Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has offered a formal apology to the Maya Indigenous community.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador: “We offer the most sincere apologies to the Mayan people for the terrible abuses committed by national and foreign authorities during the conquest, during the three centuries of colonial domination and two centuries of independent Mexico.”

AMLO was joined by Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei at the ceremony, which was held in the southern state of Quintana Roo. This comes as AMLO continues to support the construction of a massive railway in southern Mexico that would cut through sacred Indigenous land and ancient sites. And in Guatemala, Indigenous land and water defenders continue to be brutalized, criminalized and displaced under Giammattei’s government.