The Fight for the Restitution of Mexican Antiquities

               Monte Alban, this should be about                
          protecting sites, not 'saving' objects       

This is a useful summary of an issue the US authorities would like to sweep under the carpet. The scasle of the trade with the US is not properly quantified, but must be pretty enormous to judge by sales offers and catalogues of collections:   Amineddoleh & Associates LLC. Proving Provenance: The Fight for the Restitution of Mexican Antiquities Jan 19, 2022:

Mexico has suffered a great deal of looting and illegal export of its cultural heritage over the past decades. Despite enacting protective legislation dating back to the late 19th century, cultural heritage objects from Mexico continue to be smuggled out of the country and sold on the open market [...] This is a profitable business worldwide; according to Sotheby’s, its auctions of these items have reached nearly $45 million over the past 15 years.

The paper discuses a number of case studies. It however focuses more on the issuiue of repatriation, that US fixation, rather than prevention. For some of the legal issues, see also the paper by Claudia S. Quiñones Vilá 2021,'On the Borderline – Using National and International Legal Frameworks to Address the Traffic of Pre-Columbian Antiquities between Mexico and the United States', Santander Art and Culture Law Review 2/2021 (7): 51-76 discussed earlier in this blog.