The Mexican government is calling for a Colorado art gallery and auction house to return a selection of cultural items that representatives says were looted from their country.
Alejandra Frausto Guerrero, Mexico’s secretary of culture, demanded in a post on the social media site X on Tuesday that the Artemis Gallery in Louisville “stop the sale of pieces that belong to the cultures of Mexico.”
“There is nothing more immoral than (putting) a price on the heritage of a nation,” Frausto wrote, using the government’s hashtag #MyHeritageIsNotForSale.
Mexico’s first lady, Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, also sounded the alarm over Thursday’s auction, writing in Spanish in a post on X that the pieces were “illegally stolen from our territory.”
Mexican officials flagged 25 pieces of pre-Columbian pottery in the Artemis auction that came from their country, with five of them deemed to be fakes, said Miguel Barradas, consul for protection and legal affairs in Mexico’s Denver consulate. The remaining 20 need to be repatriated to the country, he said.
“The burden of proof rests on the buyers, not on us,” Barradas said in an interview Thursday. “If they cannot prove they have an export certificate, we presume those pieces were looted and illegally trafficked.”
Mexico, like many other countries, has laws on the books concerning the sale of cultural property. Since 1897, no Mexican archaeological heritage can be subject to commercial transactions. The law stipulates that all archeological remains are property of the country, and their exportation is controlled by export certificates.
But, importantly, Mexican legislation carries no legal weight outside the country, meaning international auction houses and private dealers have no legal obligation to capitulate to Mexico’s demands.
“A colonial argument that we don’t like”
Bob Dodge, Artemis’s owner, said the Mexican artifacts come from the estate of a deceased collector who contracted with his company to auction the objects. He would not name this individual.
“I could say,” Dodge told The Denver Post on Thursday. “But I’m not going to.”
He said Mexico has come to him before with these same demands, but without evidence that the objects in question were looted. Dodge said he has never pulled items from auction after a Mexican delegation request and would not be doing so this time around.
“Mexico is attempting to strongarm companies like ours into repatriating goods like these,” he said. “They have no legal standing.”
J.P. Labbat, a former special agent with Homeland Security Investigations who spent years working cultural property cases, said the U.S. government “has learned the hard way” not to pull pieces from auctions based simply on the word of foreign countries.
“If they flag pieces,” Labbat said, “we need evidence before we act.”
Dodge estimates there are 500,000 pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico in American museums and private collections.
“Mexico has such an extensive collection of objects in their museums that if they were to repatriate, they wouldn’t go into a museum or on display. They’d never be seen by an individual again,” he said. “They would go into a storage warehouse and rot in hell.”
Barradas said he hears this justification all the time: That countries in the Global South do not have the capacity, facilities or expertise to properly display cultural artifacts. This language mirrors similar explanations, mainly from Western countries, concerning relics from Southeast Asia, West Africa and across South and Central America.
“That’s a colonial argument that we don’t like,” Barradas said. “We have one of the biggest anthropological museums in the world. We have the capacity, the know-how, to manage all of this.”
Under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico has aggressively pursued cases of cultural patrimony across the globe.
Leaders have vocally objected to auction sales in the U.S. and in Europe over the past five years, using social media to plead their cases for repatriation under the hashtag #MiPatriomonioNoSeVende, or “My Heritage Is Not for Sale.”
Since 2018, Mexico has received more than 13,500 archaeological and historical objects from 15 different countries, including the U.S., Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany, ArtNews reported last year. In May, a delegation from Mexico flew to Colorado to accept the return of a $12 million ancient “earth monster” artifact that had been in the possession of an unnamed collector.
“A byproduct of our business”
The Artemis Gallery, though, does have a history of marketing pieces authorities have determined were looted.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York City, which has a specialized Antiquities Trafficking Unit, executed a search warrant on Artemis in May, taking possession of an ancient Egyptian piece that had been illegally removed from the source country, court documents show.
Investigators said neither Dodge nor Artemis had engaged in any criminal activity. The item was set to be repatriated to Egypt.
The following month, a New York judge ordered Artemis give up two more stolen Egyptian pieces — a $12,000 painted cedar wood coffin cover and a $3,500 slipper coffin lid from 1500 to 1200 BCE, documents show.
The seizures came as part of the Manhattan DA’s criminal investigation into an Egyptian trafficking network.
Dodge said he’s in constant communication with authorities, but that seizures are simply “a byproduct of our business.”
“That is something that happens to every dealer of ancient art,” he said. “Unknowingly, people will come to us with items that have been stolen. We do not have access to those records that show they have been stolen.”
He does worry, he said, about increased attention from law enforcement on cultural property.
“It is one of the biggest challenges of being an antiquity dealer,” Dodge said. “The political climate of collecting antiquities seems to be shifting.”
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