Sheinbaum said the famous 19th-century statue of Columbus on the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard would be relocated to a “worthy” place in the city to make way for a monument that would help deliver “social justice” for the historic role played by women in Mexico, particularly those of indigenous origin.

“Of course we recognise Columbus. But there are two visions,” Sheinbaum said, observing that on the one hand, there was the European vision of the “discovery of America” even though civilisations had existed for centuries in Mexico.

“And there’s another vision from here, that in reality a European arrived in America, who made an encounter between two places, and then came the (Spanish) conquest,” she added, speaking at an event in the Mexican capital.

Several statues of the Italian navigator, whose Spanish-funded expeditions from the 1490s onward opened the door to the European conquest of the Americas, have been removed in US cities since the Black Lives Matter protests and the worldwide re-examination of the colonial era and the legacy of slavery.

Sheinbaum is a close ally of leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has sought to cast his government first and foremost as a defender of the poor and indigenous communities, many of which are among the country’s least well-off.