the apologies offered by the King of England to his former colonies. In other words, Spain is very late. So late, in fact, that to turn things around, it must begin with a gentle communication maneuver: in the supposedly informal realm of social media, without the weight of an official statement, much less a retraction of the narrative of October 12th, so as not to disrupt the breakfast of readers of theABC nor to Aznar, who made that clever joke about the name of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador:Andrew, on the part of the Aztecs; Manuel, on the part of the Maya; López, a mixture of Aztecs and Incas, and Obrador"From Santander," celebrated by the claque that listened to her.