By Raul Cortes and Aida Pelaez-Fernandez
MEXICO CITY, March 19 (Reuters) - Mexico has invited Spain's King Felipe VI to attend the World Cup opening match, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Thursday, marking a thawing in relations after she did not invite him to her inauguration ceremony.
Mexico's government representative for the 2026 FIFA World Cup Gabriela Cuevas sent invitations to all the countries with which Mexico has diplomatic relations, and among those invited was Felipe VI, Sheinbaum told a daily press conference.
Sheinbaum did not invite Felipe VI to her 2024 inauguration after the monarch declined to apologize for colonial-era abuses.
In the 16th to 18th centuries, Spain ruled one of the world's largest ever empires, spanning five continents, including much of Latin America, where it practiced forced labor, land expropriation and violence against Indigenous peoples.
Felipe VI unexpectedly acknowledged abuses in his country's colonial past on Monday.
The king's comments followed a speech by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Munich last month, in which Rubio criticized a decline of "great Western empires" and said Washington did not want allies "shackled by guilt and shame."
Sheinbaum said on Tuesday the latest comments were a conciliatory gesture on the king's part, but "it wasn't everything we would have wanted."
Mexico will play South Africa in the World Cup's opening match, which is scheduled for June 11 in Azteca Stadium - where Pele dazzled with Brazil in 1970 and Maradona's "hand of God" propelled Argentina to glory in 1986.
(Reporting by Raul Cortes and Aida Pelaez-Fernandez; Editing by Sarah Morland, Kylie Madry, Rod Nickel)
