On Friday, Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares inaugurated a sprawling exhibition titled “Half the World: Women in Indigenous Mexico,” with more than 400 works on loan from the Mexican government.

At a press conference at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, one of the exhibition’s four venues, Albares said that the history between Spain and its former colony Mexico “like all human history, has its light and dark sides,” according to a report in El País.

He continued, “There has been pain and injustice toward the indigenous peoples. There was injustice, and it is only right to acknowledge and lament it. That is part of our shared history; we cannot deny or forget it.”

However, Albares, speaking on behalf of Spain, stopped short of offering a full apology for Spain’s three-century colonization of Mexico. That has been a point of contention in the two country’s relations since 2019, when former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wrote a letter to Felipe VI,...