Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's new president, keeps insisting these days that the king of Spain "has to come to his senses" and ask for forgiveness for the "atrocities" of the Spanish conquest. Of course there were -and the black legend has been in charge of spreading them for 500 years- but this discussion goes beyond what we can read in the chronicles of the time: To what extent are we children responsible for what our parents have done? And should we ask for forgiveness for it? Does Felipe VI have to apologize for all the crimes committed by the Hispanic Monarchy?

In reality, López Obrador and now Sheinbaum are not seeking forgiveness from the King of Spain, but from what he represents: the Spanish nation. That is, the Spanish people. But far from considering the nation as a continuous line that remains incorruptible and immutable, historians understand nations as living beings that change, evolve and can even die. As nations are, according to Renan, a product of history, both Mexico and Spain are the result, among many other things, of the contact between Hernán Cortés and the Mesoamerican Indians. For better and for worse.

The fact that we are the result, on both sides of the Atlantic, of that historical process does not mean that today's Spaniards are responsible for what happened 500 years ago. In the same way that Mexicans today are not the victims either.

Did it make sense for Willy Brandt to kneel in Warsaw in 1970 as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany to apologize for the occupation of Poland? Clearly yes, given that these were crimes committed by many Germans of the same generation as Brandt, although he himself was also a victim of the Nazi regime. The question to ask is when do we as a society stop being responsible for what past generations have done? I don't have an answer to that question, but I think there comes a time when, without forgetting, it is appropriate to remain outside that heritage, and to act in accordance with the present.

Rather than asking for forgiveness, what is needed is to repair the past or essentialist explanations of the past. It is a matter of offering historical discourses that put on the table the lights and shadows of history. All of them. Stefan Zweig asked himself: Is history fair? And he affirmed that it "exalts a few heroes to the point of exaggeration while it leaves the heroes of everyday life, the heroic characters of the second and third ranks, to fall into obscurity". And I believe that the only "justice" we can offer to those Mexicas defeated by Hernán Cortés is the search for historical truth, without letting those second and third rank characters fall into oblivion. And that task, evidently, corresponds to us, not to the king of Spain or to the politicians, but to the researchers. In this sense, Javier de Navascués, Full Professor of Spanish-American Literature at the University of Navarra, has explained these days that "the conquistadors were not officials of the Crown, but armed entrepreneurs". Although they shared the objectives and had the authorization of the Monarchy, these hosts were private companies.

There are many who, in response to this question, have ironically demanded that the Italians apologize to the Spaniards for the Roman conquest. Although I am meeting these months in Rome for a stay, I have to admit that I have not dared to try. In any case, these days I have come across a polemic between Miguel de Unamuno and Sabino Arana in relation to the Roman conquest. From agreement with a recent publication by Professor Jonatan Pérez Mostazo of the University of the Basque Country, Unamuno defended that "the Latins took us out of barbarism, they have civilized us, making the Basques part of the great Latin family". Arana, on the other hand, saw in this statement the beginning of an "eminently destructive campaign to lower and discredit the Basque language". In Navarre, in 1895, before the finding of the Iberian bronze of Larumbe, evidence of the paganism of the ancient Basques, Juan Iturralde y Suit, on the contrary, accused the Romans of "modifying religious ideas" with their "decadent" practices. I suppose that today there are still some Navarrese who would prefer to continue speaking in Basque.

Nothing new, therefore, in the controversy between Spain and Mexico. Asking what we owe to those who "conquered" us and, above all, what those who "conquered" us owe us, are questions that will not disappear from our societies. In the words of Eric Hobsbawn, both human beings and nations are rooted in the past. It would behoove Sheinbaum, however, to pay less attention to those supposed debts she sees in history and put more effort into addressing the crimes of the present. For example, breaking with the lamentable position that her predecessor, Lopez Obrador, has maintained in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and that she has continued by inviting Putin, who most resembles Hitler in the 21st century, as Timothy Garton Ash has written, to her inauguration ceremony.