Mexico City marks Columbus Day without Columbus statue
MEXICO CITY — Mexicans have never had much affection for Christopher Columbus, and officials were being coy about why his statue was removed from the capital’s main boulevard over the weekend before Monday’s observances of Columbus Day, which saw protests in several Latin American nations.
Unlike in other cities where monuments to the 15th-century explorer have been toppled by protesters, in Mexico City the 19thcentury bronze statue was gently lifted off its pedestal with a crane and taken away for restoration.
But leaders danced around the question of when, or whether, it would return.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said it was just a coincidence it was removed just before the anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. In past years, leftist and indigenous groups have spray-painted the statue on Oct. 12, as well as during many other protests, and had appeared likely to do so again this year.
“As far as I know, they took the statue down to restore it. And, yes, it did coincide with today’s date, but that should not be misinterpreted,” Lopez Obrador said, while acknowledging “it is a date that is very controversial and lends itself to conflicting ideas and political conflicts.”
In Mexico’s western state of Michoacan, a coalition of largely Purepecha communities marked Monday by blocking roads leading into their territories and issued a statement saying that “we were not ‘discovered.’ Our lands were invaded and looted, not discovered.”
Elsewhere, an unauthorized march in support of Chile’ s biggest Indigenous group, the Mapuche, erupted into clashes when police attempted to stop the demonstration.
The Mapuche long resisted the Spanish conquerors, and later the Chilean government, and the march is held annually to bring attention to their plight and reiterate their claims to recover ancestral lands.
In Bolivia, protesters painted a statue of Columbus red to symbolize the blood of Indigenous peoples and also dressed a statue of Queen Elizabeth I in the clothes of an Indigenous Chola woman during demonstrations on what is known there as “Decolonization Day.”
In Mexico, Lopez Obrador, who railed against the conquest, asked Mexicans “not to take their anger out on statues.”
The National Institute of Anthropology and History, which oversees such monuments, said only that “the date for returning the statue will be determined by the Mexico City government” once restoration work is completed. There is one other smaller statue of Columbus in the capital, but it is in a little-visited median strip.
On Monday, the steel barriers protecting the stone base of the monument were already marked with graf f i t i reading “Christopher Columbus, murderer!”, “To the junkyard!” and “We brought him down!”