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 Vallarta Living | Art Talk | November 2006 
Art Thieves Threaten to Erase Mexico's Past
 Jo Tuckman - The Guardian
| | Heritage agency says 1,000 works have been lost and smuggled abroad since 1999. |
When Father Jorge Villa shut up his workshop for the night in La Compañía Jesuit church in the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, he left with a proud glance at the painting of the Virgin he had meticulously restored. The next morning, July 27, he opened up again to find nothing but an empty frame where the Nuestra Señora del Popolo had been.
"The thieves knew what they were taking," said the priest, who trained as a restorer in Madrid. "It is a particularly fine work."
Despite it being a historic work painted in 1570 on the orders of the Jesuit general Francis Borgia, the theft of the Popolo caused only a minor stir. In the last few years the looting of colonial-era religious art from churches around Mexico has become so common it barely counts as news. The loss of lesser pieces receives no press attention at all.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History, the government agency responsible for looking after Mexico's ancient and colonial heritage, has counted close to 1,000 pieces stolen since 1999. Magdalena Morales, the official in charge of theft prevention, said most were probably smuggled out of the country and sold in the United States, Europe or Japan.
The Institute's efforts to stem the haemorrhage include teaching customs agents to spot pieces of fine art and lobbying for the appointment of a special prosecutor. At the moment some thefts are reported to Interpol, but beyond that there is little investigation.
Since 1972 it has been illegal for any colonial art to leave Mexico, even from private collections. Ms Morales knows of no convictions for stealing or exporting such works, and can recall only a handful of pieces that have been recovered.
The institute says that from early next year pictures and descriptions of stolen pieces will be on the internet so dealers and collectors the world over can see what they should not be buying.
The website is part of a bigger project to register the millions of pieces of art housed in the country's 60,000 churches. It is a herculean task, still far from completion after several years.
"The problem is that there are so, so, so many pieces," said Father José de Jésus Aguilar, who heads the sacred art department in the Mexican bishop's conference. The effort is also hampered by the lack of computers and digital cameras and the deep suspicion with which many priests view the government. For many it is still associated with 19th-century anti-clerical reforms that transferred all church property to the state.
Valery Taylor, the owner of a New York gallery that specialises in Spanish colonial paintings and sculpture, said the database would be enormously helpful to reputable dealers seeking to check the origins of suspicious pieces, but will do little to address the ease with which stolen works are smuggled out of the country. "The Mexicans are corrupt and the United States doesn't care."
It is hard to imagine how some of the stolen works could have been spirited away over borders without being noticed. In 2001 a 2.5 metre, 300kg (8ft, 660lb) 16th-century wooden altarpiece of St Francis of Assisi was stolen from a small town church only a block from the police station. It turned up in a New Mexico gallery, discovered only after a Mexican scholar saw it for sale on the internet for $225,000 (£118,000).
In Oaxaca, Father Villa holds out little hope that a similar stroke of luck will locate the Popolo again. "I think it is gone forever," he said. |
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