Davidglen77 said:
I agree that the system here is not ideal, and robberies are way to common and tragic at banks, however this Yahoo article has so many things taken out of context.......
As a resident expat I have experienced this situation first hand when selling my wife´s apartment and then when we went to buy another apartment. The process is that you gather up all your cash at your bank safe deposit box and carry it in the street to the the bank that is carrying the mortgage. Since there are only 100 peso notes it is no easy task to conceal 320,000 peso notes. (10,000 pesos is about an inch thick so we are talking about 3 feet of cash to hide on your body)
Once the two parties meet than the fun begins as the bills need to be counted and verified by both parties. Then it is off into the streets again as we go back to our bank that has our safe deposit box.
God forbid that we get robbed as we would be without our apartment, money to buy a new one and no recourse to get our money back.
Some of the article maybe out of context but there is an underlying distrust to the banks, governments, police and strangers in this society that make this the only acceptable means to perform financial transactions. Electronic transfers and checks would solve a lot of this but I do not see this happening because of this distrust.
Ironically the man that we bought the apartment from had not paid taxes in over 10 years and had to turn over almost half the proceeds of the sale to the government who had a representative at the bank.
The issue with the pregnant woman being stopped on the street and shot is very sad. But it is very suspect in that the bank teller told her to come back the next day and see him. It is suspected that the teller was in on spotting the woman for the thieves. This just adds to the distrust of the banks.