Publicizing the fight against the illicit trade in African art, and simplistically connecting plunder to poverty, the Malian state catered to the donor priorities of cultural development and poverty alleviation. Malian elites promoted a misleading image of poverty not only as structural but also as the cause of the looting, and presented farmers simultaneously as looters and victims of the market economy, thereby obscuring poverty s true causes. My paper will investigate this image of structural poverty by analyzing press articles of the 1990s that addressed the looting of archaeological sites in Africa, especially in Mali. In doing so, I will show that the Malian government s discourse on looting and poverty betrays a lack of interest in the deep country.