Treasure Hunters Lurk Honduras´s Copan Ruins

The Mayan culture, harking back over 2,000 years BC, is well alive. Descendants and dregs of its glory days can be found like treasures in a region sprawling from Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras all the way to southeastern Mexico. The entire area is covered by projects aimed at developing sustainable tourism.

Honduras, for its part, cherishes one of the most monumental treasures of the Mayan civilization: the Copan Ruins, unearthed in the late 19th century in a jungle patch in western Honduras. Last year, roughly 120,000 travelers visited the premises, but that figure doesn´t seem to please experts who believe as many as 300,000 trippers could have come to this archeological site if they would have had the means to lure them there.

The Copan Ruins were home to the biggest Mayan settlement in Central America and one of the most advanced civilizations ever to saunter on the face of the earth. For over a hundred years, researchers and historians have studied the Mayans.

Argentina Valle, a congresswoman for the province of Copan, is a passionate watcher of those ruins that so many treasure hunters long for laying their hands on.

She denounced that the government doesn´t count on the necessary funds to keep those treasures safe, valuable things that have lived out thanks to the support of the Inter American Development Bank (BID) and other donors. However, there´s not enough money to look after lots of still unexplored areas, even when all pieces and artifacts are properly logged in registration files.

Mrs. Valle remembers that a severe looting, occurred some four years ago, stripped the ruins of very valuable objects that still remain unaccounted for.

Even the Honduran Congress denounced there´re lots of things going on behind every theft, hinting at the possibility of briberies and cover-ups that prevent law enforcement officers from nabbing perpetrators, Mrs. Valle noted.

"Those are well-organized gangs that come from overseas and relate to people who work in those sites, because those gangs walk out with pieces which are supposed to be restored. They make sure that no precious stones or highly valuable gems are missing," she added.

Congresswoman Valle indicates that jade, not gold, is what lurkers are after in Copan. Smugglers, aware of the fact that former Mayans used to work jade on a regular basis, are more interested in the historical value of artifacts than in the price tag of the object itself. Some of the pieces here are over 3,000 years old.

The Copan Ruins have endured megabuck ransacks and the Queen´s Necklace is a good case in point. Today, only a few beads of that famous piece of jewelry remain in Honduras.

The province of Copan is one of the poorest departments all over Honduras. Nearly 80 percent of its more than a quarter of a million inhabitants live under the poverty line and are illiterates, a situation that has prompted the Mayor´s Office to turn to Congress and the government for more financial support.

Mrs. Valle concluded that the revenues the municipality reaps out of the travel industry "never come around to be used in other projects." In the meantime, a once glamorous location that was declared Heritage of Mankind by UNESCO continues languishing in the shadows of abandonment and neglectfulness.