Priceless artefacts taken from museum

Press, 28 December 1985, Page 5

Priceless artefacts taken from museum

NZPA-Reuter Mexico City Mexico’s police are watching ports and air terminals throughout the country for 140 priceless relics stolen over Christmas from the capital’s show-piece National Anthropology Museum. Museum officials said that they believed the ancient Aztec and Mayan pieces may be bound for collections abroad and denounced what they said was a growing wave of world art thefts.

“It’s impossible to put a price on these items, 5 ’ the National Anthropology Institute’s director, Enrique Florescano, told a news conference yesterday. “They are irreplaceable.”

The relics were not insured.

The theft was discovered on Christmas morning after the alarm system failed to warn the nine-man night guard of a break-in. All nine were later questioned by agents of the Federal Attorney-General’s Office.

Mr Florescano said that the alarm system had done its job well for the last 20 years and he promised an investigation. Cases housing the exhibits had been prised open or removed altogether. It was not known how the thieves had entered.

“This has been the biggest ever robbery of Mexican heritage and the most im-

portant theft from a Mexican museum. It is part of a wave of robberies which has hit the world’s main museums,” he said.

The stolen pieces, dating from before the Spanish conquest of 1521, were from southern and central Mexico. They included a famed obsidian jar shaped like a monkey and a mask of a Mayan bat-god unearthed in the ancient city of Chichen-Itza. Mexico’s previous most celebrated art theft was in July, 1980, when paintings by Rubens, van Dyck, and Tintoretto were stolen from a museum in the capital.

The Anthropology Museum is in the forefront of attempts to stop the international trade in stolen or illegally-exported art through either bilateral agreements to repatriate native works or accords such as that with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Museums in London, Oxford, the Vatican, Madrid, Dresden, and Uppsala have Mexican relics that were taken out of the country in the last century.

In June the authorities seized 14 parcels of prehistoric fossils they believed were being illegally exported to an address in Italy. No charges were ever made public.