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newsAlso in this section: Five convicted, seven acquitted in museum heist by Eric Jackson, from other media Panama’s Seventh Circuit Penal Court has convicted five of those accused of participating in a February 2003 theft from the gold room at the Reyna Torres de Arauz Anthropology Museum in which 292 pre-Columbian gold artifacts were stolen. Eight other defendants were acquitted. The crime was an inside job, according to prosecutors organized by Adrián Cedeño Somarriba, a man whom the National Institute of Culture (INAC) hired because of his family relationship to a Mireyista politician despite the fact that at the time he was out of prison on bail while appealing a conviction in another grand theft case. All but 27 of the pieces were eventually recovered, after police investigating a credit card counterfeiting ring stumbled across some of the priceless huacas and were thus able to solve a case that had been getting cold. The guilty include Cedeño Somarriba, Benjamín Rangel, Marquelio Headley, Acela Lavergne and Beatriz Ledezma. The latter two, because their participation was apparently only in the cover-up rather than direct participation in the theft, will be allowed to avoid prison time by paying $1,400 fines. The alleged ringleader and repeat offender, Cedeño Somarriba, received a five-year prison term, while Rangel and Headley were each sentenced to four years and two months behind bars. Headley and Rangel were not INAC or museum employees, but all of the other defendants were. The theft was carried out by persons in a position to turn off alarm systems, and who knew the codes to combination locks and had access to keys to get into the gold room and its display cases. The heist also could not have taken place without the cooperation of those who were supposed to be guarding the museum. Everyone of lower rank at INAC who had access to the keys or knew the codes --- with the exception of the INAC director at the time, Rafael Ruiloba --- was prosecuted. Ledezma protested her innocence in La Prensa, claiming that she didn’t hold a position of responsibility at the museum and wasn’t the only one who knew the codes or had access to the keys. She said she just did what Ruiloba told her to do. Inside thefts from INAC have been common over the years, which is the main reason why museums abroad will not consider lending things to be displayed in Panama. (That former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares’s relative Francisco Iglesias, while serving as Panamanian consul in New York, notoriously turned this country’s consulate there into a showroom for stolen pre-Columbian artifacts and was never prosecuted for the violation of Panamanian and international law is another reason why the international museum community generally will have nothing to do with Panama.) What was unusual about this case, other than the value and number of pieces taken, was that anyone at all was prosecuted. If the 27 unrecovered pieces were sold on the international black market or are being hidden for subsequent sale and those who were convicted share the proceeds, the four or five years that the thieves will have spent behind bars will have been profitable, as these artifacts are worth many millions of dollars.
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