Displaying items by tag: immigration and customs enforcement

The closest comparison is Swiss cheese: holes in vast swaths of land where looters, armed with machine guns and bulldozers, take to ancient archaeological sites in search of international paydays. To the untrained eye, these holes, visible in satellite images, seem haphazard. But to experts, these deep pits, spanning acres of land, are the work of sophisticated traffickers.

It’s exactly the kind of looting that worries Mohamed Ibrahim Ali, Egypt’s minister of state for antiquities.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) returned more than 4,000 pieces of looted cultural artifacts to the Mexican government. A repatriation ceremony was held on October 25 at the Consulate of Mexico in El Paso, Texas. The items were recovered in El Paso, Phoenix, Chicago, Denver, San Diego, San Antonio, Fort Stockton, Texas, and Kalispell, Montana. Many of the artifacts that were found in Texas traced to a 2008 theft from a museum in Mexico. Five pre-Columbian statues, over 4,000 pre-Columbian artifacts, and 26 pieces of pre-Columbian pottery were returned to the people of Mexico.

The repatriation that took place on Thursday is one of the largest that has taken place between the two countries. Many of the items returned date from before European explorers landed in North America. The items will be taken to the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City where they will be studied, cataloged, and distributed to museums across Mexico.