A total of 4,150 archaeological pieces returned to Peru on Thursday February 8 after they were illicitly trafficked to Argentina.
The valuable goods, which are part of Peru’s cultural heritage, returned after undergoing five legal procedures, in which the Argentine justice issued a sentence in favor of their return.
This is believed to be the largest repatriation of pieces for that reason, and an example of cooperation and harmony of the joint work carried out by the governments of Peru and Argentina against illicit cultural heritage trafficking.
4,136 pieces, many of them quite remarkable, have undergone a judicial process that started in 2000, within the framework of a research conducted by the Airport Security Police, which broke into commercial premises to seize archeological pieces mainly from Peru and Ecuador.
In 2007, the Interpol Department made a new forceful entry to confiscate material of the same typology —about 20,000 pieces were recovered at that time.
The pieces were subject of a brief preliminary report by DR. Luis Guillermo Lumbreras in 2005.
Later, in 2007, a team at the Directorate of Cultural Heritage Defense at the Ministry of Culture conducted a more detailed report.
Based on such identification, the Argentine justice resolved to return the objects that were determined to be part the country’s cultural heritage to Peru.
Peru's Ministry of Culture thanked the cooperation provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of Peru in Argentina to handle the repatriation process successfully.
(END) ECG/RMB/MVB
Published: 2/9/2016