On March 25, 2020, Mexico’s banking regulator, the CNBV, announced that banks could defer payments of capital, interest or both for up to four months, with a possible extension of two more. The measure covered mortgages, consumer loans, credit cards and business loans that were current at the end of February 2020 and whose borrowers had lost income.
According to a CNBV study, deferred business loans made up 16 to 17 percent of the business loan portfolio between March and June 2020.
A pilón is the small extra that a Mexican vendor adds to a purchase, such as one more quesadilla. An article in the journal of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico defines it as “una cantidad extra de mercancía que el comerciante regala a su cliente en agradecimiento por su compra,” an extra quantity of goods that the vendor gives the customer in thanks for the purchase.
The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy lists a Mexican verb for the other side of the relationship. Amarchantarse means “hacerse cliente habitual de un comerciante,” to become a regular customer of a merchant.
El que manda, manda, y si se equivoca, vuelve a mandar. “The one who commands, commands, and if he makes a mistake, he commands again.” In a 2019 column in Excélsior, the journalist Félix Cortés Camarillo wrote that he learned the saying from a businessman, don Emilio.
In 2019, BBC Mundo asked Mexican scholars why it is hard for Mexicans to say no. Alí Albarrán of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM said: “Decir que no a alguien que te está ofreciendo algo de buena voluntad es considerado una ofensa” (Saying no to someone who offers something in good will is considered an offense). The anthropologist Roger Bartra said that “it is not very polite to say no openly.”
The article describes the common solution: “para no decir no, dicen que sí, pero no ponen un plazo” (to avoid saying no, they say yes, but they set no date).