They Have Looted Us: Mexico's 1982 Bank Nationalization

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 1 September 1982, in his final state of the nation address, President Jose Lopez Portillo told Mexico that its private bankers had looted the country and would not be permitted to loot it again, and announced the nationalization of every private bank in Mexico. The declaration came three weeks after Mexico's finance minister had privately told the IMF, the US Federal Reserve and the US Treasury that the country could not make an upcoming debt payment, the moment usually marked as the start of the wider Latin American debt crisis. The peso had already fallen from roughly 25 to the dollar in February to over 100 by late August, with a black market rate near 200 to 1. The government closed the banks to the public for five days while it worked out the takeover, assumed roughly ten billion dollars of private foreign debt on top of the fifty seven billion the public sector already owed, and watched its own central bank director resign in protest of the accompanying exchange controls. Lopez Portillo's speech, and the bank doors closed behind it, became one of the crisis's defining images: a government publicly assigning blame at the very moment its own economic model was collapsing.