Carlos Fernández-Vega: Mexico Inc.

▲ Members of El Barzón Metropolitano during a protest against Fobaproa in front of the local Superior Court of Justice in September 1996. Photo by Víctor Mendiola

AND

in the banking crisis of 1995 Of the federal government, headed by Ernesto Zedillo, official and unofficial spokesmen were hoarse in their attempt to justify the bank bailout , spreading the official version. Without the rescue of the institutions reprivatized during the Salinas administration, thousands of formal jobs will be lost ; either the bank debtors will pay or the entire society will have to ; and public resources will not be used to provide relief to the minority to the detriment of the majority . At the same time, they missed no opportunity to emphasize the integrity of the bankers and the legality of banking practices .

That was the official rhetoric, but in fact, exactly the opposite happened: banks and bankers were bailed out , and 815,000 formal jobs were lost in 1995; the major debtors defaulted, and the Zedillo government saddled society with the entire price of the mess (which Mexicans still can't seem to pay off), and abundant and growing resources from the public coffers were shamelessly allocated to benefit the minority, while the lack of integrity and illegality of banking practices were exposed.

According to these highly intelligent spokesmen, who was the majority who expected to benefit from the bailout ? According to reports (1995) from the National Banking and Securities Commission, that majority consisted of the owners of just 24,193 bank accounts (0.17 percent of the total accounts, but representing 60 percent of the money deposited in banks) with deposits of nearly 210 billion pesos; In contrast, for them, the unrescuable minority was the approximately 8.5 million accounts (60 percent of the total, but representing 1.09 percent of the total accounts), with deposits of just 4 billion pesos. And it wasn't a question of numbers, but of elitism. The nation's money, at the service of a few.

In other words, Zedillo decided to bail out the majority (those with the most money deposited, but the fewest accounts) and reject those with the fewest resources in the institutions, despite having the majority in terms of accounts. It's almost a tongue-twister, but the obvious goal was to bail out those at the top, pretending they were those at the bottom.

Unless, of course, Zedillo considered –and he still does– that the majority to be rescued was that made up of businessmen like Fernando Senderos Mestre (then in charge of the DESC Group), Fernando Canales Clariond (at that time governor of Nuevo León), José Eduardo Robinson Bours Castelo (Bachoco Group and then president of the Business Coordinating Council; he was governor of Sonora at the time of the tragedy at the ABC daycare center in Hermosillo), Carlos Hank Rhon (heir to El Profesor ), Carlos Cabal Peniche (Salinas de Gortari boasted about him as an example of Mexican businessmen ) and Ángel Isidoro Rodríguez, El Divino (winner of Banpaís who fled the country due to tax evasion).

Also Vicente Fox, Pablo Escandón Cusi (of the pharmaceutical mafia), Manuel Gómez-Daza Rangel and the Ballesteros (plus Claudio X. González Laporte, Agustín F. Legorreta, Valentín Díez Morodo and others in the Mexican Development Group), the inevitable Ricardo Salinas Pliego, Enrique Molina Sobrino (with Salinas de Gortari in Los Pinos he became a Forbes multimillionaire; later he fled) and a few more. That was Zedillo's majority , and the minority - Mexicans as a whole - illegally passed the bill for the bailout on to him.

Do the math: Salinas de Gortari and Pedro Aspe boasted that the bank reprivatization left the government around $13 billion; Zedillo's illegal bailout has cost the nation (capital and interest paid so far) close to $150 billion (11.5 times more than the proceeds from the disincorporation of the institutions), and that's counting, without forgetting that Ernesto handed over the country's financial sovereignty to multinational corporations.

Thus, the Fobaproa robbery is not limited to the nearly 74 billion pesos (more than 10 billion dollars at the time) in related loans (unpaid self-loans from the barons of the reprivatized banks), but to the very illegality of the bailout with national resources.

The slices of the cake

Zedillo says the golden pension he receives from the Bank of Mexico (for just nine years at that institution) is recognition for the services he provided there . Well, if that's the justification, then he should pay the nation for the damage he caused.

X: @cafevega

[email protected]