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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | November 2005 
Mexican Churches Trying to Stem Their Losses
 Chris Hawley - Arizona Republic
| | Many are closing doors except to locals, while Mexico builds database of artworks. |
Huamantla, Mexico - It was a still night in June, eight days after the feast day, when someone smashed in the ancient door of St. Anthony of Padua Church.
The latches ripped right out of the worm-eaten wood, opening to a dazzling treasure: a collection of colonial-era paintings that would make a museum curator cry. There was St. Michael, charging through the clouds with the armies of heaven. St. Anthony, demonstrating the miracle of the Eucharist to a crowd of doubters. The Virgin of Guadalupe, appearing in a blaze of light to help convert the New World.
One by one, the thieves sliced the saints from their frames. They took down a crucifix. They stripped the clothes from a statue of St. Anthony.
By dawn, they were gone. Where 22 paintings used to hang, there were only dark spaces on the wall.
"How you could do this to a church, I don't know," said Ángel García Manzola, the church custodian. "But it's getting worse. They're going to rob every parish in Mexico."
About 600 works of art are disappearing every year from Mexico's colonial churches, fueling a huge international black market in stolen Mexican art, the country's National Institute of Anthropology and History says.
To guard against the theft of what many worshipers think of as priceless icons, some Mexican churches are closing their doors to all but local parishioners.
The Mexican government is building an art theft database and is struggling to catalog the estimated 4 million artworks in the country's churches. Lawmakers are demanding harsher punishment for art thieves, and a few parishes are considering putting microchips in their artworks to deter theft.
"People want this old art, and it brings a very good price. They are exploiting Mexico's historical riches," said Elpidio Pérez, Huamantla's chief parish priest.
In Huamantla, a town of 40,000 people 70 miles east of Mexico City, six of the seven main churches have been burglarized in the past decade, along with several chapels in nearby haciendas, or colonial plantation houses, Pérez said.
The thieves' favorite hunting grounds are the central Mexican states of Puebla, Tlaxcala, Mexico and Morelos, officials say. Those states were the heart of Spain's empire in the New World and are thick with basilicas, monasteries and shrines.
In Puebla alone, there were 154 church burglaries reported from 1999 to 2005, with 569 artworks stolen, said Victor Valencia, director of the historical institute's branch in that state.
Many of the burglaries are sophisticated heists, Valencia said. At a former monastery in Huejotzingo, the thieves managed to remove paintings from the top of a 65-foot-high altarpiece.
In a 2001 burglary in Acolman, thieves entered through the window of a 16th-century church and rappelled down the wall to steal 10 paintings.
"With the frequency of the thefts, the quality of the pieces and the methods they use, it seems to me that these are not simple crimes," Valencia said. "These thefts are done upon the orders of someone."
The path of stolen art is difficult to follow. Some pieces go directly abroad, mainly to the United States and Japan, said Ana Ruigómez of the Anthropology and History Institute. Others end up in antique stores and art galleries in Mexico City and border towns, or on Internet auction sites like eBay.
Serious collectors usually demand a "provenance," documents showing the history of the artwork, before buying any piece. They also usually hire researchers to make sure it doesn't appear on any lists of stolen art. But documents are easily forged, and the most-wanted lists maintained by Interpol and other agencies are often incomplete.
Though there have been no recent cases of stolen art discovered in Arizona, collectors and museum officials here say they are constantly on guard for suspicious pieces. Stolen goods can be notoriously difficult to spot because of poor reporting of thefts, they say.
"You're just kind of on your own, being a detective," said Jim Ballinger, director of the Phoenix Art Museum.
In 2000, buyers from the San Diego Museum of Art bought an 18th-century painting called The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden from an art dealer in Mexico City. The museum hired an expert in Latin American art to oversee the purchase and check the painting's provenance.
But it wasn't until two years later that museum researchers detected discrepancies in the provenance while putting together an art catalog. Working with Mexican officials, they discovered the painting had been stolen earlier in 2000 from a church in the town of San Juan Tepemazalco.
To help track down stolen pieces, the National Institute of Anthropology and History is encouraging churches to photograph their artworks and submit them to a new government database. Some parishes in Puebla have considered attaching microchips that set off an alarm when artworks are moved.
A few churches, like the one in Acolman near the popular pyramids of Teotihucán, have closed their doors to outsiders to prevent thefts. Since the 2001 heist, the church is open only for Sunday Mass.
Meanwhile, lawmakers from Puebla state are proposing changes to the Historical Monuments Law that would increase jail time for art theft to 15 years from 10 years, and boost the maximum fine to $2,100 from $5.
But Valencia says church theft may be a symptom of deeper changes in Mexico as the country moves away from its Roman Catholic past.
"What is happening in our society when an individual loses his sense of faith, when he is not just committing a crime against the state, but a crime that goes against his entire ideological environment?" Valencia said.
"As an anthropologist, that's what worries me most."
Reach the reporter at chris.hawley@arizonarepublic.com |
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