Mexico asks the French company to stop the auction of more than 100 pre-Columbian objects that are cultural heritage

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These are some of the pre-Columbian art pieces that are auctioned in Paris. (Credit: Million)

(CNN Spanish) - The Government of Mexico requested an auction house in France to stop the sale of more than dozens of pre-Columbian art pieces that are part of Mexican cultural heritage, the government said in a statement.

The Millon auction house, based in Paris, France, organized an auction on September 18, of at least 120 pieces of pre-Columbian art, of which 95 belong to Mexican cultural heritage, according to the Government of Mexico.

The pieces have their origin in places like Teotihuacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and other states in the Mexican southeast, where the Olmec and Maya cultures settled, according to the Government.

For the Government of Mexico, this auction encourages “illegal excavations, looting, illicit traffic and counterfeits, deprive archaeological pieces of their historical and symbolic cultural essence,” and “reduce” these pieces to decorative objects and sounded the integrity of cultures, according to Bernardo Aguilar Calvo, general director for Europe, on this auction.

Some of these pieces are part of the private collection of Manichak and Jean Aurance, a French art collector couple, who acquired them in 1962 at an art gallery in Paris, according to the Million website. Manichak Aurance said that the objects in his collection "reflect the state in which they were found" without having received restorations.

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Follow the sale of pre-Columbian pieces

The auction took its normal course this Wednesday, CNN in Spanish confirmed the Million auction house by telephone, but did not issue any statement on the request and accusations of the Mexican government on the acquisition of the pieces.

The president of the auction house, Alexandre Millon, said in a statement to the France Press Agency (AFP) that the auction continues: “I keep the sale and I am the guarantor of the defense of the rights and the perfect property of my sellers” he declared.

The Mexican ambassador to France, Juan Gómez Robledo, told reporters in Paris that the Ministry of Culture, INAH and the Prosecutor's Office brought the request to the Ministry of Justice of France, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also sent diplomatic note to French government to stop this auction, without success.

"We have to regret and condemn the fact that despite the efforts several days ago we did not get the millionaire auction house to cancel the sale," said Gomez Robledo.

Meanwhile, María Villarreal Escárrega, national coordinator of legal affairs of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) also warned some of these pieces could be fakes, because according to analyzes made to the online catalog at least 20 pieces could be “recently manufactured but they are being sold as pieces of archaeological value. ”

The executive director of Cultural Diplomacy of the SRE, Enrique Márquez, said that the Millon company "speculates with the cultural assets of many countries of the world, this time ... [with] the cultural assets of Mexico."

The collection contains 130 pre-Columbian art pieces not only from Mexico, but also from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Peru, among others. Its initial value ranges from 100 euros (about 110 dollars) to 120,000 euros (plus 132,000 dollars) for a ceremonial mask of a shaman lord with four mythical birds, with carved gold sheets, hammered and perforated, originally from the province of Calima, Colombia, preserved in the Gold Museum of Bogotá.

Last week, the Guatemalan government got the Millon Drout auction house to suspend the sale of a pre-Hispanic piece that is part of Guatemala's cultural heritage at the auction that took place on September 18 in Paris. According to a statement from the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the starting price of that piece was between $ 27,000 and $ 38,000.

After the suspension of the sale, Guatemala seeks to repatriate the piece.

Pre-Columbian art