Benito Juarez, formally elected as president of Mexico in March 1861, was faced with a continued crushing debt and a new insecurity that the American Civil War promised on his northern border. Mexico owed 82 million pesos, most of it in British bonds, and in order to gain some control over the economy, the Juarez administration suspended interest payments to Britain, France, and Spain. This would result directly in the French invasion of 1862. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Brian R. Hamnett, A Concise History of Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 162-163.
Record Data
Date Certainty
Exact
Type
US/the World