Peru hints at suit

Paul Needham.
Staff Reporter Yale Daily News
Published Monday, November 10, 2008

Yale and Peru edged closer to court over the weekend, as officials in
the Peruvian government approved in principle the filing of a lawsuit
against the University with the hopes of reclaiming Incan artifacts
housed at Yale.
While Peru has not yet taken formal legal action, the decision of the
country’s Council of Ministers to begin formally the process of
selecting a lawyer comes after more than six months of threats from Peru
that it would sue the University. The controversy surrounds Incan
artifacts excavated by Yale explorer Hiram Bingham III between 1911 and
1915; Peru has maintained for nearly a century that it is the rightful
owner of the objects and has vigorously sought their return in recent
years.
The University, for its part, has hoped to resolve the matter without
entering the courtroom. Last September, Yale hailed a memorandum of
understanding signed between the parties as a new precedent for
international collaboration. University Vice President and General
Counsel Dorothy Robinson said in an e-mail message to the News on Sunday
that, while Yale would defend itself against a lawsuit, the University
still hopes not to find itself in court.
“We believe that a lawsuit does not best serve the interests of the
public, both in Peru and internationally, or of posterity,” Robinson
said, “and continue to believe that cooperation and collaboration would
provide a better framework for satisfying the multiple interests in the
archaeological material excavated by Bingham at Machu Picchu.”
While Peruvian officials have threatened a lawsuit since April, Yale
officials said earlier this fall that they were hopeful the parties
might be able to avoid legal action. Much of this optimism was the
result of a meeting in late September that included, for the first time,
Jose Antonio Garcia Belaunde, the Peruvian foreign minister. Belaunde
had never before been involved in the negotiations, and some at Yale saw
his presence at the meeting in an optimistic light.
“The fact that the minister feels that it’s appropriate for him to
intervene suggests that there is a desire to reach an understanding,”
Richard Burger, the Yale archaeologist most closely associated with the
artifacts, said last month. “Because if [Peruvian officials] wanted to
go to court, they could have just left things as they were.”
But Belaunde’s involvement with the negotiations was brief; Peru’s new
minister of labor and employment promotion, Jorge Villasante, has now
been charged with overseeing the selection of a lawyer and the potential
filing of a suit.
That selection will be easy for the Peruvian government to make, said
one high-level government official who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. The official
said the government is in the process of retaining William Cook, a
lawyer at the Washington, D.C., firm DLA Piper. Cook has represented
Peru in the negotiations for nearly a year.
In that time, the official has seen the government and Yale get closer
and closer to court as the memorandum of understanding never became
finalized and Peruvian politicians split apart over the question of
Yale’s rights to keep some of the objects for up to 99 years while
returning others at once.
On Sunday, though, Cook declined to comment to the News, saying only
that he was awaiting his “instructions from Lima.”