The following is one of those stories in which one no longer distinguishes the good from the bad, nor those who tell the truth from those who lie, nor does one allow one to take someone’s side.
All this confusion began on June 19, 1982, when Jose Luis Castanedaa lawyer and owner of a local newspaper in Quintana Rooentered the National Library of France to steal the Codex Tonalámatl Aubina kind of prediction book of the nahua peoples.
With the scroll hidden among his clothes, he returned to his hotel and then flew to Spainthen to Egypt and days later take a flight to NYwhere he would board the aircraft that would finally take him to cancun. His house was in Cozumel.
Interpol locates the Mexican who stole the Tonalámatl Aubin Codex
Until then the agents of the police arrived for the lawyer and journalist. Interpol Mexico, at the request of Interpol France. They found the codex in a desk drawer. The thief was taken to the Mexico City to be delivered to PGR. The case was beginning to make international news.
Almost immediately the experts of the National Institute of Anthropology and History They determined that it was indeed the Aztec Codex 18/19the same one that in 1840 was stolen Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin to take it to Europewhere he was renamed as Codex Tonalámatl Aubin.
A diplomatic conflict between Mexico and France
Once the pre-Hispanic document stolen by Castañeda from the National Library of France was located, pressure from the French country on Mexico to return the codex and imprison Castañeda increased.
But they were not the only issues that the Mexican government had to resolve, because returning the document to France meant ignoring the theft of the codex from the nation carried out almost 150 years ago by Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin, while imprisoning the lawyer who stole it. it meant not recognizing his patriotic act, be it real or fictitious.
Castañeda gets entangled in explanations for the Aubin Codex
In order to keep the forms, and send several messages, the Mexican government presented to the media to José Luis Castañeda, who got entangled in the explanations. Because, although he is a scholar on the Mesoamerican subject, he began by saying that he stole it because he wanted to teach the people in France in charge of safeguarding the codex a lesson, who, according to him, made fun of the fact that Mexico does not take good care of its documents.
He then said that he stole it as a patriotic act, that his only intention was to return it to the nation. And although some small-time newspapers went for the easy way of putting him as a national hero, the reality is that if that had been the case, then why did he wait to be arrested to hand him over to the PGR or the INAH?
France says that Castañeda did want to sell him the Codex
The answer would come years later, during an interview with Pierre Charasse, a former employee of the embassy of France in Mexico. He revealed that after being in Egypt, José Luis Castañeda flew to New York, not precisely as a stopover on his way to Cancun, but to sell the Tonalámatl Aubin Codex in the North American city, which he could not do because the document was already I had a search token for the Interpol.
It was this official french embassy who delivered to Roberto Garcia Moll, then director of the INAH, the codex for analysis and safekeeping. He admitted that the matter was for several years a stone in the international cooperation of both countries, since there was even a prohibition for Mexicans to enter the National Library of France.
The Tonalámatl Aubin Codex remains in Mexico
But everything was resolved between the two nations in a “more technical than legal” way, according to Pierre Charasse. Mexico did not imprison José Luis Castañeda, France did not ask for the codex anymore, but it did not admit that 150 years ago Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin stole it, in short, they reached an agreement that it would remain under the protection of the INAH National Library of Anthropology, and there finished the matter.
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