Critics of Mexico Economy Bare Their Anger : Crisis: Protesters offer bank teller the clothes off their backs. They belong to fast-growing citizens group.

Jose Maria Imaz strode into the crowded bank in the modern Perisur shopping mall Wednesday morning, looking every inch the newest breed of Mexican revolutionary.

He was not wearing a ski mask nor carrying a rifle. The 31-year-old businessman, in fact, was naked to his undershorts under a sandwich board bearing protest slogans, as he and three other nearly naked men took the clothes off their backs to Teller 19 for deposit.

“I want to pay my debt, but there is no money,” Imaz said, squeezing his shirt and pants through the teller’s window slot. “My clothes are all I have left, and now they’re yours.”

Then, as dozens of customers and the shotgun-toting bank guards stood by, confused but interested, Imaz read his group’s two-page manifesto against Mexico’s spiraling consumer debt.

The protest was staged by the fast-growing citizens group called El Barzon, or Oxen’s Yoke. On a day when Mexico’s bellwether interest rates again soared--driving consumer credit above 80% a year for the second time since January--Wednesday’s protest was a stark reminder that the economic crisis continues to push millions ever deeper into debt.

It also dramatized the political impact of the crisis: El Barzon, which began as a small, rural group of frustrated farmers two years ago, has mushroomed this year into a potentially powerful political force that has embraced the fury of the urban middle class.

The group now claims a nationwide membership of 1.2 million, although critics place hard-core membership at about a tenth of that.

It has staged protests at banks in Acapulco. In the northeastern city of Monterrey, Barzonistas have flooded local banks with more than 80,000 lawsuits to paralyze their legal departments. The group’s members have sealed off major highways with tractors in rural areas and carried coffins representing Mexico’s emerging middle class through the streets of Guadalajara.

Figures released by the government on Tuesday showed that there is fertile ground for El Barzon’s self-styled economic revolutionaries: By year’s end, inflation will have topped 51%, keeping interest rates in the stratosphere; more than 1 million Mexicans will have lost jobs, and consumer spending will have fallen.

Among the worst hit are the estimated 6 million Mexicans now living with debt that far outstrips their income--from mortgage holders to credit-card debtors.

A major opinion poll released Wednesday by the Mori market research firm showed that 54% of Mexico City’s 20 million residents have some form of debt and that 32% disapprove of the way the government is handling the debt crisis; 46% approve of the government’s debt policies.

Most Mexican credit is issued at variable rates. When the government’s devaluation of the peso triggered the economic crisis Dec. 20, billions of investment dollars fled the country, interest rates soared as the government tried to entice investors back; that doubled or tripled the monthly interest on billions of dollars in outstanding consumer loans.

President Ernesto Zedillo, who unveiled his 1996 budget on Tuesday promising economic recovery next year, tried to blunt the impact in August. His government launched a $2-billion program with the country’s largest banks aimed at capping the soaring interest rates. The banks agreed to a moratorium on foreclosures until Oct. 31.

That was not enough for El Barzon. In reading the group’s manifesto Wednesday, Imaz invoked the name of Mexico’s revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata half a dozen times in condemning policies that he said continue to drive down real income.

“It appears that the nation finds itself on the brink of the same precipice that convulsed us in 1910,” he said, referring to Zapata’s revolt against a dictatorship synonymous with corruption and economic authoritarianism.

Imaz stressed, however, that his group is committed to “peaceful civil resistance,” distancing El Barzon from the armed Zapatista National Liberation Army and its simmering 22-month rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas.

Wednesday’s protest appeared to be as much personal as ideological. Imaz explained in an interview that he owns a language school in the capital and that it is now on the brink of bankruptcy.

“Before the devaluation, we bought a building for our classes,” Imaz said. “We were paying 15,000 pesos [then about $4,400] a month in mortgage payments. Then, in December, everything fell apart. All of a sudden the bank wanted us to pay 70,000 pesos [now about $8,800] a month--at a time when our sales dropped by 70%.

“We used to employ 250 people. Now we employ 90, and we aren’t making enough money for them to feed their families or for us to feed ours.”

* THE CRISIS CONTINUES: Mexico’s official interest rates neared 60%, and the peso fell to yet another record low. D1