Christie’s sells pre-Columbian pieces from Peru and other countries in the region at a controversial auction in Paris

The controversial auction of pre-Columbian pieces that Christie’s held on Wednesday night in Paris, and which had been criticized by five Latin American countries including Peru, raised 3.062 million euros (US $ 3.5 million), the company reported.

The sale of these masterpieces of pre-Columbian and Taino art from the collection Fiore Arts It included Mayan vessels, various Aztec figures, or everyday utensils.

The star lot of the auction was a 32-centimeter Mayan ax from the Pacific coast, for which 692,000 euros (about US $ 794,000) were paid.

Last Tuesday Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Peru They expressed their collective rejection of the sale of pre-Hispanic cultural goods and invited those who have in their possession this type of works from their countries to return them.

Mexico had previously underlined his “deep concern”For this and another similar auction held on November 2. The country sent a note to the French government to complain and demanded that the presidents of the two auction houses cancel both operations, but their request was not honored.

These Latin American countries consider that these transactions promote “looting, looting, illicit trafficking and laundering of assets perpetrated by transnational organized crime ”.

Christie’s then defended itself, assuring that there is no “no reason“To believe that their property is from an illicit source or that its sale is contrary to French law, since, they assure, they carried out the pertinent controls.

“As custodians of art we have a duty to carefully investigate the objects we handle and sell”, Explained the spokeswoman for Christie’s, which noted that one of the requirements is that sellers provide evidence of ownership.

At the end of October, Unesco organized a ceremony at its headquarters in Paris to mark the return to Guatemala of a fragment of a stela of a Mayan king that had been looted and illegally removed from the country in the 1960s.

The piece came to public light in 2019 during an auction, although the Guatemalan government managed to block its sale. Finally, its owner voluntarily donated the fragment to the Central American country.