1789 Jesuit map of the present-day Bolivian provinces of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Chiquitos, and the Brazilian state of Mata Grosso. Showing Extent and Location of the Governments of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Matogroso, Cuyaba, and Towns of Native Americans Called Chiquitos. Public domain. CCP opposes renewing the U.S.–Bolivia MOU because the import restrictions have been in place since December 4, 2001—nearly a quarter century, with renewals in 2006, 2011, 2016, and 2021—yet Bolivia has not shown meaningful, measurable progress in protecting its patrimony or meeting the practical “self-help” expectations that were written into earlier MOUs and never fulfilled. Over that long period, CCP argues, Bolivia has not produced transparent evidence of basic protective steps such as workable inventories, consistent enforcement outcomes, or reliable reporting on thefts, prosecutions, and recoveries, and the restrictions have instead become effectively permanent while looting and theft are described as continuing. CCP also points to the near-absence of reciprocal cultural exchange—particularly the failure to facilitate loans and museum collaboration with the United States—as proof that the MOU has not delivered the public benefits it was supposed to support, and therefore should expire on December 4, 2026 rather than be extended again.
As published in the Federal Register.
To the Members of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee:
The Committee for Cultural Policy, Inc. (“CCP”)[1] respectfully submits its opposition to the proposed five-year extension of the Memorandum of Understanding (“MOU” or “Agreement”) between the United States and the Plurinational State of Bolivia, noticed for CPAC’s March 3–5, 2026 meeting and the associated public comment process.[2]
CCP is a U.S.-based nonprofit educational organization dedicated to the study of cultural property law and policy, the promotion of responsible preservation practices, and the lawful international exchange of art and antiquities for scientific, cultural, and educational purposes. CCP has participated in CPAC proceedings for many years and has a longstanding record of engagement on CPIA implementation, museum ethics, archaeological practice, and the cultural rights of source-country and diaspora communities.
I. Introduction
The United States and Bolivia entered into a Cultural Property Agreement on December 4, 2001, pursuant to a request from the Government of the Republic of Bolivia under Article 9 of the 1970 UNESCO Convention concerning the protection of cultural property.
“The United States found the cultural heritage of Bolivia to be in jeopardy from pillage and agreed to impose import restrictions on certain categories of material. The aim is to decrease the incentive to pillage thereby providing a measure of protection to sites and artifacts that are important for understanding Bolivian culture and for preserving traditional religious practices.”[3]
In the 2001, 2006, and 2011 MOUs with Bolivia, the United States added conditions it expected Bolivia to fulfill in Article II. At no time did Bolivia even begin to comply with these conditions.
Writing in May 2016, fifteen years after the first U.S.-Bolivian MOU, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the organization most concerned with retaining access to art for the U.S. public, issued a strong condemnation of Bolivia’s failure to step up to meet the requirements of the Cultural Property Implementation Act (CPIA). The museums argued that import restrictions have failed to curb looting due to poor enforcement, violating the CPIA’s fundamental principle of “helping those who help themselves”. They emphasized that restrictions must not hinder cultural exchange and criticize Bolivian law for complicating legal loans, making U.S. presentation of Bolivian-owned artifacts impossible.
“Sadly, Bolivia appears to be yet another example of a country seeking ongoing import restrictions that no doubt were well intended when initially implemented [in 2001] but nevertheless have not resulted in any measurable progress. Looting and illicit trafficking of cultural patrimony remain virtually unchecked due to an apparently apathetic government unwilling or unable to enforce its own long-established law. The Committee must not turn a blind eye toward this situation. Doing so would not be the result contemplated by the CPIA, which is premised in large part upon the equitable principle of helping those who help themselves…”
“While the laws currently in place may demonstrate a legislative concern for the cultural heritage of Bolivia, this is not a substitute for action. Despite these laws and stiff penalties on paper, looting continues apparently undeterred due to legal loopholes, blurred lines of responsibility, and delayed or non-existent responses from law enforcement officials…”
“Perhaps the best evidence of the Bolivian government’s failure to enforce its cultural patrimony laws is the fact that communities take it upon themselves to capture and punish looters—even by way of execution. One must seriously question whether recommending renewal of the MOU amounts to the Committee’s tacit endorsement of Bolivia’s lack of law enforcement and resulting self-help force by its citizens.”[4]
By the time of the 2016 renewal, the State Department had given up even attempting to get art source countries to take the serious self-help responsibilities set forth in the statue and eliminated the MOU’s Article II provisions altogether.
Now, after another decade of Bolivian disfunction with respect to preservation of heritage, CCP urges CPAC to recommend against extension of the current U.S.–Bolivia Agreement. The proposed extension is not supported by a transparent, evidence-based showing that Bolivia continues to satisfy the CPIA’s four statutory determinations as applied to the exceptionally broad categories now restricted. After nearly a quarter-century of continuing restrictions under this bilateral framework, the public record does not demonstrate that the Agreement’s scope is appropriately tailored to cultural material demonstrably in jeopardy from pillage that is materially deterred by U.S. import restrictions, nor that Bolivia has taken the kind of measurable “self-help” steps that Congress intended to be prerequisites for continuing U.S. trade restrictions.
If, notwithstanding these concerns, any extension is contemplated, it should be narrowly tailored to high-risk, clearly documented categories and conditioned on concrete, verifiable benchmarks, including public inventory progress, transparent enforcement data, and practical measures to facilitate legitimate research and museum exchange.
II. The CPIA standard for extension requires a current, evidence-based showing on all four determinations.
The CPIA authorizes import restrictions only when the United States can make all four determinations set out in 19 U.S.C. § 2602(a)(1). For an extension, the statute requires that the conditions justifying the agreement continue to exist and that no cause for suspension exists, with CPAC advising on the determinations the Act requires. The relevant determinations are: (1) that the cultural patrimony of the requesting nation is in jeopardy from pillage; (2) that the requesting nation has taken measures consistent with the Convention to protect its cultural patrimony (commonly described as “self-help”); (3) that import restrictions would be of substantial benefit in deterring pillage and that remedies less drastic are not available; and (4) that the restrictions are consistent with the general interest of the international community in the interchange of cultural property among nations for scientific, cultural, and educational purposes.
In the public record now available concerning Bolivia’s request, the Department’s notice of the proposed extension provides purely procedural information and directs commenters to State Department webpages for the agreement and designated list, but it does not supply a factual showing that would allow the public—or CPAC—to evaluate whether the CPIA’s legal predicates are satisfied for renewal of a broad, multi-category designated list.[5] When the scope of restricted material spans millennia and includes wide-ranging ethnological categories, CPAC’s obligation to insist on specificity and current evidence is at its highest.
III. The Bolivia Agreement has become long-term and expansive, while the statute contemplates targeted, conditional, and evidence-based restrictions.
The United States entered into the bilateral agreement with Bolivia on December 4, 2001[6], and the restrictions have been repeatedly extended in five-year increments, including extensions effective in 2006, 2011, 2016, and 2021. The current restrictions are effective through December 4, 2026, and Bolivia now seeks a further five-year extension.[7]
The implementing notices describing the scope of restricted material have consistently stated that the archaeological material covered is from Bolivia’s pre-Columbian cultures, ranging in date from approximately 10,000 B.C. to A.D. 1532, and that the ethnological materials covered are from the Colonial and Republican periods, ranging in date from A.D. 1533 to 1900.[8] In practice, that scope is extremely broad: it covers almost all major classes of ancient material culture and extends into the historic period in ways that predictably encompass ecclesiastical, liturgical, and other historic materials that may be widely held, legally transferred, and frequently undocumented at an object-by-object level over long periods.
As both CCP and the AAMD have warned in prior CPAC proceedings on Bolivia, the designated list’s breadth, combined with the nature of documentation for many lawful objects, creates predictable barriers to legitimate museum activity and scholarly circulation, while the record of actual deterrence is not meaningfully documented in public sources.[9] AAMD’s objections are particularly salient here because it represents collecting museums that engage in acquisition standards, provenance research, and international lending, and therefore has direct experience with how CPIA restrictions affect legitimate educational exchange and the museum public.
IV. The Determinations
Determination One: Bolivia has not shown that the full scope of restricted categories remains in jeopardy from pillage for a U.S. market.
No serious observer disputes that Bolivia has faced theft and trafficking of certain categories of cultural property, including colonial ecclesiastical objects stolen from rural churches and chapels, and theft of certain community-linked ethnological materials. News reporting has described patterns of church theft and “to-order” criminal activity directed at foreign buyers, including claims that foreign collector demand contributes to repeated theft.[10] Scholars studying the illicit trade have also documented repeated theft incidents and the pressures that such theft places on local communities and local security conditions.[11]
Yet the CPIA requires more than a generalized showing that theft occurs. The jeopardy finding must be meaningfully tied to “cultural patrimony” at risk from “pillage,” and, critically for the U.S. restriction mechanism, the categories restricted must be those where U.S. import restrictions plausibly address the relevant demand-side incentives. The problem for Bolivia’s request is that, even if certain theft patterns continue, the current designated list extends far beyond the categories that are shown in the public record to be (a) actively pillaged now, (b) trafficked into the United States in significant quantities as a principal destination market, and (c) deterred through border restrictions rather than through targeted investigative cooperation and improved local stewardship.
Both scholarship and reporting indicate that theft in Bolivia often targets colonial ecclesiastical art and precious-metal religious objects held in vulnerable rural settings.[12] Those items, however, are not simply “ethnological materials of a nonindustrial society” in the sense Congress used in the CPIA. They are frequently products of colonial and post-colonial artistic workshops integrated into transregional artistic economies, and their theft is bound up with security, poverty, and governance problems at the local level.[13] That reality is relevant to CPIA analysis because it underscores that looting in these categories is not necessarily responsive to U.S. import restrictions imposed across a vast range of archaeological and ethnological classes, especially when trafficking routes can shift to other markets and when theft can be motivated by local resale or by the melt value of metals rather than by U.S. collector demand.
In short, Bolivia’s request may be able to show that some cultural heritage faces risks. The missing element in the publicly available record is a specific, current, category-by-category showing that justifies continuing restrictions across the full designated list in the form presently implemented. CPAC should not recommend extension where the requesting state’s showing cannot be tested and where restrictions are not demonstrably tied to current jeopardy across the covered categories.
Determination Two: The public record does not demonstrate the “self-help” Congress required as a predicate to continuing U.S. import restrictions.
Pursuant to the CPIA’s second determination, Congress required source countries to take meaningful measures within their own borders to protect and document cultural patrimony, because import restrictions were intended to be part of a broader, cooperative strategy, not a substitute for governance, inventory, security, and transparent enforcement.
Bolivia’s heritage administration has continuing problems directly relevant to “self-help,” including the need for improved inventorying and documentation, stronger domestic controls and enforcement capacity, and practical systems that enable identification of stolen items and facilitate legitimate loans and exchange.¹² Independent scholarship examining the illicit market in Bolivian cultural objects likewise emphasizes the limitations of source-end regulation in environments where institutions are under-resourced and where communities may resort to informal or extralegal measures – including lynching the alleged perpetrators – in response to recurring theft.¹³
After many years of restrictions and multiple renewals, the burden is on the requesting state to show progress that is measurable, verifiable, and related to the statutory purposes.
The public notices and extension documents available in the record emphasize that restrictions continue, but they do not provide any information showing improvements such as: working to complete object inventories effectively abandoned in the 1980 that are accessible for identification purposes; regular, published enforcement statistics for cultural property crimes; transparent reporting on recoveries, prosecutions, and convictions; or nationwide programs that materially reduce vulnerability of sites, museums, or ecclesiastical collections. None of this has happened.
Absent that kind of evidence, CPAC has no justification for endorsing the “self-help” determination as a basis for yet another five-year continuation. An extension recommendation without demonstrable self-help outcomes has resulted in converting CPIA agreements into rolling, effectively permanent restrictions, completely contrary to the Act’s structure and purpose.
Determination Three: The United States has not shown that continuing broad restrictions provide “substantial benefit” compared to less drastic remedies, particularly after 25 years of restrictions.
The third determination has two parts: substantial benefit and lack of less drastic remedies. It is not enough to assert that import restrictions “help”; the CPIA requires that restrictions be of substantial benefit in deterring pillage and that less drastic remedies are unavailable.
Here, the history of the Bolivia Agreement should matter. The Agreement has been in place since 2001, renewed multiple times, and supplemented by the general U.S. enforcement framework against smuggling and trafficking. If broad import restrictions were substantially deterring pillage of the covered categories, one would expect the public record—after decades—to reflect a measurable reduction in the relevant looting incentives, or at least a transparent accounting of interdictions and deterrence outcomes associated with the MOU. Yet the publicly available extension and proposal notices do not provide any such evidence.
Meanwhile, both scholarship and reporting suggest that the theft market for certain Bolivian materials is shaped by local vulnerability, limited guardianship, and the ability of criminal actors to exploit rural sites.[14] That points toward remedies that are less drastic than broad U.S. import restrictions and likely more effective, including investments in inventorying and public registries, targeted policing capacity, church and site security measures, and investigative cooperation focused on active trafficking networks. We have previously emphasized that improvements in documentation and exchange mechanisms are central to responsible policy and that overly broad lists impose significant costs on legitimate museum exchange and scholarship.
There is also an administrative concern that goes directly to whether broad restrictions are a sensible “benefit” tool: when restrictions cover large classes of objects spanning long date ranges, and border enforcement frequently relies on the presence or absence of documentation that may not exist for lawfully exported or long-circulating material. The result can be a chilling effect on legitimate research circulation without a commensurate increase in interdiction of truly high-risk objects—particularly where sophisticated traffickers can route objects through third countries and disguise origins.
Finally, the “concerted international response” logic underlying CPIA policy is undermined where, year after year, the restrictions function primarily as U.S.-only trade controls without a demonstrated multilateral enforcement and stewardship strategy on the ground. CPAC should therefore treat the “substantial benefit” showing as unproven and should not recommend extension unless the Department and Bolivia can supply a concrete, verifiable account of outcomes and why narrower alternatives are insufficient.
Determination Four: Broad continuing restrictions are inconsistent with the CPIA’s interchange requirement and risk chilling the very educational exchange the Act is supposed to support.
The CPIA expressly conditions import restrictions on their consistency with “the general interest of the international community in the interchange of cultural property among nations for scientific, cultural, and educational purposes.” This requirement is not satisfied by the mere existence of an agreement, nor by occasional cultural diplomacy events. It demands a genuine policy environment that supports research access, museum loans, collaborative exhibitions, and lawful movement of cultural objects for education and scholarship.
Overbroad designated lists and uncertain documentation burdens impede legitimate museum activity, including loans and research circulation, scholarship in the United States, and public access to U.S. communities that share Bolivian heritage and history
Those concerns go to the heart of the interchange determination. When restrictions are expansive, long-running, and not tied to evidence of deterrence, they eliminate lawful educational exchange rather than stooping criminal actors.
Moreover, when “self-help” measures such as inventorying and accessible documentation systems are not in place, museums and scholars suffer twice: they face higher risk in lending and borrowing, and source-country institutions lose opportunities for collaboration that would increase international visibility and potentially enable identification of stolen material. The interchange determination therefore weighs against renewing sweeping restrictions unless there is progress on the infrastructure that makes interchange safe and meaningful.
V. The designated list is overbroad under the statute and should not be extended in its current form.
Even accepting that some Bolivian cultural heritage remains at risk, the designated list’s structure and date ranges raise statutory concerns. The archaeological component reaches back to approximately 10,000 B.C. and extends through A.D. 1532. The ethnological component reaches from A.D. 1533 to 1900. As implemented, that scope inevitably includes major categories of historic ecclesiastical art and colonial-era production that do not fit the CPIA’s concept of “ethnological material of the State Party” that is “the product of a tribal or nonindustrial society” and “important to the cultural heritage” of that society as ethnological material.
We have previously urged the Department and CPAC to consider narrowing and tailoring the list and to avoid overbreadth that burdens legitimate museum exchange. CCP agrees. Overbroad lists invite misuse of CPIA mechanisms as general cultural property leverage rather than as targeted anti-pillage tools. They also risk sweeping into restriction categories many ordinary historic objects for which lawful movement and educational exchange should be facilitated, not presumptively blocked.
Requested outcome.
For the reasons above, CCP respectfully requests that CPAC recommend that the Department of State deny Bolivia’s request for a five-year extension and allow the current restrictions to expire on December 4, 2026.
If CPAC nonetheless contemplates some form of extension, CCP urges CPAC to recommend, at minimum, that any renewed agreement be narrowed and conditioned on measurable, publicly verifiable benchmarks, including meaningful progress on inventories and accessible documentation, documented enforcement, and concrete steps that facilitate legitimate museum and scholarly interchange while placing restrictions only on categories shown by current evidence to be at risk from pillage – that U.S. import restrictions can reasonably deter.
Thank you for your consideration of this submission.
Respectfully submitted,, Kate Fitz Gibbon, Executive Director Committee for Cultural Policy, Inc.
[1] Committee for Cultural Policy, Inc. POB 4881, Santa Fe, NM 87502, publishes Cultural Property News, www.culturalproprtynews.org, a free, online art and cultural heritage news magazine, and publications on international laws on cultural heritage at Cultural Property Law, www.culturalpropertylaw.org.
[2] U.S. Department of State, Proposal To Extend the Cultural Property Agreement Between the United States and Bolivia (proposed extension under 19 U.S.C. 2602(f)(1)).
[3] U.S. Department of State Archive, Media Note, The United States and Bolivia Extend Cultural Property Agreement, 2006/1091, December 5, 2006, https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2006/77382.htm.
[4] Statement of the Association of Art Museum Directors Concerning the Proposed Extension of the Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Bolivia Concerning the Imposition of Import Restrictions on Archaeological Material from the Pre-Columbian Cultures and Certain Ethnological Material from the Colonial and Republican Periods of Bolivia, Meeting of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, May 24, 2016., available at https://culturalpropertynews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AAMD-CPAC-2014-Bolivia-MOU.pdf
[5] U.S. Department of State, Proposal To Extend the Cultural Property Agreement Between the United States and Bolivia (proposed extension under 19 U.S.C. 2602(f)(1)). (notice directs commenters to State Department webpages for the agreement and designated list; notice itself does not provide a public evidentiary showing).
[6] Memorandum of Understanding Between the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and BOLIVIA Signed at Washington December 4, 2001 And Agreement Amending and Extending the Memorandum of Understanding Effected by Exchange of Notes at La Paz November 27 and 29, 2006 And Agreement Extending the Memorandum of Understanding Effected by Exchange of Notes at La Paz October 31 and November 10, 2011, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/01-1204-Bolivia-Cultural-Exchanges-Property-Misc-Agreement-11.10.2011.pdf
[7] U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Extension of Import Restrictions Imposed on Certain Archaeological and Ethnological Material of Bolivia (effective December 4, 2021; restrictions continue through December 4, 2026).
[8] U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Extension of Import Restrictions Imposed on Archaeological and Ethnological Material from Bolivia (date ranges for covered archaeological and ethnological material).
[9] Supra, n.4
[10] Paola Flores and Frank Bajak, “Rural Andean churches plagued by sacred art thefts,” Associated Press, August 26, 2013, reporting on theft from Andean churches including by corrupt priests and foreign demand claims, https://apnews.com/article/8132add05c124384a48d1716188fe8b9.
[11] Yates, D. Church Theft, Insecurity, and Community Justice: The Reality of Source-End Regulation of the Market for Illicit Bolivian Cultural Objects. Eur J Crim Policy Res 20, 445–457 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-014-9232-z (presenting lynching in Bolivia as the most severe community response to the issues created by local politics, ineffectual policing, unenforceable laws, and a history of oppressive racism).
[12] Yates, Donna, Reality and Practicality: Challenges to Effective Cultural Property Policy on the Ground in Latin America. International Journal of Cultural Property. 2015;22(2-3):337-356. doi:10.1017/S0940739115000156, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-cultural-property/article/abs/reality-and-practicality-challenges-to-effective-cultural-property-policy-on-the-ground-in-latin-america/9AE1F3F6F577FBA82FD520192325AAD1 (discussing theft patterns affecting conquest/colonial artworks and related enforcement realities).
[13] Id.
[14] Id.
