U.S. returns more than 4,000 stolen antiquities to Mexico

MEXICO CITY -- U.S. officials Thursday returned more than 4,000 pieces of stolen and looted pre-Columbian art and artifacts to the Mexican government, the result of 11 investigations. 

The recovery of the items, which include statues, hatchets and pottery, came about in different ways, according to information from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.

In a Montana case, Homeland Security special agents kept tabs on an art dealer who had paid members of the Tarahumara, a tribe in northwestern Mexico, to rob items from ancestral burial caves in Chihuahua’s Copper Canyon area. The idea was to consign the items in a local gallery.

In a 2009 undercover case, agents discovered a Fort Stockton, Texas, resident in possession of 200 artifacts that had gone missing a year earlier from a museum in the Mexican border state of Coahuila.

A couple of copper hatchets were discovered at San Diego International Airport, having arrived from Sweden. At the Chicago Port of Entry, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers happened upon a Nayarit figurine.

These far-flung discoveries will come as no surprise to Mexican officials and others who follow the widespread illicit trade in Mexican cultural artifacts.

Noah Charney, the founding director of the nonprofit Assn. for Research Into Crimes Against Art, or ARCA, noted last year that Mexico had reported more than 2 million art objects stolen between 1997 and 2010, according to figures from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology.

Charney wrote that the yearly average of stolen items in Mexico surpasses the yearly average in Italy -- the country with the most stolen art reported each year in Europe -- by a factor of five.

The comparison, he added, is probably somewhat flawed, since the Italian pieces tend to be more substantial works and Mexican antiquities “may include fragments or very low-value” items. But the problem is serious enough that the Mexican ambassador to France last year asked for UNESCO to consider strengthening its 1970 Convention on Protection of Cultural Property, which set international standards to help prevent the plunder of precious cultural items.

The return of the Mexican items occurred during a “repatriation ceremony” at the Mexican Consulate in the border city of El Paso.

Tensions over border issues have been running particularly high of late after a number of shootings of Mexicans by U.S. Border Patrol agents. In statements Thursday, officials emphasized the healthy partnership between the two countries, at least when it comes to hunting down and returning stolen art.

Homeland Security Investigations Assistant Director Janice Ayala touted the “teamwork and cooperation” between the countries, while Mexican Consul General Jacob Prado thanked U.S. officials for returning items “which are a part of the cultural heritage and the historical memory of the people of Mexico.”

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Israeli Army Radio ban on protest song raises controversy

JERUSALEM — A leading Israeli radio station's decision to ban for broadcast a protest song is stirring controversy and underscoring the sensitive intersection of art, politics and freedom of speech in the country.

"A Matter of Habit," recently released by veteran Israeli musician Izhar Ashdot, describes the slippery slope Israeli soldiers go down, from fear and confusion to complacency, until "killing is a matter of habit."  The lyrics, written by Ashdot's life partner, novelist Alona Kimhi, reportedly were inspired by her tour with Breaking the Silence, an organization of former combat soldiers whose website says it is dedicated to exposing the "reality of everyday life in the occupied territories." 

The song was welcomed by liberals as a protest of Israel's actions in the West Bank but fiercely criticized by others, who defaced Ashdot's official Facebook page last month, with one angry reader referring to Ashdot as a "draft-dodging dog" — though he didn't evade mandatory service.

Army Radio stuck by an advance invitation that Ashdot perform in its studios but expressly vetoed the playing of this song. The station later issued a statement saying there was no room on the military station for a song that "denigrates and denounces those who have sacrificed their lives for the defense of the country."

"I am worried when songs are banned for broadcast in a democratic country," Ashdot told Israeli media, adding he was shocked by the "incitement" against him that the statement encouraged. The decision and statement were issued by Yaron Dekel, a veteran journalist appointed to be the station's military commander in February.

Spanish theater mounts shows -- and a 'carrot rebellion'

BESCANO, Spain -- Theater buffs no longer have to buy tickets for shows staged in this small Spanish village. Instead, they must purchase a rather expensive carrot.

That's the novel admission scheme hit upon by the director of Bescano's municipal theater, Quim Marce. Dismayed by a recent government tax hike on theater-ticket sales, Marce decided to abolish normal tickets and instead sell vouchers for carrots, with "free" admission to the show thrown in.

"We sell one carrot, which costs 13 euros [about $17], which I admit is very expensive for a carrot. But then we give away admission to our shows," Marce, 43, said in an interview Thursday at his theater. "So we end up paying 4% tax on the carrot, rather than 21%, which is the government's new tax rate for theater tickets."

Critics call it tax evasion. The Spanish media call it the Carrot Rebellion, another example of the creative lengths some Spaniards are willing to go to in order to get around austerity measures -- tax hikes and budget cuts -- imposed by the central government in Madrid.

Marce just calls it a way for his little theater to survive in this pretty village of about 4,000 people, in verdant hills about two hours north of Barcelona. With one in four local residents unemployed, even a modest hike in ticket prices might leave his 300-seat theater empty.

"And in this farming region, I naturally thought of carrots," he said.

Classified as a staple, carrots are subject to a 4% tax that was left unchanged when other taxes went up across Spain on Sept. 1. The highest value-added tax (VAT) rate on items like new cars and clothing rose from 18% to 21%, despite a campaign promise by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy not to touch the top VAT rate, and the sales tax on movie and theater tickets soared from 8% to the new 21% rate.

"It seems to me like a great idea, because culture shouldn't be taxed so much," said Pilar Bayé, 45, a civil servant in Bescano who bought two carrots for admission to a show next month. "Culture should be accessible to all the people."

The Bescano theater's new logo features a carrot with the motto "For the Health of Culture," and is printed on posters tacked up on telephone poles throughout the village and on a huge banner hung in front of cornfields at the entrance to town. Carrots cost 13 euros if you buy them online in advance and 15 euros ($19.55) at the door.

Marce said the theater has re-recorded the standard audio announcement that plays before performances begin, warning the audience to turn off mobile phones.

"Now we've added, 'No chomping loudly on your carrots during the show,' " he said.

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Photo: Residents of one Spanish town can purchase culture with their carrots. Credit: Sam Hodgson / Bloomberg

New film takes 'quiet' look at Mexico's drug-war violence

MEXICO CITY -- A new documentary on drug-war violence in Mexico is perhaps most remarkable for what it does not portray.

There are no shootouts, no decapitated bodies hanging from highway overpasses.

Instead, award-winning filmmaker Natalia Almada takes her audience into the quiet, busy world of the Humaya Gardens cemetery in Culiacan, the Sinaloa capital considered the historic center of Mexican drug trafficking.

Here death is relentless. With its garish mausoleums and extravagant crypts, the cemetery is the final resting place for numerous drug cartel capos and their legions of mostly young henchmen.

The film, "El Velador" ("The Night Watchman"), follows Martin, who works the graveyard shift, so to speak, at Humaya Gardens. He arrives at sunset, sits or dozes through the night (it is too dangerous to actually patrol the grounds after dark, he says, because of partying, trigger-happy drug goons) and tidies up in the morning, picking up beer bottles and sweeping before walking off in the yellow daylight.

"I fell in love with him as a character," Almada said, citing Martin's "quiet, stoic presence."

"He asks us to live with him, in the cemetery, at his pace," she said. "He is the clock of the cemetery."

Almada said her goal in making "El Velador" was to offer a "more contemplative" view of the violence that dominates Mexico today, not the sensationalistic portrait too common in the daily media.

"I wanted to humanize it, to put it on a more human scale," she said in a telephone interview from the U.S., where the documentary has been screening this week.

Almada's film is stark and sparse. There is virtually no dialogue. Martin occasionally offers a comment; we hear a single conversation among gravediggers about whether the latest kingpin has really been slain, as authorities claim.

What we do hear are the sounds of daily life amid the dead: a shovel hitting earth, a priest's intonations, a child playing hopscotch on tombs. And, from the radio in Martin's beat-up truck and his wavy black-and-white TV set, we hear the litany of drug-war mayhem as broadcasters read the "nota roja," the crime news. Bodies dumped roadside, young men kidnapped; "Culiacan has become a warzone," the broadcaster says.

And at times it seems the cemetery can barely keep up. In one sequence, the builders are finishing a gravesite even as a body waits in a hearse and a woman is heard wailing for her son; the concrete crypt is drying as mourning wreathes are being gathered.

"It's also the futility of it all," Almada said. The death toll rises and rises. Martin waters the dirt. A widow mops her husband's mausoleum, over and over again.

Almada filmed in Humaya Gardens off and on for several months in 2009-2010.

"El Velador" is a co-production of Altamura Films, Latino Public Broadcasting and American Documentary/POV. It begins airing in the Los Angeles area Friday on PBS affiliates. Check local listings.

You can watch a trailer here, and the film will be streaming on the POV website until the end of the year.

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Video: A trailer from the documentary "El Velador."  Credit: Altamura Films

In Spain, an amusingly botched fresco is now a moneymaker

It was bemoaned as “catastrophic” and “unspeakable,” a botched restoration attempt that transformed a beloved, aging fresco of Jesus Christ into something more closely resembling  an aghast ape.

Now it’s a moneymaker. And Cecilia Gimenez is asking whether she gets a cut.

The elderly woman who took a paintbrush to a church fresco in Spain, transforming the work once known as “Ecce Homo” ("Behold the Man") into what Spanish jokesters dubbed “Ecce Mono” ("Behold the Monkey"), is now exploring her legal rights after the church started charging curious visitors.

The botched restoration has become a tourist draw, bringing in more than 2,000 euros (about $2,600) for the Fundacion Hospital Santi Spiritus in just four days, El Correo reported Wednesday.

Spanish television reported the recently introduced fee for looky-loos at a euro each, money that could be used to restore the fresco with a finer touch or for other charitable purposes. Since the mangled fresco made headlines, shocking and amusing people worldwide, about 30,000 people have flocked to the town of Borja,  while Gimenez is in hiding from the media, reportedly suffering from anxiety. 

A 'Hank Rhon' appears in a museum, and Mexicans mostly shrug

MEXICO CITY -- The art world in this art-obsessed city entertained a minor controversy last week during the official reopening of the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Chapultepec Park.

With President Felipe Calderon presiding at an official ceremony, the museum was reinaugurated with the names of two patrons placed in gold-lettered signs in two refurbished halls.

One hall is now named for Angelica Fuentes, president of Omnilife, a supplements company. The other is named for Carlos Hank Rhon, a banker who sparks polarizing reactions anywhere Mexicans gather to gossip or argue about the state of their country.

Hank Rhon, who recently entered Forbes' wealthiest list, is brother of the scandal-ridden former mayor of Tijuana, Jorge Hank Rhon. Their father is Carlos Hank Gonzalez, former governor of the state of Mexico and a powerful figure in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

La Jornada, the stalwart of leftist newspaper journalism in Mexico, quoted a rebuke from the respected art critic Raquel Tibol, who knew Tamayo and sometimes squabbled with the painter (links in Spanish).

"It is embarrassing that culture and art these days must depend on the money of ricachones" -- fat cats -- "without determining the origin of those accumulations," Tibol said.

There were similar complaints on Twitter.

"Better be the room dedicated to surrealism," one quipped. "At this rate, the new airport will end up being named Joaquin Guzman," after the world's most-wanted drug lord, another huffed.

But the complaining didn't last very long, and for some that crystallizes a cold reality. Private money is increasingly a crucial source of funding for public cultural institutions in Mexico.

'Behold the Monkey'? Amateur art restoration goes awry in Spain

Art experts are trying to salvage a beloved Spanish fresco of Jesus Christ that was disfigured by an amateur restoration that went miserably awry.

Spanish media reported that an elderly woman, upset by the deterioration of the aging 19th century fresco in the Sanctuary of Mercy Church in the town of Borja, decided to fix it.

The unhappy results were perhaps most memorably compared to "a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic" by the BBC. Spanish jokesters have christened the revamped work once known as "Ecce Homo" -– Behold the Man -– as "Ecce Mono" -– Behold the Monkey.

Taking a more sober tone, the Centro de Estudios Borjanos described as "“unspeakable" its first sight of the redone fresco weeks ago, while doing an inventory of religious art in the area. Though the fresco is not believed to be unusually valuable, it was treasured in the town.

The family of the deceased painter, Elias Garcia Martinez, met with the mayor to express their shock and dismay and to explore the possibilities for legal action, the center said on its blog.

Churchgoer Cecilia Gimenez told Spanish television station TVE on Wednesday that the priest knew about her restoration efforts and that she had done nothing in secret, insisting, "Everyone that entered the church saw me painting!"

Though local officials say the would-be restorer had good intentions, they have not ruled out taking action against her for defacing the artwork, El Mundo reported.

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Photo: A series of images shows the damage to the 19th century "Ecce Homo" fresco by artist Elias Garcia Martinez. The picture on the left shows the original work, the one in the middle the pre-renovated fresco and the one on the right the damaged painting. Credit: Centro de Estudios Borjanos

Stalinist tactics on Russian dissent could stumble in Internet era

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny faces charges of embezzlement, accusations of inciting violence in the Caucasus and the threat of having his law license revoked. A female punk rock trio awaits sentencing for appealing to the Virgin Mary to throw President Vladimir Putin out of office. And Putin's allies in parliament recently passed laws punishing demonstrators and branding civil rights groups with overseas supporters "foreign agents."

The crackdown on dissent in recent weeks has Kremlin watchers making comparisons with Josef Stalin's paranoia-driven repressions in the early Soviet era for their power to scare opponents into silent submission.

But the politics of fear may not work so reliably, Russia analysts say, in the age of the Internet and toppled authoritarian regimes across the Middle East. And, the experts say, Putin and his hierarchy may be underestimating the potential for global cultural stars and social media to incite a backlash against their efforts to stifle dissent.

The three feminist rockers fell afoul of Putin's regime when they belted out a "punk prayer" at a Moscow cathedral in February that ended with a heavenly appeal to "throw out Putin." They were charged with hooliganism and inciting religious hatred, prosecuted in what many called a show trial this week and are awaiting an Aug. 17 verdict widely expected to send them to prison for at least three years.

Superstar Madonna, in Russia for a concert tour, showed her solidarity with the jailed rockers by sporting their signature black ski mask at a performance Tuesday and scrawling the group's name across her bare back. Sting, Yoko Ono, Pete Townsend of the Who and Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant also have appealed for the trio's release in a rising outcry against free-speech infringements.

The opposition in Russia may look weak now, but "there's a potential spark out there," said Paul Gregory, a Russian scholar at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

"Putin clearly watched with some trepidation as the 'Arab Spring' unfolded," Gregory said of the swift spread of uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria last year. Just imagine, he said, if something were to happen to one of the twentysomething rockers while in prison, like a suspicious death or suicide.

"I don't want to suggest something like this, but it's the kind of thing that could bring millions of people out on the streets," he said. "The people who can help, believe it or not, are those in the artistic community, like Madonna. The Kremlin is scared to death of her. These artists can't be written off as foreign agents, and they speak to millions and millions of Russians."

Putin's strategy throughout his 12 years in high office has been to cast challenges to his authority as bankrolled by foreign enemies, and it has been successful in portraying him as a strong leader and defender of Russian sovereignty in the provinces, said Andrew Weiss, director of the Rand Center for Russia and Eurasia and a former National Security Council official during the Clinton administration.

But blaming foreigners for the 100,000-strong protest in Moscow after December's tainted parliamentary elections doesn't play as well with the educated, technology-savvy populations of Russia's biggest cities, Weiss said.

The unprecedented eruption of anti-Putin protesters shocked the Kremlin and spurred its Security Council chief, former KGB official Nikolai Patrushev, to call for "reasonable regulation" of the Internet and social media to prevent their use by "criminals and terrorist groups."

"There may be people in the Russian establishment who want to block Facebook and Twitter, but I doubt they could pull it off," Weiss said. He sees a leadership that is out of touch with the wired generation of Russians with no memory of the Soviet era, when the communist government could control movement and access to information.

Laws that criminalize public assembly and the defamation of officials are acceptable to Russian peasants and workers in the provincial rust belt cities, he said. But it remains to be seen how long tactics that were refined decades ago will succeed in stifling dissent, Weiss said.

Navalny, the 36-year-old lawyer whose disjointed political alliance failed to get much traction against Putin's United Russia last year, has reacted to the criminal charges and moves to undermine his credibility with regular postings on the blog of his nonprofit Endowment for Fighting Corruption. The posts have included reports of his discovery this week of listening devices embedded throughout his Moscow apartment.

"They're using a bazooka to shoot at a mouse," Weiss said of the Kremlin's excessive moves against the opposition. "The big question is how effective these steps will be in tamping down what Putin and his top officials should be worried about."

Like the Internet, and Facebook and Twitter.

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Photo: Russian jail matrons escort punk group members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, top, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina into a Moscow court where their trial concluded Wednesday. Credit: Sergei Chirikov / European Pressphoto Agency

Mexico artist Minerva Cuevas is giving away phone calls

MEXICO CITY -- The pay phone is tucked into a colonial-era doorway facing a busy sidewalk downtown. It happens to draw attention only because the phone is bright red. “Free calls,” reads a plain sign taped inside, along with instructions on how to dial any number in Mexico or in the world.

An installation conceived by artist Minerva Cuevas, the phone also features a photograph of a chimpanzee picking up an old rotary phone, like an open invitation. One recent day, this reporter stumbled upon the phone and did what millions of others might do when faced with a free call. I called my mother.

“Hey, mom! I'm calling you for an art piece!”

“Oh, that's great, mi'jo,” she replied, before launching into the latest local gossip.

---

FOR THE RECORD:
Mexican artist: In the July 22 Section A, a photo credit that accompanied an article about a free pay phone installation by Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas identified Tracy Wilkinson as the photographer. The photo was shot by Daniel Hernandez. —

---

Few artists in the world challenge the penny-for-penny profits of global capitalism as bluntly as Mexico City native Cuevas. She puts revolutionary slogans inside mass-produced fortune cookies and hands out bottles of water taped with the word “Egalite” instead of “Evian,” because shouldn't water always be free?

Her free pay phone is a new work produced for an exhibit at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, or Museum of Mexico City. The show, on view until Aug. 5, covers a career defined by Cuevas' knack at turning art into giveaways for ordinary people hustling to make ends meet in a tough city. They are particularly subversive gestures for Mexico, the artist says, a society where the very wealthy and connected usually get all the shortcuts and giveaways they might wish.

Cuevas' Mejor Vida Corp. is perhaps her most well-known conceptual project. This Better Life “corporation” distributed subway tickets inside underground stations, handed out low-price barcodes to sneak onto items in stores, and produced fake student ID cards (for transit and entertainment discounts) by request from strangers.

As might be expected, the public responded approvingly. Mejor Vida Corp. went on to become an icon of contemporary Mexican art in the 1990s.

Spanish baroness says hard times forced her to sell painting

MADRID -- A Spanish heiress' sale of a 19th century masterpiece by the British painter John Constable has sparked a high-society family feud in recession-ridden Madrid.

The 1824 oil painting of an English countryside scene, entitled “The Lock,” has long been displayed in Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, alongside works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso and others. It fetched $35 million at auction Tuesday at Christie's in London, a record for any work by Constable, an English Romantic painter. It now ranks in the top five most expensive British paintings ever sold.

Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, the fifth wife of the late Swiss industrialist who founded the museum, has said she was forced to sell the painting because of lack of “liquidity” in Spain's dismal economy. The unemployment rate tops 24%, and the country has requested a bailout of much as $125 billion from Europe.

“It's very painful for me [to sell the painting], but there was no other way out,” the baroness told the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “I need the money -- I really need it. I have no liquidity. Keeping the collection here is costly to me, and I get nothing in return.”

But the 69-year-old heiress, a former Miss Spain beauty queen who goes by the single moniker “Tita,” is one of the richest women in Spain. She's said to employ 80 servants at four luxury villas and owns a Rolls-Royce and a 175-foot yacht. Both relatives and art aficionados have cast doubt on her claim of hardship.

“She likes to pretend she is a typical Spanish citizen who is struggling just like everyone else, but that could not be further from the truth,” the baroness' stepdaughter, Francesca von Habsburg, told the Mail on Sunday in Britain. “The baroness has shown absolutely no respect for my father and she is simply putting her own financial needs above everything else.”