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MEXICO UNDER CARRANZA
Council of Sequestration although in fact, thanks to the loans which have been granted, the old administration has been tolerated; almost all of its branches have been closed; finally, it has been obliged to loan to the government its entire specie holdings, "gold" and silver."
The experience of the London and Mexico Bank was equally disastrous. On July 3, 1917, the Board of Directors of that Bank published its annual report in El Universal, the leading daily paper of the City of Mexico, in which it said:
"It was then reported that of the amount of more than nineteen million pesos in gold and silver in bars and coin which has been in the bank's vaults, there had been slowly taken away from January 18, 1917, until the present time, the sum of more than seventeen million pesos; there remaining in the vaults, according to information received by the Board of Directors, only about two million pesos. In the report it was stated that the Board of Receivers (a board appointed by and representing the Carranza government), ordered that the cash department and the safes should always remain open, which measure obliged the Board of Directors to put a corps of employees on guard in this department, day and night, to avoid responsibility for abstraction of funds from the vaults falling on those not responsible. "The Board stated categorically that of the $19,611,141 in specie which were in the vaults of the bank, hardly $2,000,000 remain, as the Board
