Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez announced Saturday thousands of stolen antiquities will be returned to Ecuador and Peru and firmly called on other countries to either follow her lead or pay up.
After 15 years of investigation, Argentine police recovered a total of 3,982 ancient artefacts belonging to Peru and another 518 to Ecuador, which were found in private homes, shops, and fairs.
"We are doing something unusual, unprecedented, restoring cultural heritage to other countries, in this case Ecuador and Peru, to whom we are restoring more than 4,000 pieces of art that were stolen and were recovered," Fernandez said.
She criticized Western countries for historically robbing other nations from their cultural heritage and displaying them in their museums.
"We live in a world that has been characterized by great powers in snatching the cultural heritage of peoples. In the world's most importan museums one can see pieces from Greece, Syria, Egypt, Asia and even from our Latin America, and that are not returned," she said.
To address this problem, the president called for the creation of a “cultural patent” so that “countries that still have not returned cultural treasures should at least pay the countries to which they belong a sort of 'royalty,' because they were made by cultures that are not theirs."
RELATED: Argentina Replaces Columbus Statue with Indigenous Heroine
Kirchner made the announcement at the official opening of 18 exhibition rooms of the National Museum of Fine Arts, which was attended by both Ecuadorean and Peruvian officials.
Argentina is not the first country to call for the return of ancient artefacts originally belonging to other nations, but now mostly located in Europe and the United States.
Egypt, for instance, has long pled for the repatriation of the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin's Egyptian Museum and Rosetta Stone in the British Museum in London. Both museums have denied the request even though they were taken out of Egypt when it was under colonial rule.
Libya has also pushed the British Museum to get the Apollo at Cyrene back, while Peru succesfully retrieved its Machu Picchu collection from Yale University after a lawsuit in 2008.