Peruvian minister joins Inca talks
Paul Needham.
Staff Reporter- Yale Daily News
Published Tuesday, October 7, 2008


More than a year has passed since Yale and Peru signed a memorandum of
understanding regarding the rightful ownership of ancient Inca artifacts
housed at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History.

For much of the time since last September’s memorandum, the parties were
locked in a stalemate over the objects excavated nearly a century ago.
But now, Peru has sent a higher-level official to the negotiations, and
some on Yale’s side say there is new hope that a final agreement can be
reached, although both Yale and the Peruvian government acknowledge that
the parties may well end up in court.

Yale and Peruvian officials met in New York Sept. 27 for the second time
in just over a month. Jose Antonio Garcia Belaunde, the Peruvian foreign
minister, was present at that session; Hernan Garrido-Lecca, the
Peruvian health minister who has overseen the negotiations for over a
year, was not.
If nothing else, the mere presence of a senior Peruvian government
official was progress for the talks, as neither Garrido-Lecca nor
Belaunde attended an Aug. 25 meeting between the parties.

But Richard Burger, the Yale archaeologist who has been most closely
involved with the artifacts, noted in an interview that Belaunde’s
attendance at the meeting was even more significant.

“The fact that the minister feels that it’s appropriate for him to
intervene suggests that there is a desire to reach an understanding,”
said Burger, who was a part of the August negotiations but was not
present at the September session. “Because if [Peruvian officials]
wanted to go to court, they could have just left things as they were.”

To have left things as they were would have been to declare a final
agreement between the parties essentially out of reach. Yale and Peru
were as far apart as ever after the summer, with Peru threatening
litigation against Yale in April and almost no progress being made at
the meeting in August. Officials from both Yale and Peru present at the
September meeting declined to comment this week, but University
spokesman Tom Conroy said in a statement that the meeting was
“productive,” adding that, “Yale believes the two sides are close to a
resolution that would meet the goals of both parties and serve the broad
public interest in the collection’s conservation and access.”

Productive as Belaunde’s presence at the September meeting might have
been, comments he made in Peru just three days after that meeting
indicate he still considers litigation a viable option for Peru.

“It is evident that if we go on to trial, Yale will have to bring out
what it’s got up its sleeves in order to maintain ownership,” Belaunde
told the Peruvian state news agency Andina.

He added that dialogue with Yale is an alternative to a lawsuit, but the
minister made a point of noting that the one constant over the nearly
100 years that Yale has held the artifacts is that Peru has not
renounced its title to the objects.

For its part, Yale maintains there is “no need or justification for
litigation on the part of the government of Peru,” as Conroy put it. He
added that the University is prepared to defend itself if a suit is
filed and that Yale still hopes to reach an agreement on a
“collaborative relationship” with Peru.

The idea of a collaboration between Yale and Peru was central to the
University’s portrayal of last September’s memorandum of understanding.
The memorandum stipulated that Yale would acknowledge Peru’s title to
all the artifacts and return most of the pieces — including almost all
of the finest, museum-quality pieces — over the course of the next few
years while keeping others for up to 99 years.

The pieces that were to be sent back at once would have been housed in a
special museum near Machu Picchu that Yale and Peru would design and
fund together. All this was intended to coincide with the 100th
anniversary of the first expedition to Peru by Yale explorer Hiram
Bingham III in 1911. But Burger said too much time has passed for a 2011
museum opening to be feasible.

“Regardless of how good the memorandum was, just by the passage of time,
certain aspects of it aren’t feasible,” Burger said. “So the
negotiations are definitely taking on a new form.”