Last week workers were pledging themselves to give up a day’s pay each month, leading bullfighters were putting on benefit performances and the Church was urging the faithful to contribute what they could—all to gointo a fund to pay off the U. S. and British oil concerns whose $400,000,000 properties were expropriated four weeks ago. President Cardenas and most of Mexico hope that if the country can make a settlement with the U. S. concerns, Washington will resume purchase of Mexican silver and thus immeasurably better Mexico’s present financial squeeze. With this in mind, President Cardenas last week made his first offer—Mexico would give the U. S. concerns 20% of the proceeds derived from the sale of oil abroad. This the U. S. companies promptly rejected with the curt comment that such a payment would not even cover annual interest charges on the expropriated properties and Cardenas cast about for another solution. Nevertheless, the general feeling in private financial circles that a deal would be reached raised the peso from its low of 5.00 to the dollar to 3.80, almost back to its pre-expropriation rate of 3.60.
Since the seizures, Mexicans have been quietly relieved that the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt “good neighbor” policy keeps Great Britain’s hands off the controversy. However, last week Britain decided that she would at least enter her protest in the diplomatic record. In a blunt note she asked that the expropriation decree be rescinded on the grounds that it was a “denial of justice” and “inherently unjustified.” “That is Great Britain’s point of view,” snorted a Cardenas spokesman. “Mexico has her own, very different.”