Mexico Tries a New Tactic to Get Its Antiquities Back: Social Pressure

“I read some articles about how private people were giving back artifacts to Mexico,” said the archivist, Lovisa Severin Kragerud, who works for Kahlúa owner Absolut Vodka. “I thought maybe they would be angry, but they were very welcoming and appreciative.”

Mexico is significantly amping up its efforts to recover stolen or missing cultural patrimony, and in the process roiling international antiquities markets.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s nationalist government last year created a special National Guard team dedicated to recovering stolen pre-Columbian artifacts that was modeled on a unit of Italy’s national police, the “carabinieri.” Italy, which is helping Mexico in the effort, famously clawed back some looted masterpieces by suing dealers and major museums like the J. Paul Getty Museum.

But instead of sending its lawyers to rankle museum directors, Mexico is leading with a social-media campaign designed to persuade buyers that sales of antiquities are unethical. Repatriation efforts are hyped with a hashtag—“Mi Patrimonio No Se Vende,” or “My Heritage Is Not for Sale”—that was created by first lady Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, who has actively championed the effort.

Mexico is also coordinating with political and law-enforcement officials in the US and Europe. A Unesco official said in an interview that Mexico, more than almost any other country, routinely appeals to the United Nations cultural agency to intervene in pending auctions.

Mexico’s Foreign Ministry says the government has recovered nearly 9,000 pieces since 2018, with several hundred more now in embassies awaiting transfer to Mexico. The total includes two major recoveries announced on Tuesday: 2,522 pieces from Barcelona and another 428 pieces from Portland, Ore. Those quantities, officials say, are considerably more than previous administrations repatriated.

‘Socially Unacceptable’

Scrutiny of the global antiquities trade is intensifying as art values ​​escalate and attitudes shift in the West over who gets final say on the whereabouts and display of other countries’ artifacts. Countries from Cambodia to Iraq are increasingly pressuring auction houses to win back potentially pilfered objects.

The spirit of Mexico’s own repatriation efforts “feels like it’s coming more from the community than from the government, which says a lot about Mexican nationalism,” said Donna Yates, an associate professor at the Netherlands’ Maastricht University who specializes in trafficking of antiquities from Latin America. “Mexico is trying to make it socially unacceptable to buy this stuff.”

Unlike countries whose antiquities were mostly carted off by colonial masters, Mexico also suffered a rash of thefts from the 1950s to ’70s as pre-Columbian artifacts gained cultural currency, Ms. Yates said. Mayan imagery featured not only in advertising—such as Kalhúa’s—but also in Hollywood. Audrey Hepburn hit an advancing French lover over the head with an ancient Mexican figurine in the 1957 film “Funny Face.” Celebrated collections were held by Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Nelson Rockefeller and Vincent Price.

“Because we’ve been so vocal, we’re creating a social consciousness,” said Alejandro Celorio, the Mexican Foreign Ministry’s top legal adviser. “Every day we get more cooperation from law enforcement in the world and from private individuals.”

The recovered items range from simple arrowheads from a private collection in Portland, Ore., to 16th-century documents written by Spanish conquistador Hernán Córtes, Mexican officials say. Those 500-year-old documents had been stolen—surgically cut out with a blade—from Mexico’s vast National Archives at an unknown point in recent years. They were almost auctioned in New York before academics in Mexico and Spain spotted them in an auction catalogue. The Manhattan district attorney’s office halted the sale in March. The government generally returns the artifacts to where they were before they were removed—museums, archives and exhibitions.

Mexico says that such sales encourage illegal looting of artifacts, their illicit trafficking and forgeries, and deprive archaeological pieces of their significance, reducing them to mere decorative objects.

“We’re talking about a heritage with enormous symbolic weight,” said Diego Prieto Hernández, the chief of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. “For Mexico, these are sacred cultural goods that shouldn’t be bought and sold commercially.”

Encouraged by Mexico’s campaign, Mexican officials say, individuals are increasingly returning artifacts from their family’s collections. Many of them are the children of the original collectors, academics say. Last year, two German citizens voluntarily returned 37 ancient Olmec and Maya figurines to the Mexican Embassy in Berlin. And Albion College in Michigan voluntarily returned a 500-year-old Lacandon Maya urn. Found by an amateur archaeologist in Mexico and gifted it to his alma mater in 2003, it sat “all but unnoticed” in a library glass case—until it was reunited with its twin in a Chiapas museum last year, the college said.

“There was no question as to what we had to do,” said Cathy Cole, an Albion spokeswoman.

Targeting Auction Houses

One unusual way Mexican officials discourage auction sales is to have anthropology experts scrutinize publicly released auction catalogs for fakes—which officials and academics say are particularly common among Mexican antiquities—and then inform the auctioneers without telling them which specific pieces they believe to be counterfeit.

“This goes to the heart of their credibility and prestige,” Mr. Celorio said. “They could be committing fraud and might face legal action from the buyers.”

Mexico’s interactions with some foreign auction houses have been less cooperative. In 2019, the Millon & Associés auction house in Paris sold 120 pieces of pre-Columbian art from the Olmec and Mayan cultures for €1.2 million, then worth about $1.3 million, despite pleas from Mexico, Guatemala and Unesco to halt the sale. The auction house sold another batch of 20 artifacts in June after Mexico complained again. Millon said the countries failed to provide documentation establishing the pieces’ provenance, according to Mexican officials, who say that isn’t always possible. Millon did not respond to requests for comment.

“Countries like France say they need proof,” said Mr. Celorio. “We say to them, ‘We didn’t have cameras in the 19th century.’ They’ll say, ‘Then what about a catalogue?’ The problem is there are so many archaeological sites it would be difficult to catalog everything with the resources we have.”

In some cases Mexico allows overseas antiquities with unresolved status to be temporarily sent home for shows, then returned—such as when the Vatican recently lent Mexico pieces for an exhibition in Mexico City on recovered artifacts.

“We have the opportunity to keep a window to our culture abroad,” said Mr. Celorio. “I think there’s a middle ground—recognizing that it’s Mexican patrimony, while educating people about our culture.”

Write to Robert P. Walzer at robert.walzer@wsj.com