‘If the MINT countries could change the world’

human sacrifices on pyramid altars, to an ambitious, forward-looking democracy of 120 million people.

It now has the second-largest economy in Latin America (just behind Brazil). It’s doing so well, in fact, that economist Jim O’Neill has identified it as one of four future economic giants – just as his so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have emerged to become nations of booming wealth and progress, so the MINTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) are predicted to follow in their footsteps. “If the MINTs reach their potential, they could change the world,”O’Neill said on a BBC Radio 4 program in January.

Why Mexico? For a start, president Enrique Pena Nieto, who was elected at the end of 2012, has been amending the constitution and pushing through radical new reforms that apply to almost every aspect of society – from education, tax and banking to telecommunications, financial services and energy.

It’s all aimed at boosting productivity, opening up the economy to foreign Mayans and Aztecs, the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors led by a grotesque Hernan Cortes in the 1500s, the cruelty of the Inquisition, the Mexican Civil War of 191020, and Karl Marx pointing in the direction of a utopian future, while gold-grabbing capitalists and corrupt, carousing priests carry on beneath him.

Since the founding of“New Spain,”now known as Mexico (it gained independence in 1821), the country has moved from a pre-colonial place of blood-thirsty sunworshippers who conducted thousands of investment and readying the country for “sustained growth,”as Pena Nieto said.

“What is convincing about the‘Mexico Moment’is that it coincides with a remarkable shift in the world economy,” O’Neill notes.“For Mexico, things are happening on the supply and the demand side – just as they are enacting their reforms, they are finding that they can suddenly compete with the world’s biggest exporter.”

In part, O’Neill says, that’s because things are changing in that export giant half a world away.“China has been deliberately boosting wages, as well as allowing the currency to rise, so suddenly any number of countries can find themselves in a position to compete, and none more so than Mexico.”

MINT Condition

At the heart of it all lies Mexico City, its immense national capital which is virtually equidistant from both the coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, and