[MSN] Nothing Is Sacred, as Looters Rob Mexican Churches of Colonial Treasures

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Nothing Is Sacred, as Looters Rob Mexican Churches of Colonial Treasures
By ELISABETH MALKIN
SAN AGUSTÍN ZAPOTLAN, Mexico — Only the new iron grille over the entrance
of the stone country church here suggests that anything is amiss.

One night this summer, thieves forced open a side door, removed an
18th-century painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe from an alcove on the
north side of the transept and sliced the painting out of its frame. They
also made away with 17th-century wooden figures of St. Augustine and St.
John the Baptist, leaving the vestments that had adorned them in a heap on
the floor.

“We were all trusting,” lamented Esteban Cruz, the retired railroad worker
who guards the only set of keys to the church, in this village less than
two hours northeast of Mexico City. “We knew that they had been robbing
the churches. There were rumors that they had stolen in this or that
village. But we just trusted that nobody had ever gotten in here.”

Thefts from churches have become routine here in the colonial heartland of
Mexico, spurred by collectors’ demand, a dwindling number of legitimate
pieces and what appears to be only a remote chance of facing prosecution.

Looters have picked through Latin America’s archaeological sites for
centuries. These church robberies are newer, arising as the taste for
colonial religious art has grown in the international art market. Every
country in the region has experienced thefts, but the scale is larger in
Mexico because of the country’s wealth of colonial art.

Since 1999 about 1,000 colonial pieces have been stolen, according to the
National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, the government
agency that oversees the country’s antiquities and colonial heritage.

“I think that more than half the pieces end up outside Mexico,” said
Magdalena Morales, the institute’s official in charge of its
theft-prevention efforts.

Most of the work is lost forever.

“Cultural patrimony is a nonrenewable resource,” warned Clara Bargellini,
an art historian at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “We are
suffering losses, partly because we still do not have an accurate count of
what exists and where.”

The Mexican government is now setting in motion a vast project to register
the country’s sacred art, hoping to enlist parish priests and local
congregations to photograph, measure and describe objects. Estimated in
the millions, they are tucked away in churches, chapels and former
monasteries. About 600,000 items have been inventoried so far, spread
across a patchwork of earlier registries.

The institute is also preparing its own Web site of stolen art, to counter
claims by dealers and collectors that there was no record of a theft. This
site will be an improvement, cultural officials suggest, over
international data bases that are difficult to navigate and incomplete for
Mexican pieces.

Sometimes there is a break. Last month the San Diego Museum of Art in
California returned an 18th-century painting that had been stolen in 2000
from a church near here. The museum bought the painting, “Expulsion From
the Garden of Eden,” from a Mexico City dealer. Because the work was
unusual and known to experts, when curators began checking its provenance
in 2002, they discovered it had been stolen.

But when there is no record that a piece was ever in a church, there is
little hope of recovery. At the church of Santiago Tepeyahualco, also near
here, a statue of the infant Jesus was plucked from its glass case in
July. The empty case is still there, roped off as a crime scene. But
nobody had ever photographed the figure or even jotted down a brief
description in a notebook.

“The best news I have heard is that Mexico is embarking on a program of
going into the boonies and photographing,” said Marion Oettinger, director
of the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas and an expert on Mexican
colonial art. “Virtually every village in Mexico has works of art. They
are just magnificent.”

In theory, the task of registering items in small parish churches should
be relatively simple, sped by the Internet and digital photography. In
practice, it is more complicated. The separation of church and state has
provoked spasmodic bursts of violence for decades, and left relationships
prickly.

Because historical religious objects in churches, chapels and monasteries
belong to the state, priests who have done their own inventories may be
reluctant to share them with the government.

“The priests ask, ‘How can I do an inventory if they are going to take it
and send it to a museum?’ ” said the Rev. José de Jesús Águilar, director
of the department of sacred art for the Mexican Bishops’ Conference.

Father Águilar estimates that only about 35 percent of parishes are
equipped with the computers, Internet access and digital cameras needed to
download the government’s registry sheet, fill it out and send it back.

The registry is just one step in stopping thefts. Alarm systems might
help, but most local churches and small towns cannot afford them. And when
a few months go by without a robbery, vigilance starts to wane.

“People are sensitive to what they have; they love their objects,” said
Sergio Camarena, who is in charge of the National Institute of
Anthropology and History’s offices in the state of Hidalgo. “But then they
relax.”

In July thieves stole a 16th-century Italian work, “Nuestra Señora del
Popolo,” from the restoration workshop of La Compañía Jesuit church in
Oaxaca. Protesting teachers have been camped out in the city center for
months, and the church had left a door open to allow them to use the
toilets.

The institute has held workshops for Mexican customs agents and federal
police, teaching agents how to recognize suspicious pieces. But Mexico’s
federal attorney general’s office has turned down its requests for a
specialized police force and prosecutors, said Luciano Cedillo, the
institute’s director general.

“The problem of trafficking is one of organizations that are perfectly
structured,” he said, adding that in many cases the art smugglers use “the
routes of the drugs and arms trade to move the pieces.”

Even in cases where it was clear that a piece was smuggled out of Mexico,
there are no known prosecutions on either side of the border. This was the
case with “Expulsion From the Garden of Eden,” although the United States
authorities say they are still investigating. Another such example was the
relief of St. Francis stolen from a chapel in the state of Puebla in 2001,
which turned up in a gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2002.

Dealers say they are tricked by forged papers. But since 1972 Mexico has
forbidden the export of colonial art, even from private collections, with
rare exceptions. So, almost by definition, any such work that leaves
Mexico has been smuggled.

With virtually no legal exports from Mexico, the supply of legitimate
pieces for the international market is shrinking, said Valery Taylor, who
runs a Manhattan gallery that used to specialize in this area. “When you
see a dealer with a nice big stock of Spanish colonial art,” she said,
“you’d better be afraid.”

http://www.nytimes.com/