Three years after her tiny, 16th century chapel was looted, sacristan Maria Elena Sauza still noses around Puebla's Frog Alley flea market, hoping for a miracle. Sacred art objects stolen from churches all over Mexico resurface here, and she prays hers will too.
Trafficking in stolen religious art is big business in Mexico, and the thieves who broke into her San Cosme chapel knew exactly what to take: four statues and two paintings, all dating from the 17th century, each worth thousands of dollars.
"The robbery was horrible. You feel pain and impotence of not being able to do anything," said Sauza, who regularly makes a three-hour bus trip from the town of Otumba to scour Frog Alley.
One night in June 2001, thieves armed with bolt cutters broke into the padlocked chapel. Sauza, whose family has provided the chapel's custodians for four generations, discovered the thefts the next morning.
San Cosme's icons may have been smuggled to the United States or Europe or peddled to clandestine buyers in Mexico. Growing international demand drives an epidemic of theft. On average, one of Mexico's 17,000 churches is looted each day.
San Cosme's rustic paintings of the Virgin Mary and wooden icons of saints Cosme, Damian and Antonio and the Virgin of the Assumption may already have been sold in southwestern U.S. cities such as Santa Fe, N.M., San Antonio, or Phoenix, where the market for stolen objects is strongest.
"The market is excellent for these objects all over the world," said Luis Alvarez, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency attache in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. "But in states like Arizona, California or Texas where the Spanish Colonial home style is predominant, these objects are highly appropriate as decor."
But buyers of Latin American sacred art should be aware that whatever the circumstances of their purchase, chances are that the relics were stolen, said Mary-Anne Martin, owner of a New York City gallery that specializes in modern Latin American paintings.
"It's very shady," said Martin, who has brokered major sales of paintings by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and others. "There really never has been a legitimate market for this material. It's not supposed to leave the churches anyway." Martin added that most Latin American countries, including Mexico, have laws that declare the artwork national patrimony, "so it's supposed to stay put."
Churches, convents and shrines all over Latin America are under siege. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in Washington and the FBI, which will soon unveil a "rapid response" task force to fight trafficking in smuggled art, say they are beefing up enforcement efforts. A key tactic is monitoring the Internet, where much of the loot is sold, Alvarez said.
Sauza knows the odds of finding San Cosme's relics are slim, but she still combs Frog Alley. Miracles do happen, she says.
In a rare success story, a spectacular wooden altarpiece, depicting St. Francis receiving the stigmata, that had been taken in 2001 from a convent near Puebla was returned to Mexico in September. The Peyton Wright art gallery in Santa Fe had priced it at $225,000 and marketed it on the Internet. A Mexican art historian saw it there and informed Mexican authorities, who notified U.S. agents. The agents seized the piece, which was returned during a ceremony in Mexico City.
The owners of the gallery said they didn't know that the 8-foot altarpiece, which is called a retablo, had been stolen. They cooperated fully in the investigation, Alvarez said.
Sauza also takes heart in the case of San Marcos Tlaxuchilco, a church a couple of miles from hers that lost its main effigy, a seated St. Mark, to thieves in 2001. The church recovered it a week later when an enterprising young parishioner, Alejandro Ramirez, came across it during his search of shops in downtown Mexico City's antiques district. Police arrested the shop owner and closed down the store.
Museums, another important market for stolen relics, are also trying to do the right thing. The San Diego Museum of Art disclosed in December that it was considering returning an 18th century painting allegedly stolen four years ago from a church in San Juan Tepemazalco in Hidalgo state.
The museum said it was investigating how the painting, titled "Expulsion From the Garden of Eden," became a part of its collection.
There are signs of progress in the struggle to protect Mexico's cultural patrimony. Thefts have leveled off after several years of rising rates, the federal attorney general's office said. Many parishes have taken measures to safeguard their relics, such as installing alarms and motion detectors and, in the case of San Marcos Tlaxuchilco, posting round-the-clock vigils.
But less than 20% of Mexican religious art has been photographed and cataloged, which makes legal description of stolen relics difficult. And it makes the job of tracking them down all the more challenging.
Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, the legal custodian of all Mexican religious art objects, has begun the process of photographing and cataloging 4 million works of art in the nation's churches and shrines, said Teresita Loera, the institute's national coordinator for conservation.
But the process is woefully underfunded at just $30,000 a year and will take years to complete, Loera said. Meanwhile, churches remain vulnerable in states such as Puebla, Morelos, Hidalgo and Tlaxcala, all rich in colonial religious artifacts.
The Otumba region, 60 miles northeast of Mexico City near the Teotihuacan pyramids, is especially rich in centuries-old churches and sacred art because it lies along the royal highway that connected the port of Veracruz with the capital. From the beginning of the Spanish colonization, chapels were built along the route to provide travelers with religious sanctuary.
The attachment that San Cosme's parishioners feel for the stolen statues is hard for outsiders to appreciate, said Cuauhtemoc Sahaman, an Otumba city councilman.
Even after they are gone, Sahaman said, "they protect us, they console us, they are close to us. They will never leave us spiritually."
Sauza trudges on, in and out of Frog Alley's two blocks of shops. One Saturday, her pulse began to race when a dealer said he knew of a statue of St. Antonio that resembled the one taken from her church.
Following his directions, she scurried across the street and up two flights of stairs to an attic, where an assistant pulled a weathered, wooden statue from behind a desk. "No, that's a statue of St. Peter, not our St. Antonio," Sauza said, crestfallen.
Later, she acknowledged that she was disappointed but vowed to press on with her search here and in Mexico City's antiques districts. She still dreams of restoring the precious artworks to their empty niches at San Cosme and the hearts of the chapel's faithful. "I'll never give up looking for my babies," she said.