[CPProt.net] Art thieves looting rural Mexican churches

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Friday, November 25, 2005 
Art thieves looting rural Mexican churches

The Arizona Republic Mexico City Bureau 


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."

The case is part of a disturbing trend, say Mexican officials, as bands of
art thieves loot rural churches across the country and sell their colonial
art to collectors in the United States, Europe and Asia.

In the past five years, about 140 churches have been burglarized in Mexico,
mostly in the rich colonial region of central Mexico, according to the
National Anthropology and History Institute. About 600 pieces of art were
reported stolen in 2004 alone, said Ana Ruigómez, an expert on art theft at
the institute.

Nationwide, reports of burglaries are on the rise, as church members begin
to realize the value of their art and take steps to protect it, she said.
Before, most churches failed to report such thefts.

The losses run in the millions of dollars, although it's hard to know
exactly how much because most churches have never had their art appraised.
Most of the art ends up abroad, usually in the United States or Japan,
Ruigómez said.

Related story:

Theft from church steals more than artwork
 
Mexico isn't the only country with this problem. In 2003, 2,162 thefts from
places of worship were reported to Interpol, with Italy, France, Russia and
Poland the worst-hit countries. But in the Americas, thieves in Mexico lead
the pack raiding parishes, like the one in Huamantla.

To guard against the theft of what many worshippers 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," said Elpidio
Pérez, Huamantla's chief parish priest. "They are exploiting Mexico's
historical riches."

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, 154 church burglaries were 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 such
as 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 the
international intelligence agency Interpol and others are often incomplete.

Though no recent cases of stolen art have been 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. 

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