THERE was a sudden silence on the Stock Exchange floor. The dealers stopped shouting, portable phones went unanswered and a woman who had been clattering away at a computer terminal stopped, her fingers poised over the keys.
She, like everyone else, was looking up at the figures on the electronic board. The US dollar was in the process of crossing an unthinkable boundary against the Mexican peso. Until December there had been parity, a dollar for a peso. Now the green electronic figures clicked up 7.106 pesos to the dollar, and there would be worse to come. Soon the moment passed, and the arm-waving continued and the portable phones were answered once again; but watching from the glassed-in balcony I could detect a sense of real gloom.
A little more than a year ago, many of the brokers and dealers below me had genuinely believed that Mexico was on the point of joining the First World. Now, as they watched, that illusion was being destroyed in the cruellest fashion possible. Beside me, the elegant Cambridge-educated economist whom I had been interviewing sighed.
'Professionally, of course, I find all this fascinating,' he said, 'but as a Mexican I find it a disaster, pure and simple.
'Do you realise,' he went on, 'our currency has now collapsed four times since the mid-1970s? That means the total accumulated depreciation in the peso since then is . . . [he made the necessary mental calculations] around 45,000 per cent.' To have failed to make the grade as a First World economy is just a matter of self-image; by some calculations Mexico still rates 14th in the world in terms of productivity. Yet the belt-tightening package which the Mexican Government rushed out last Friday means that ordinary people will have to pay the price for the exaggerated and sometimes corrupt policies of their rulers - and that is a serious problem.
Mexico isn't just going through an economic crisis: it is suffering a political crisis as great as anything since the 1930s, and the political one is worse than the economic one.