Not always the case. Foundations can sometimes exist simply to almost claim the land. There are still vestiges of the old squatter rules and putting something on your land prevents that in some ways. The last peso crisis was in 1995 and may have slightly contributed to some of what you see, but its been so long and prosperity has been such recently that I doubt its the reasoning. When you see a structure like that it often can mean that some business made a deal with a builder to get something built and then backed out or ran out of money. Its tough to get loans for buildings in Mexico because the foreclosure rules are terribly skewed to the debtor. It can take 3 years to get a property foreclosed even if the debtor goes into court and admits not paying. So construction is mostly funded through free cash flows and if they dry up you get a building just like you saw.


The history of the peso? Well two big shocks come to mind really. The first peso was worth about 4-5 to the dollar in the early 80s. Remember Mexico is heavily dependent on oil, not because there is that much of it, but because it all is government property and sales of it become a major part of the governments revenues. In the late 70s and early 80s Mexico was rich because of it, oil was high and the economy was well protected from any international forces. The world's banks loaned money lavishly to Mexico because they were so flush with oil money. Well the oil price collapse of the mid 80s wiped them out. They had no way to pay off these loans so they did what every country used to do and that is to get the printing presses running. In about 10 years the peso went from 5-1 to about 4000-1. It was like Italy, things were priced in the millions and people didn't want anything but dollars if they could get them. Finally the government had enough and did the in vogue thing, declared a new currency with new policies that would limit the printing presses. The "new" peso was basically the old peso minus 3 zeros. One thousand old pesos became 10 new pesos. The plan worked fairly well, there was a slow devaluation band that factored in the higher inflation of Mexico and also obliged the common people in their still strong desire to hold dollars. Mexico at this time was still fairly closed economy but was slowly opening up and it was exposing their currency. However, every government to keep up their election chances, kept the peso fairly steady and it would build imbalances. Once the new president made it into office one of the first orders of business was to devalue the peso in an orderly and expected way. This always caused a short term crisis, what Mexicans always came to expect when a new office began. Well in 1994 it was no different except NAFTA and further openings in the market made them much more exposed. Pesos were still controlled, but the economy in a global sense wasn't. Disaster struck as Zedillo did the usual and devalued. Problem was that the markets weren't having it at his modest devaluation. They began a flat out run on the peso. Mexican inflation and interest rate differentials were running really high in 1994 because that was the time of a run-up in US interest rates and also a time where more and more foreign products were being sold in Mexico. The Salinas goverment refused to devalue and the Zedillo government paid for it hard. The peso went from about 4-1 to 7.5-1 in a matter of days. The Zedillo goverment saw this because they had almost no currency reserves and were forced to free float the peso. No more controls and everyone ran to the dollar. If the country's economy was still closed it wouldn't have been a disaster, but with such a newfound dependence on foreign goods and direct investment, this was a huge negative shock, one that the population spent 5 years or so overcoming. At the time there were interest rates over 100% and even at that banks wouldn't loan much money. There still are lingering problems in the banking industry to this day from the 95 crash, basically the banks won't loan to small businesses, put up mortgage loans, and up until last year charged variable rates at outrageous levels on credit cards. Its a good lesson for anyone to study because there are some doomsday scenarios that are very similar for the US should our currency have the bottom fall out of it. It would be hard to do, short of a bond default fortunately. Free-floating currencies are the key to keeping it from being a disaster. Now things have changed. Fox's election was the first time in decades a president started out on good economic footing without a peso devaluation. The peso has actually appreciated because of supply and demand with Mexico being among the biggest investment spots in the developing world. These inflows are finishing off a lot of those buildings, many times just buying the land and tearing down what foundations there are.


I own a house in the city of Veracruz, very close to a block where there were the frames of houses. One of my neighbors told me they did it to avoid the squatter situation with the intention of moving in once they retired. They ended up selling the land and its frames and a rich local businessman build a house the size of a whole city block, turned it into a fortress with walls so high you can't see in. So don't always expect those abandoned foundations to come out the way they appear. Architecture and zoning just don't really exist in any uniformity in Mexico. You can build a business anywhere you have land and you can make your buildings look completely different than your neighbors in all but a few historical cities.