“I fear, and I will say it openly, that the Austrian government is hiding something with the plume. I don’t know if it is broken or replaced, there is something there, they should answer that.”
Thus, the doctor Beatriz Gutierrez Mullerwife of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, asked the Austrian government for an explanation regarding the status of the object attributed to the penultimate Mexica tlatoani, which has been in the Central European nation for 144 years.
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In her first participation in her husband’s morning press conference, the linguist and researcher revived the dispute between both nations that had its climax 2 years ago, when López Obrador accused the government of Alexander Van der Bellen He treated with “arrogance” the request that was sent to him through Gutiérrez Müller:
“This meeting that Beatriz had with the president was very unpleasant. She tells me that he did not have much knowledge and was surrounded by ladies and gentlemen who think they own the plume. The subject was just being discussed and they said no (…) he said goodbye and there was no more conversation, the subject was not continued because there was that refusal, it is a very arrogant, overbearing attitude and there is no justification for not being able to convey it, we were not even raising it.”
The historian also responded that it left her with a “bad taste in her mouth” not having achieved the task that López Obrador had entrusted her with four years ago with Van der Bellen, whose administration responded that the piece would not survive the trip to Mexico.
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In response to which, President López Obrador said in his morning press conference on February 23, 2022, he reproached that:
“The truth is that they have appropriated something that belongs to the Mexicans, as usually happens with everything that has to do with art and culture. They have not only plundered the towns but also their cultural and artistic heritage.”
That same day he asked “not to close the file” and that the insistence on returning the piece should continue.
Two days after the above, the Mexican Government released the letter that López Obrador sent to Van der Bellen on October 2, 2020, in which he requested a loan of the only Mexican feather headdress that exists in the world, kept by the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna.
In the text, the President pointed out that it would be a great event, both for the binational relationship and for Mexico, if the object were in Mexico in 2021, as part of the commemorations of the 700 years of the founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlán and the 200 years of Mexican Independence, for which reason, he made the commitment that:
“As a ruler, return it, if you do not wish to donate it to the Mexican Republic, within a period of no more than one year with all the guarantees and legal grounds that are required of us.”
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Negative precedent that Austria had lent the Plume
Despite all of the above, archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, one of the world’s leading specialists on the Mexica world, considered since 2012 that a request for a “loan” would set a negative precedent worldwide.
In the text “Does the so-called “Moctezuma plume” belong to Austria or Mexico?”, the emeritus researcher also warned that:
With the same intention of obtaining historical and archaeological pieces from Mexico to be exhibited in our country during the Bicentennial of Independence, Beatriz visited the president of Austria, Alexander Van der Bellen. pic.twitter.com/w3dUxR0Kl3
— Andrés Manuel (@lopezobrador_) October 12, 2020
“If accepted by the Austrian Parliament and the ‘loan’ action is carried out, it would create a negative precedent, since the countries that have been requesting the return of their archaeological assets extracted from their territory would be exposed to the fact that European and North American museums, the main owners of these assets, either due to colonialist action, especially during the 19th century, or due to illegal looting in more recent times, would see the easy way out of ‘loaning’ their assets temporarily to those countries on the condition that they be returned.”
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Matos Moctezuma even stressed at the time that this intention would mean that Mexico would be the one to open the door to recognize that these museums are the owners of these assets, which would contradict the Mexican actions, supported by UNESCO, in the struggle for the restitution of its archaeological assets that are in other nations.
MSA
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2024-09-16 02:15:16