Organized corruption: Stolen religious art is international trade

Published: 2006-03-10

LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- In an airy workshop on a top floor of Lima's Museum of the Nation, art restoration experts touch up plump cherubs on a 450-year-old bas-relief altarpiece. The workshop is the next to last stop on an odyssey that has seen the masterpiece smuggled out of a tiny chapel in the southern highlands of Peru and into the United States, where it was seized from an art dealer in Santa Fe, N.M. Once some minor damage is repaired, the 12-foot-high altarpiece will be displayed briefly at the museum before being returned to the chapel in Challapampa, in the prelature of Juli in the southern highlands known as the Altiplano. The Challapampa case is part of a thriving international trade in stolen art works, particularly colonial religious art from the Andean countries of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. Few pieces are ever recovered, and the countries are losing valuable cultural and religious heritage, including pieces that have never been documented, said Maria Elena Cordoba, administrative manager of Peru's National Institute of Culture.

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