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News > Latin America

Germany Returns Two 3,000-Year-Old Olmec Busts to Mexico

  • The two wooden busts are more than 3,000 years old and belong to the Olmec civilization.

    The two wooden busts are more than 3,000 years old and belong to the Olmec civilization. | Photo: Twitter / @INAHmx

Published 21 March 2018
Opinion

The two pieces were stolen shortly after their excavation from the El Manati archeological site in the 1980s.

After a 10-year trial and international legal efforts, Germany returned two 3,000-year-old Olmec wooden statues to Mexican authorities.

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According to Mexican authorities, the busts were illegally extracted from the El Manati Olmec archeological site, in the east coast state of Veracruz in the 1980s, and were then bought by Costa Rican art collector Leonardo Patterson in the black market, who exhibited them among his collection in Spain in 1997.

The exhibit sparked an investigation as many experts thought some of the pieces were fake while others suspected they had been illegally acquired.

Spanish authorities found out that in fact many of Patteron's pieces had been illegally extracted from their place of origin and sold in the international black market. They offered to return them to their rightful owners, but Patterson moved them to a storage in Munich in 2008.

Once in Germany the pieces didn't last long in hiding, and German authorities seized them along with about 1,000 other pieces the same year. They were transferred and stored at the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection before being returned to Mexico.

Patterson declared his pieces were rightfully acquired from other collectors, but authorities didn't believe him. “All of that stuff, I got it in Europe. I don't traffic pieces," he said.

A witness said in a hearing that Patterson had told him he got the wooden statues from an art dealer, who in turn got them from a tomb raider. Patterson was found guilty of dealing fake and looted art pieces in 2015 by Germany, and was sentenced to house arrest.

But the two busts are not the only pieces Mexico is trying to recover from Patterson. In fact, the Costa Rican art collector has 690 archeological pieces of Mexican origin, and Mexico's Anthropology and History National Institute (INAH) has been involved a legal battle to bring them back home.

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Last year, different media outlets reported that the INAH hadn't been able to recover the pieces because they failed to hand over Germany's authorities a detailed catalog in German of the pieces possessed by Patterson.

But INAH's head of legal affairs, Maria del Socorro Villareal, denied these claims and declared they were a trick by Patterson's legal team.

“This news the lawyer is spreading about Mexico losing the legal battle because we didn't translate the files or didn't register the pieces, is an absolute lie,” said Villareal in 2017, “all the records were sent in German at the corresponding time.”

In 2017 it was finally decided the two wooden busts should be returned to Mexico, but Mexican authorities are still fighting to get the whole collection back.

The two busts date back to approximately 1,200 BCE, Mesoamerica's Pre-Classical period. They were found wrapped and buried along with 13 other pieces. Authorities believe the two busts were stolen shortly after the excavation.

"The recovery is very significant, since Olmec culture represents one of the first civilizations in ancient Mexico and only 13 pieces exist with the same characteristics," Villarreal said.

After a restoration process, the busts will be exhibited at Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology.

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