Page:Mexico under Carranza.djvu/178

162 and Mexico, representing French and English capital. The following description of the way the Carranza government dealt with the Banco Nacional was secured from a man who was at one time connected with that institution. He says:

 "Since the Carranza government came into power the bank has been obliged to accept at par, in payment of the loans which it made formerly, either in specie or notes of the Banco Nacional, the paper money issued by the Carranza government which had depreciated in value and was worth only five or six cents instead of fifty cents (its face value).

"For having tried timidly to prevent the afflux of this depreciated paper in its vaults, the directors of the bank were imprisoned and the employees were molested.

"The paper of the other governments (Villa and Zapata), which the bank was obliged to receive in payment, was declared to be invalid and it had to be remitted to the authorities and destroyed.

"It is thus that more than 30,000,000 pesos in current account alone, representing active funds of the bank amounting to $15,000,000 were reimbursed by paper which, on an average, was not worth more than three or four million dollars.

"On September 15, 1916, Carranza issued a decree annulling the concessions of circulation of the banks, fixing a period of sixty days in which to increase their specie holdings up to an amount equal to the amount of their circulation, establishing Sequestration Councils composed of three