“I could say,” Dodge told The Denver Post on Thursday. “But I’m not going to.”

He said Mexico has come to him before with these same demands, but without evidence that the objects in question were looted. Dodge said he has never pulled items from auction after a Mexican delegation request and would not be doing so this time around.

“Mexico is attempting to strongarm companies like ours into repatriating goods like these,” he said. “They have no legal standing.”

J.P. Labbat, a former special agent with Homeland Security Investigations who spent years working cultural property cases, said the U.S. government “has learned the hard way” not to pull pieces from auctions based simply on the word of foreign countries.

“If they flag pieces,” Labbat said, “we need evidence before we act.”

Dodge estimates there are 500,000 pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico in American museums and private collections.

“Mexico has such an extensive collection of objects in their museums that if they were to repatriate, they wouldn’t go into a museum or on display. They’d never be seen by an individual again,” he said. “They would go into a storage warehouse and rot in hell.”

Barradas said he hears this justification all the time: That countries in the Global South do not have the capacity, facilities or expertise to properly display cultural artifacts. This language mirrors similar explanations, mainly from Western countries, concerning relics from Southeast Asia, West Africa and across South and Central America.

“That’s a colonial argument that we don’t like,” Barradas said. “We have one of the biggest anthropological museums in the world. We have the capacity, the know-how, to manage all of this.”

Under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico has aggressively pursued cases of cultural patrimony across the globe.

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