Two Doofuses Pulled Off One of Mexico's Greatest Art Heists

[TexasTowelie]

It's the subject of Alonso Ruizpalacios's hypnotically beautiful new film, Museo.


Two huge events happened in Mexico City in 1985 that shook the entire country. First, there were the literal shakes: In the early morning of September 19, 1985, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck the greater Mexico City area. The quake was almost 220 miles away from the city, but since it's precariously built on top of an ancient lake bed, around 412 buildings collapsed and the quake caused the deaths of at least 5,000 people. A second earthquake would hit Mexico City the following April with a magnitude of 7.0. The tremors left the whole city exposed.

The second event that rocked Mexico City was confined to just one location, the city's National Museum of Anthropology and History, but the aftershocks of the event extended across the entire globe. On Christmas Eve, while the guards were drunk, thieves took advantage of the museum's faulty alarm system and got away with around 125 Mayan, Aztec, Miztec, and Zapotec artifacts. The country panicked.

Most of the theories around who stole the items involved foreigners, with many suggesting that the CIA or KGB were behind the heist. (In 1972, a Mexican law banned the sale of pre-Columbian objects for private collections. People argued this theft was an example of how foreigners were getting around that law.) "It’s no secret to anybody that pre-Hispanic pieces stolen from different zones of our country leave Mexico daily, to be taken principally to the United States, a country which, lacking its own valuable cultural antecedents robs or buys others," wrote the columnist Joel Hernandez Santiago in the weekly newspaper Punto.

But three and a half years later, federal officials retrieved nearly all of the stolen artifacts and arrested two men who were behind the theft: Carlos Perches Trevino and Ramon Sardina Garcia. Far from KGB operatives, the men were two ordinary guys who "visited the museum more than 50 times, made sketches and plans, then jumped the fence, crawled through an air-conditioning duct and looted seven display cases before dawn on Christmas Day, 1985," according to the New York Times.

Read more: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/11/26/36181812/two-doofuses-pulled-off-one-of-mexicos-greatest-art-heists

[Judi Lynn]

1. This should be an amazing film to see, throughout.

Did not know the history of the art theft. Am glad to have finally heard about it.

Sure hoping the chance comes to catch this one.

Thank you for the information.

[TexasTowelie]

2. You're welcome.

One of the benefits of scouring local media is that I run across stories like this one. I hope you get to see the film since I doubt that it will be shown in my local theater.