Translate / Traducir

Quantities of sábanas issued

The Tesorería General del Estado published its monthly balance sheet in the Periódico Oficial until September 1915 and these included figures for the issue of notes (both sábanas and dos caritas) though these are, according to other sources, massive understatements of the numbers in circulation. The following table summarises this information.

Tesorería General record of issues

  Total issued  
1914 January 931,000 emisión de billetes
February    
March 2,093,750 emisión de billetes del Estado
April 2,496,801  
May 3,311,948  
June 1,667,945  
July 3,334,440  
August    
September 4,960,000  
October 4,984,981  
November 8,854,998  
December 22,547,720  
1915 January 29,584,650  
February 14,024,940  
March 26,578,487  
April 30,493,012  
May 16,757,607  
June 22,755,183  
July 19,044,180  
August 13,125,911  
September 13,276,500  
    239,893,053  

 

In January 1916 the Carrancistas calculated that Villa had issued $274,173,096 in different denominations, including $14,476,000 that the last Villista governor, General Fidel Avila, had taken to Ciudad Juárez that lacked seals (resellos) and control letters (contraseñas). $12,475,000 in strongboxes that Avila might not have had time to get to the United States was probably still in Ciudad JuárezAGN, Fondo Gobernación Periodo Revolucionario, caja 61, exp 24, report 10 January 1916.

Elsewhere it is stated that the sábanas totalled 9,621,440 pesos in May 1914Though according to the broker J. S. Curtis 30 million pesos in sábanas had been issued by April 1914 (Vida Nueva, 5 April 1914) and that by October 1914 thirty million pesos (including twelve million in sábanas) had been issuedEl Liberal, 25 October 1914. In March 1915 United States consul Marion Letcher reported that since Villa occupied Chihuahua $444 million in paper money had been issued and that at that stage a million pesos a day were being printedSD papers, 812.5157/68, Marion Letcher to Secretary of State, 10 March 1915. Letcher writes "To be exact, in the month of December just past 22,000,000 pesos were issued; in January, 26,000,000; and in February, 29,000,000" which does not align with the table above. The dos caritas themselves totalled $417 million by the end of 1915 plus $150 million which had been printed in the United States because the presses in Chihuahua could not cope. According to [ ] the grand total of Villa’s issues was more than $576.5 million.