Don’t call us traitors: Cortés’s local allies defend role in toppling Aztec empire

On the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest, people from Mexico's smallest state Tlaxcala say their ancestors were liberators

When people from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala travel to other parts of the country, they are sometimes insulted as traitors by their compatriots.

Tlaxcala is Mexico's smallest state in size, but it played an outsized role in Mexico's early history, not least when indigenous Tlaxcalans allied with Hernan Cortes' tiny band of invaders to bring down the Aztec empire.