The location, characters and what was about to happen are worthy of a thriller: in a room in the luxurious Hotel Loews in Miami, two supposed art dealers, Pedro Antonio Marcuello Guzmán and María Martha Elisa Ornelas Lazo, waited for some potential art buyers for something huge they had been offering for a while.
It was August 2017 and I had just become the General Director in Defense of Cultural Patrimony in the Peruvian Ministry of Culture. An e-mail from a special Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agent specialized in crimes against cultural patrimony suddenly came across my desk.
As a study abroad student in Quito, Ecuador, about ten years ago, I wandered through the living spaces of Eduardo Kingman (1913-1997), an influential modernist painter.
In February 2022, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador revealed the letter he sent two years earlier to Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen, requesting the return of the Penacho de Moctezuma…
