The Mexican president has asked Spain and the Vatican to apologise for the "invasion" of the Americas five centuries ago.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he wrote a letter to King Felipe VI of Spain and Pope Francis about the "many misdeeds that were committed".
In a video that was filmed at Mayan ruins in the southeastern state of Tabasco and posted on social media, Mr Obrador said: "There were killings, impositions".
He demanded an apology to "the original peoples for the violations of what are now known to be human rights".
In response, Spain rejected the president's request "with all firmness".
"Our sibling peoples have always known how to read our shared past without anger and with a constructive perspective, as free peoples with a common inheritance and an extraordinary projection."
The statement also reinforced Spain's willingness to work closely with Mexico to strengthen relations.
He called for the 500-year anniversary of the conquest of Tenochtitlan - the capital of the Aztec empire on what is now Mexico City - to be a year of "historic reconciliation".
He said: "It is time to say we will reconcile but first let us apologise.
"I am going to as well because after the colonisation there was much repression of the original peoples."