Mexico wants back stolen Cortés papers auctioned in U.S.
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[May 13, 2021]
By Drazen Jorgic and Raúl Cortés Fernández
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - In September, a New
York auction house had a rare treasure up for sale: a five-centuries-old
letter revealing political intrigue involving Hernán Cortés, the famed
leader of the Spanish force that colonized what is modern-day Mexico.
Cortés papers seldom come to market. The 1521 document, offered by Swann
Galleries, was expected to fetch $20,000 to $30,000. That is, until a
plucky group of academics in Mexico and Spain helped thwart the sale.
Searching online catalogues of global auction houses and mining one of
the researchers' personal trove of photos of Spanish colonial documents,
they traced its provenance to the National Archive of Mexico (AGN), the
nation's equivalent of the National Archives in Washington. An image of
that 1521 letter captured by a Mormon genealogy project would play a
supporting role.
What's more, these amateur detectives unearthed nine additional
Cortés-linked papers put on the block from 2017 to 2020 in New York and
Los Angeles by auction houses - including the well-known British firms
Bonhams and Christie's - that are now confirmed to be missing from AGN,
officials at the Mexico City-based archive told Reuters. They said some
of those documents, once bound in weather-beaten books, had been
surgically removed as if with a scalpel.
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"It's scandalous," said one of the gumshoes, María Isabel Grañén Porrúa,
a prominent Mexican cultural figure and a scholar of 16th-century
Spanish colonial books. "We are very worried, not just by this theft,
but also about all the other robberies and looting of national
heritage."
Names of the buyers and sellers of the Cortés documents were never
disclosed publicly by the auction houses. Such anonymity is commonplace
in an industry whose well-heeled patrons prize secrecy.
Swann Galleries, which handled a half-dozen Cortés papers, denied
wrongdoing. London-based Christie's, which put two out for bid, said it
carefully vets the provenance of all items it puts up for auction.
Bonhams, another London firm, auctioned one; it declined to comment. Los
Angeles auction house Nate D. Sanders, which put one Cortés document on
the block, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Cortés flap comes at a time of intensifying scrutiny of the global
antiquities trade. Countries including Mexico are watching auction
houses for potentially pilfered objects. Others are demanding
repatriation of relics displayed in foreign museums.
The researchers' sleuthing has sparked law enforcement investigations in
Mexico as well as in the United States by U.S. Homeland Security
Investigations (HSI), Reuters reporting has revealed.
A spokesperson for HSI declined to comment.
The news organization is also the first to reveal that Mexico's Foreign
Ministry has enlisted the help of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)
in repatriating the 10 missing manuscripts, according to Alejandro
Celorio, the ministry's legal advisor.
"We are already in cooperation with the federal prosecutor in the New
York district," Celorio said.
The DOJ declined to comment.
Separately, Reuters tracked down the Brazilian buyer of one of the
allegedly purloined Cortés manuscripts handled by Swann Galleries who
said he returned it to the auction house.
Manhattan-based Swan Galleries has emerged as a key player in the
unfolding drama. It cancelled its scheduled Sept. 24 auction of the 1521
Cortés letter on Sept. 9, one day after Reuters contacted the firm about
the researchers' allegations.
Swann Galleries said it works diligently to ascertain the provenance of
antiquities it auctions. It keeps extensive records and cooperates fully
with law enforcement, said Alexandra Nelson, Swann Galleries' chief
marketing officer. "Knowingly moving stolen material through an auction
house is just about the silliest thing a person can do," Nelson said.
Robert Wittman, a former special agent who founded the Art Crime Team at
the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), said big auction houses
aren't doing enough to safeguard the world's antiquities.
"They are not in the business of recovering stolen property or
protecting cultural property," Wittman said. "They're in the business of
buying and selling."
Also under scrutiny is the AGN, Latin America's largest archive. Mexican
academics have long warned that the holdings of the cash-strapped
institution are vulnerable to decay and theft.
"We are not ruling out any hypothesis," about how the Cortés papers were
stolen, Marco Palafox, legal counsel for the AGN, told Reuters. "We are
not discounting the possibility that the person responsible for the
thefts of these documents was a manager, a worker or a researcher."
THE AMATEUR SLEUTHS
Key to the discovery of the alleged Cortés heists was a small group of
Mexico-based academics. They included Grañén, the researcher of Spanish
colonial books, and Michel Oudijk, a Dutch philologist at Mexico's
National Autonomous University of Mexico. They also recruited María del
Carmen Martínez, a renowned Cortés scholar at the University of
Valladolid in Spain.
They said their suspicions were first aroused when a handful of
Cortés-signed letters suddenly appeared at auctions in 2017 after three
decades of no public sales.
The mini-boom began in April that year at Swann Galleries, which touted
a 1538 letter from Cortés to his property manager as the first such
document sold publicly since 1984. "Cortés letters are quite scarce on
the market," the auction house said on its website.
The document fetched $32,500, according to the website. The name of the
buyer was not published. But in 2018, the letter was displayed at The
Morgan Library & Museum in New York. The institution said it did not own
the letter and that it was part of an exhibition based on the private
manuscript collection of Brazilian art historian Pedro Corrêa do Lago.
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![](../images/051321pics/news_t57.jpg)
A Hernan Cortes letter, signed "El Marques", to his mines
administrator Pedro de Castilleja is seen in Mexico City, Mexico
July 20, 2010. Archivo General de la Nacion AGN/Courtesy of Maria
del Carmen Martinez/Handout via REUTERS
![](../images/ads/current/centraldirect_lda_SPONSOR_2021.png)
Reuters contacted Corrêa do Lago last month to
inquire about the document.
"I have returned the letter, acquired in good faith, to Swann
Galleries," Corrêa do Lago said in an e-mail. He declined further
comment on what he termed a "very rare and unfortunate occurrence".
Swann Galleries declined to comment on Corrêa do
Lago's remarks.
Bonhams, Christie's and Nate D. Sanders also auctioned one Cortés
document each in 2017, according to the academics and information on
Bonhams and Christie's websites.
Nate D. Sanders did not respond to requests for comment. Bonhams
declined requests for comment.
Christie's said it devotes "considerable resources to investigating
the provenance and authenticity" of auctioned objects and it "does
not comment concerning ongoing investigations."
The researchers said they alerted Mexican antiquities authorities in
2018 and 2019 about their suspicions as fresh Cortés manuscripts
kept appearing at auction, including four in 2019. When two more
surfaced in 2020, with still no action from the government, the
academics launched their own investigation around mid-year.
MORMON CONNECTION
One of the group contacted Martínez, the Spanish scholar, for help.
Not only was Martínez a leading Cortés expert, she had taken
thousands of photographs of AGN manuscripts documenting his colonial
administration during two trips to Mexico City in 2010 and 2014.
The academics quickly compiled a list of nine documents that had
been put up for auction since 2017. A tenth was to be sold by Swann
Galleries on Sept. 24, 2020: a 1521 missive to Cortés from some
allies imploring him to avoid an emissary of the Spanish crown
intent on stripping him of his powers.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2021/May/13/images/ads/current/2021_lda_Businessdirectory.png)
It sounded familiar to Martínez. Poring over her photos, she found a
match. The document shown on Swann Galleries' website was identical
to one she had photographed at AGN years earlier - down to the
penman's swooping cursive and a small triangle-shaped chunk of
parchment missing from the left-hand margin.
In all, Martínez had photographed eight of the 10 manuscripts
allegedly swiped from Mexico's national archive.
"We really shouldn't have situations like this in the 21st century,"
Martínez told Reuters.
The researchers went public with their concerns in early September.
Swann Galleries cancelled its Sept. 24 sale following inquiries from
Reuters.
Palafox, the archive's legal counsel, said AGN didn't contact the
U.S. auction house to stop the sale because it could not quickly
establish - beyond Martínez's photos - that the 1521 manuscript and
others were, in fact, missing from its collection.
AGN houses hundreds of thousands of documents, but only about 40%
have been catalogued, Palafox said. "The other 60% we don't know
what's there," he said.
For help, the archive staff turned to microfilm images recorded at
AGN in 1993 by the Genealogical Society of Utah, an arm of The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The non-profit, now
known as FamilySearch, has photographed archives worldwide to assist
Mormons and others in tracing their ancestry.
Within that microfilm, Palafox said, AGN staff found images of nine
of the 10 manuscripts that had come up for auction; a written
description was found of the 10th. From there, AGN employees
pinpointed where those papers should have been housed in its stacks.
All were missing, Palafox said, some cut cleanly from their
colonial-era bindings.
In October, Palafox said he hosted a video call with U.S.
investigators. He displayed images of the Cortés documents from the
websites of the auction houses alongside those of the 1993
microfilms and researcher Martínez's photos to show the
similarities.
"This was enough to get their attention," Palafox said.
A senior source at Mexico's Foreign Ministry told Reuters that the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. State Department and
one of the federal U.S. Attorney's offices in New York state were
working to retrieve the documents. The State Department said it
could not comment on specific cases, but said the government was
committed to combating the theft and trafficking of cultural
heritage. The other U.S. authorities declined to comment.
Palafox said Mexican federal prosecutors have also launched a probe.
The Mexican Attorney General's office did not respond to requests
for comment.
Wittman, the ex-FBI agent, said U.S. investigators would likely
subpoena the auction houses to identify the sellers and consignors
who handled transport of the documents. The strategy, he said, is to
work down the chain until they reach the suspected thieves in
Mexico.
(Reporting by Drazen Jorgic and Raúl Cortés Fernández in Mexico
City; additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick in Washington; editing
by Marla Dickerson)
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