Fernando: Good evening. It's a special honor for me to be here at National Geographic because probably if I was born again I would give it a try to be part of this organization. My poor kids, all my life whenever we went on vacation, once they told my little daughter said, “Dad, why do we always end up in the boondocks?” Because the passion to go to the jungle, to go to the countryside, to go see nature and be close to it was close to my heart.

I had the pleasure and honor to meet Bill Garrett when he was editor of the magazine. I went to hear him speak at a university in Honduras. Had nothing to do there other than wanted to go hear him speak, and we became very good friends and I enjoyed wonderful trips with him to Maya sites and photography and learned a lot from Bill Garrett. He was the founder of this wonderful organization incorporated here in Virginia, La Ruta Maya Conservation Foundation. His vision was to preserve Maya heritage in different ways. I took the presidency of this organization, and took it to a different emphasis and tried to do with it the best we could to preserve this heritage for Guatemalans.

The piece you'll see on screen is called the Cancuén Panel. It narrates the history of the kings of Cancuén, their heritage, who they fought, who they captured, and so forth, a very important archaeological piece that the foundation acquired, and it keeps today and offers to museums. This piece has traveled the world visiting museums, and we are constantly putting it on loan for exhibits locally. So we promote education and we are also trying to archive and document everything that the collection has.

These pieces on screen are vases that were acquired here in United States, or received as donations here in United States that were sent back home. The piece here on the left is very important because that little Mickey Mouse guy with the ears on the bottom is the glyph for Mirador, a site in the jungles of Guatemala, pre-classic site, and this glass was used to drink chocolate by the king when he was appointed king. Around the vase it says who his grandfather was, who his father was, who he is, and today he's appointed king of Mirador with the dates of all this. This is called an ascension cup, archaeologically extremely interesting and extremely valuable. This piece was donated by a collector here in United States.

Pieces very artistic or archaeologically very important are what we are endeavoring to bring to Guatemalans through the collection. We brought a container of pieces out of United States in one shipment. Sofia Paredes, the executive director of the foundation, you can see her smile on the face because she was so happy these pieces were coming back home.

Bringing pieces back to Guatemala is not a simple story. There's no legislation to bring them into the country, so I bumped into customs with legislation that treats these pieces that are Guatemalan pieces as merchandise. They want us to pay duties when we bring them in. I raise hell and I don't pay the duties, and I find a way to bring them in because I was so offended when they told me that we had to pay duties. I said, “These are Guatemalans coming back to Guatemala. You cannot charge us for it.” And I even threatened to take them back bring them back to the States. But the truth is the fellow from customs said, “Please don't be angry with me. I just don't have legislation to back me up, and I have to charge the duty.” So I got the Ministry of Culture to run them through customs for me, and they avoided the law and we did not pay. We did not pay the duties. We have a law right now in hands of Congress that we have worked and spent quite a bit of effort to correct this so we can in the future import these pieces legally.

In 2012 we bought these pieces in California. They were part of a private collection, very important pieces. These are part of a staircase of La Corona, a very important site that archaeologists were crazy looking for because they only knew by reference with other sites that La Corona existed and it was finally found. These pieces, the companion of these pieces are in American museums illegally. We're going to ask nicely to see if we can get them back, and if not, later we will think of other ways. But these pieces need to go back. They left the country illegally. We can prove that. We have photographs of archaeologists at the site with these pieces. And the last piece is very interesting because it says this king enjoyed drinking pulque which is a wine made out of maize, corn. So the Maya had a lot of sense of humor. Not everything they put on their stelaes is very important information like this one saying that he was drinking pulque. But they're very important archaeologically for us.

Every piece we have we invest huge effort in documenting them. Our files for every piece are as good as any museum here in the States. We're very proud of that, and we are working to put all these photographs online, high resolution, 20 megapixel photography. We're putting them online as we speak. Every piece, we abide by the law, it's properly registered with the National Registry of Antiquities, and the instant they become part of that registry, they obviously are available to any researcher. But if a researcher comes to us, we make the pieces available, the photography, everything available for free. Our collection is right now 3,300 pieces that are registered. Some as I say are extremely valuable and very important. Every museum in the country has pieces from our collection.

We focus today on that effort of documenting and repatriating, and we have received donations from Guatemalan collectors, or international collectors. One of the most touching moments for me, I went to a house of a friend, gives me a piece and I am admiring it. I said, “My, God, this is really an important piece, and I'm putting it back on the shelf.” He said, “No, no, no, no. Take it. It's for you. It's for the museum. It's for the foundation.” My hair just, you know, you can imagine the emotion of receiving that, and I have a friend in North Carolina and he puts in my hands a mosaic jade mask, and I'm putting it back. He says, “No, no. Take it, but take it fast before I change my mind.” And I took it in my hand and I smuggled into the country and it is happily sitting in a museum in Museo Miraflores in Guatemala City today.

So this effort it's controversial. Some archaeologists don't like what I do. I'm very proud of what I do, and we can have a very solid discussion about it, and we can agree to disagree, but these are public places where our pieces are exhibited. They have no place in a warehouse. I don't have enough places to exhibit them, and we need to create a place, a world-class place to exhibit. The Arts Show of Los Angeles invited us to exhibit there, and we presented the piece in the center there. It's almost 10 feet long. It's a monumental piece. It's a very important piece we acquired from a collector. These pieces today should be the core of a museum.

These pieces are part of the collection like this rattle here on the left for a child, or for an instrument for music. You can see they're really fun and very beautiful some of them. For example, this bust is the only bust that we know that comes from Tikal, very beautiful also. That piece we acquired in Florida. The one on the right there is another vessel to drink chocolate. Maya considered chocolate very important, and it says, Lord how so and so. This is his cup for chocolate just like you have one in the kitchen that says sugar and he had one that says chocolate. These are really fun pieces, very beautiful.

This takes us to the big dream. We want to create a museum, world-class museum. We want to replicate the success of cities in Europe like Bilbao, and the Museum of Bilbao that changed a fairly ugly industrial city into a cultural destination. Today Bilbao has 1.1 million tourists a year it did not receive before. Bilbao formerly was a crisis in Spain this last few years, because Bilbao was receiving double or triple the tourism than the rest of the country was because of one museum. If we can do that for Guatemala, we can increase the GNP by 1%. Because the country receives 1.8 million tourists a year, I think the museum can bring 600,000 people a year. The math we do with the government one percentage increase in gross national product that could be done through culture through an institution like this. I won't bore you with the museum, but that's my big dream today. I'm dedicating and committing probably the next 10 or 20 years of my life that I hope we can enjoy to bring a world-class museum dedicated to the preservation of this wonderful heritage. We went to the best architects of the world, and we found some architects in Switzerland. This is seen from an airplane view over the museum. This is the view of what we intend to build. It's a 60,000 square foot building. It will take quite a bit of money that we need to raise, and we're in the process of that. The government will give us the land.

There's a lot more to talk about that, but the purpose is conservation. The purpose is to bring well-being to our country through tourism, and for me one of the biggest purposes is to give the Maya people of my country a sense of pride of being Indian, a sense of pride of being Maya because there is a huge heritage to be proud of and a museum like this would be built and created to celebrate that heritage. So National Geographic with this invitation is giving us credibility for this effort and for that I thank you very much. Thank you.