Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [95]
I wanted to meet Karp-Toledo because she was widely perceived—largely through her own efforts—to be Hiram Bingham’s worst living enemy. In 2002, the Yale scholars Richard Burger and Lucy Salazar had approached Karp-Toledo about Peru’s cooperation in an exhibition they were assembling around Bingham’s Machu Picchu artifacts. Karp-Toledo agreed to a meeting with her own agenda in mind. She had asked some Peruvian researchers to look into the Bingham situation and came away convinced that the 1912 edict that Bingham had agreed to in order to get his relics out of the country required Yale to return the artifacts. “We provided talking points that represented the position of the president,” Karp-Toledo told me. “Everything started with two points: One, we wanted to take an inventory of the pieces at Yale. Two, everything had to come back to Peru. We said, ‘Nothing happens if you don’t start with those two points.’” Yale declined, and the Machu Picchu show toured without Peru’s assistance. Karp-Toledo kept pushing the subject. In the meantime, the National Geographic Society reviewed their records and sided with Peru—in their opinion, Yale should send everything back. “In 2005, my husband, in front of the board of directors of the National Geographic Society, picked up the phone and said to the president of Yale, ‘We need to discuss this.’ The president of Yale never returned the call, from the president of a sovereign nation. That’s very disdainful.”
Karp-Toledo was certain that Yale had waited for the clock to run out on her husband’s administration. In September 2007, a year after the Toledos had left Peru for Stanford, Yale and Peru announced that a “memo of understanding” had been reached under which the Bingham items would be returned. Initially, it sounded like a good deal for both sides. Yale would give back more than three hundred “museum-quality” pieces. For the time being, the university would hold on to a less exciting-sounding “research collection.” Yale would reassemble the Burger-Salazar show, which would make a new tour of museums to help pay for a new Machu Picchu Museum and Research Center in Cusco. (Peru would pick up the rest of the tab.) With a little elbow grease, both parties could look forward to a 2011 ribbon cutting. The memo stated that “it is intended that the international opening of the new Museum will coincide with the centennial celebration of Bingham’s rediscovery of Machu Picchu.”
“Do you know what they did?” Karp-Toledo asked me, her dainty hands throttling her gigantic herbal tea. “They sent a cartoonist to do the negotiating with Yale!” (Actually, the negotiator was Peru’s minister of housing, who’d written children’s books that were made into animated movies.) “I found this ‘memo of understanding’ on the Web, and I couldn’t believe it!” The fine-print details did seem to favor Yale. While the university acknowledged Peru’s title to all the artifacts, they reserved the right to keep the “fragments, bones and specimens” for use in “ongoing research,” which turned out to mean for an additional ninety-nine years.
Karp-Toledo was out of power but she wasn’t powerless. In February 2008 she wrote an Op-Ed column for The New York Times, in which she said the agreement reflected Yale’s “colonial way of thinking.” The subsequent uproar made the deal politically untenable. By the end of 2008, Peru was suing for the artifacts in U.S. district court, on the grounds that Bingham’s concession clearly stated that the relics would be returned when requested. Yale rejected Peru’s claims as “stale and meritless.” And so, fifty years after Bingham’s death, Yale and Peru were fighting