The FBI has returned a 500 -year -old stolen document signed by Spanish winner Hernan Cortes in Mexico.
The US investigating agency said that the manuscript was written in page 1527 and is one of the 15 pages that were swipe from the National Archives of Mexico between 1985 and 1993.
Page – which describes the payment made for supply for campaigns – was discovered in the US and rented on Wednesday.
Cortes were a explorer who brought about the end of the Aztec Empire and helped to pave the way for the US Spanish colonization. The description of the manuscript is planning for his visit which will become a new Spain.
At its height, the colony extended to western and central North America and Latin America.
The first missing documents were written after the cortes that the Governor of New Spain was made by the Spanish Crown.
The National Archives of Mexico counted the document among a collection of letters signed by the cortes – but found that 15 pages were missing when put on the microfilm in 1993.
The recovered page had bored a number written in the wax which was implemented by the archivist in 1985–1986, suggesting that it was stolen between two cataloging periods.
The Mexican government requested the FBI’s art crime team assisting in finding the missing documents in 2024, providing notes which pages were taken and how some pages were torn.
The FBI said open-source research showed that the document was located in the US.
The agency did not reveal where the manuscript page was found or when it was confiscated.
According to Jessica Ditmer, the special agent of the FBI’s art crime team, no one would face prosecution on theft as the page had “changed hands several times” as it was stolen.
The document “really gives great taste because the preparation of the unwanted area for planning and preparation”, he said, “underlining the payment of common gold pesos for spending in preparation for the search of the spice land”.
The so -called “Spice Lands” were regions of Eastern and Southern Asia. Europeans sought to find a quick trade route with these areas by sailing the West, but instead landed in the US.
Cortés will go to detect northwest Mexico and Baja California Peninsula.
The repatriation of the document comes during political tension between Mexico and the US amid illegal migration on the Tariff and the US-Maxico border imposed by the Trump administration.
But the FBI says that, as one of the largest consumers of antiques, the US had the responsibility of fighting the smuggling of artifacts.
Ms. Ditmer said: “Such pieces are considered a protected cultural property and represent valuable moments in the history of Mexico, so this is something that people of Mexico are in their archives for the purpose of better understanding history.”
The FBI said it was determined to detect and revive other pages disappearing from the collection.
Another document signed by Cortés returned to Mexico by FBI in 2023.
