During the Christmas 1980exactly on December 25 at dawn, one of the most important robberies in Argentine criminal history took place: of National museum of fine arts were extracted seven porcelain and jade objects and 16 impressionist paintings. With the exception of two of those assets, all had been donated by the aristocrat and collector Mercedes Santamarinain 1970. The case is now being revisited by a book that describes in depth the details of this mysterious episode in which multiple themes from the country’s history are condensed.
That Christmas night, Eusebio Eguía, the Museum’s night watchman, and Anselmo Ceballos, a federal police firefighter, were the only people in the building. He military government He had declared the Museum of Fine Arts a “sensitive state object”, that is, it could be a place chosen by guerrilla terrorism to carry out an attack, and that is why he had assigned a firefighter as permanent guard of the museum. Both men toasted, like the rest of the Argentines in their homes, and went to sleep. Around four o’clock, Eguía was awakened by smoke coming from the room of the Santamarina Collection. He woke up his partner and together they went to see: there were no flames, just smoke and the smell of burning plastic. For the rest: destroyed and empty display cases, picture frames with nothing on the floor and the missing works.
Among the stolen works were works by painters such as Matisse; Renoir; Cézanne, Gauguin, and two drawings by Degas. All works valued at several million dollars.
The police investigation determined that the thieves had entered through the roof of the Museum: there was a metal door through which the workers who were working on the renovation of the first floor entered. The dictatorship did not take many measures to find the thieves. He questioned those who worked at the Museum, including Eguía and Ceballos. The judge in charge of the court that was carrying out the operation, Laura Damianovich de Cerredo (participant in several tortures in the clandestine detention center “El Pozo de Banfield”) was convinced that one of the two had been the deliverer of the pieces. The men were beaten, tied hands and feet, and tortured with electric prods. When the torturers realized that they had nothing to do with it, they released them. Paz Anchorena Pearson and Horacio Mosquera, curator and photographer of the Museum respectively, were also tortured. The same: blows and cattle prods. But the pieces did not appear.
An article published in 1983 in the newspaper La Prensa by the journalist Guillermo Patricio Kelly, also kidnapped by the dictatorship, shed light on some events. Kelly reported having been tortured by “The Anibal Gordon gang”, former head of Triple A, who followed the orders of Otto Paladino, general who was head of the Intelligence Services. Gordon and Paladino had run the clandestine detention center “Orletti Automotive”. In the article, Kelly included an anonymous complaint that said that most of the paintings stolen from the Bellas Artes “could not be sold” and that they were in the possession of an owner of the Magister Agency, from private investigations. The owner of Magister was Paladino, and even Gordon’s relatives worked there, such as his daughter.
The Magister Agency knew the Museum’s security perfectly: they had been hired months before the theft as private security for an exhibition. Judge Damianovich de Cerredo dismissed this lead, and Gordon and Paladino died without testifying about this cause, nor being investigated for it.
Time
22 years passed. In March 2002, the Parisian gallerist Pascal Lansberg He received a Taiwanese friend, who brought him three paintings (rolled up and without frames) belonging to an uncle of his, and asked to appraise them: a Cézanne, a Renoir and a Gauguin. Lansberg thought it was a great deal, but before finalizing it he requested a report from Art Loss Register, an English company dedicated to searching for and recovering stolen works of art. The report was conclusive: all were pieces stolen from the Santamarina collection, from the Museum of Fine Arts from Buenos Aires.
But before Art Loss Register answered that to Lansberg, Julian Radcliffe, president of the British company, had already contacted Jorge Glusberg, then director of the museum, notifying him of the three works of art found. Radcliffe had discovered that the 16 pieces had ended up in the hands of a Taiwanese businessman linked to arms trafficking, and requested £50,000 from the Argentine State to take charge of recovering the works of art. But these were times of the 2001 crisis, and the State lacked funds. Glusberg continued talks with Radcliffe for two years, never notifying the State that three paintings had appeared. The reason for the secret? A mystery.
Later, in 2003, the judge Norberto Oyarbide took charge of the case in 2003. Oyarbide managed, in 2005, to have the three works found in France returned, after a diplomatic agreement between that country and Argentina. The recovered works had, at that time, a value close to 1 million three hundred thousand dollars. Oyarbide flew back in economy class, with two bodyguards located in the back of the plane, and with the rolls of paintings covered. Where the rest of the paintings are is a mystery. Oyarbide never managed to get Taiwan to respond to requests for information on the rest of the works: Argentina does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country, but rather as part of the People’s Republic of China, and that is why the Asian country refuses to cooperate in the search.
Theories
Ramon SantamarinaMercedes’ nephew, had the theory that the dictatorship had allowed this task group steal the paintings as payment for some service. Several clues point to the hypothesis that the dictatorship would have bought weapons from Taiwan, among other things for the War conflicts with Chile and later for the Malvinas, and that it could have paid with those works of art.
But there is much more to this captivating story that is back in circulation thanks to “Golpe en el museo”, (Ed. Planeta) the journalist’s new book Imanol Subiela Salvo, which goes through the details of this plot with the rhythm of a thriller. Salvo has been investigating the case in depth for a long time: in 2020 he published an article in the prestigious magazine Catopard where he addressed this story and, now, he has created an expanded version of it that adds a lot of information about the events and characters involved. “I found it interesting that it is a story of the art world but crossed by state terrorism, generally one thinks that stories linked to the cultural world are lighter, but this case shows that this is not always the case,” comments the author. to NEWS.
“I believe that the importance of the case lies in the fact that through the history of the robbery we can illustrate the history of the country, at least in recent decades, and think about what the dictatorship did with our cultural heritage, how justice was handled. in coexistence with the military junta, how the judicial system was impoverished with the return of democracy and how the figures of power (economic and political) are intertwined with the world of art,” he adds.
Ideal for art and history lovers, and good police officers.
