Post by sometimeman on Oct 11, 2008 18:43:50 GMT -4
Encouraged by the banks, farmers had borrowed beyond their means to position themselves for the never-materialized bonanza of the North American Free Trade Agreement (TLCAN are its Spanish initials) and couldn't pay up. The banks foreclosed on family farms, ranches, machinery, and herds of livestock.
Urban borrowers, squeezed by the soaring rates, lost taxis and taco stands, their furniture and their apartments. The banks hired armed, off-duty cops who broke down the doors of the debtors, terrorizing their families. Over a thousand citizens were unlawfully jailed and charged with theft.
By February 1995, Mexico had lurched into its deepest economic slide since the Great Depression. Indeed, depression was the mood of the day. Farmers drank pesticide to end it all or poured gasoline over their bodies and immolated themselves in despair. 33 citizens leaped to their deaths before onrushing trains down in the Mexico City Metro in 1996, a record.
But other debtors organized and fought back. El Barzon which took its name from a popular depression-era tune (the "barzon" was the strap that fastened the plough to the mule team) mobilized farmers and cityslickers alike. Bank officials were tarred and feathered, highway tollbooths burnt to the ground. In Mexico City, the Barzonistas sealed bank doors shut with superglue and marched through the streets in their underwear or less or clothed only in barrels in classic Great Depression style. One day, El Barzon paraded a circus the banks had foreclosed on to the great doors of the Bank of Mexico where the elephants took dumps on the marble steps, a steaming souvenir for the hated bankers.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency told the daily business journal El Financiero that the Barzon movement was even more subversive than the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the Indian rebels in Chiapas whom Zedillo was falsely blaming for destabilizing Mexico and triggering the collapse.
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