Bank Heists Stir Showdown in Mexico

Something strange happened in Guadalajara on Monday: Nobody robbed a bank.

In a city that has suffered 23 armed bank robberies in the last 30 days, that was big news Tuesday.

In a showdown between cash-strapped governments and banks teetering on the brink of collapse in the state that includes Mexico’s second-largest city, the government had blinked. The governor ordered 600 state police officers to guard the banks in an emergency step--one month after a showdown between Guadalajara’s mayor and the bankers left every bank in town a sitting duck.

The standoff illustrated some of the fallout from Mexico’s continuing economic crisis as institutions try to do more with less. At a time when joblessness and soaring prices are driving up crime rates throughout Mexico, state and local governments have less to spend on law enforcement. The result has been a jump in burglary, armed robbery and street crime that has spread insecurity throughout the country.

As a case study, Guadalajara’s bank-robbery crisis highlights the complexity of the dilemma--and its increasing toll. On Tuesday, it became a national issue as negotiations to resolve it moved to the federal level.

Mexican cities have traditionally provided guards for banks, but Guadalajara Mayor Cesar Coll has demanded that the banks now help finance their own security. If he succeeds in compelling them to do so, that would add millions of dollars in operating expenses to national banks that are barely solvent as it is. And the Mexican Bankers Assn. fears other cities and states will follow suit.

The showdown began a month ago when Coll--his law-enforcement resources already stretched beyond their limits--gave the banks an ultimatum: Help pay for more police and patrol cars or the bank security officers, who represent nearly a third of the city’s police force, would be withdrawn.

But the local banks are branches of national institutions that have been among the hardest-hit by Mexico’s 1994 peso devaluation and an ensuing recession and credit crisis. Bank officials told Coll that they would contribute uniforms, equipment and some cash but that they cannot afford the $1.4-million lump sum contribution, let alone the nearly $150,000 monthly stipend, that Coll demanded.

So the mayor made good on his threat, leaving the banks a wide-open target. And the result has been a rash of bank robberies that might have awed Bonnie and Clyde.

“Many of these bank robbers are common people,” said Jorge Zapeda Patterson, editor of the Guadalajara newspaper Siglo 21. “Usually, when you think about bank robbery you think organized crime. But because of the crisis, people are desperate, and so we’re not talking only about organized crime here.”

Accounts culled from Guadalajara’s recent police blotter include a 60-year-old man who witnesses said calmly robbed a bank at gunpoint, went out to the street corner and hailed a taxi to take him home. In another case, a robber brought his 3-year-old son with him. And in some of the heists, middle-aged women have wielded the weapons.

The crime wave grew so fast--an average of one bank robbery each working day since the police were withdrawn--that Zapeda’s newspaper launched a new feature, the “assault-o-meter,” that charted and totaled each robbery through last weekend.

On Friday, the problem appeared to spin dangerously out of control: Armed robbers hit five banks in a single day in the heart of the city. “New record in Guadalajara: Five bank assaults in nine hours,” declared Saturday’s headlines. And Jalisco Gov. Alberto Cardenas was forced to act to protect the capital.

He ordered two guards at each of the city’s 305 banks--all drawn from a state security force that he said was stretched beyond its abilities. “Don’t ask me where I took the people from, because that would also tell you where we’re unprotected now,” Cardenas implored reporters after he deployed the new force Monday.

Cardenas said the deployment would be for a “very short and limited period.” But he added that he was “very worried about what could happen to the workers at the banks, to the families or people who go to deposit or withdraw their money.”

Negotiations between Cardenas and the nation’s top bankers began Monday night in Mexico City and continued through Tuesday with no resolution. But the issue is considered important enough that the talks included top officials from Mexico’s Treasury Department, Interior Secretariat and federal banking commission.

“There still isn’t an agreement, but with all of the goodwill that the parties are showing, we hope to have one before the end of the week,” said Eduardo Curi, spokesman for the national banking commission. “Our position is [that] the banks cannot substitute for state and municipal authorities in questions of public security.”

Coll’s position is otherwise. “The bankers are doing harm by demanding the taxpayers’ money to transform it into instruments of security for their private businesses,” he said.