Nearly 17 years after it was stolen from a church in a small town in the state of Hidalgo, an polychrome wooden statue with gold-leaf plating of Santa Rosa de Lima has been repatriated to Mexico by US officials.
In a ceremony on Wednesday (11 December) at the Museo del Templo Mayor in Mexico City, Ken Salazar, the US Ambassador to Mexico, said: “What is stolen must be returned. The history, heritage and greatness of Mexico belong here.” In addition to the three-foot-tall colonial-era statue, six small pre-Hispanic artefacts were also repatriated. They will remain on view in the museum’s lobby for an unspecified duration.
The polychrome Santa Rosa de Lima was stolen from a church in the town of Epazoyucan (around 100km northeast of Mexico City) on the day before New Year’s Eve in 2007. It resurfaced almost a decade later in the US, when it turned up for sale at Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After authorities in Mexico flagged the stolen object to US authorities, the gallery turned it over to agents from the US Department of Homeland Security.
The 17th-century Santa Rosa de Lima statue, along with six small pre-Hispanic artefacts, also recently repatriated, on display at the Museo del Templo Mayor in Mexico City Photo courtesy Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia
At the time, representatives for Peyton Wright Gallery told the Santa Fe New Mexican that the object had been consigned by the former owner of a local art-storage company who found it amidst the unclaimed items when he closed his business. The former owner of the art-storage business told Homeland Security that he had repeatedly tried to contact the person who brought in the object to come retrieve it and pay overdue fees, to no avail. He ultimately consigned it to the gallery in hopes of recovering some of the unpaid storage dues. The circumstances of the statue’s theft and journey across the Mexico-US border are not publicly known.
Why it took more than seven years for the seized sculpture to be repatriated is unclear. The statue also appears to have sustained some damage in that time: the figure of infant Jesus being held by Santa Rosa de Lima appears to have lost his right arm in the interim, though he had both arms in photographs accompanying reports of the sculpture’s seizure in 2017.
As of press time, a spokesperson for Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia had not responded to questions about the statue's ultimate destination and whether it would undergo restoration work.