Mexico makes international news most often for its grizzly drug-mafia murders. But this violence, which taints foreign perceptions of the country as a whole, is largely restricted to certain areas where drug trafficking is rife: the northeast of the country along the US border and in states on the western coastline. Many parts of Mexico are peaceful and record low crime; Yucatan in the south – where foreign tourists swim with whale sharks and clamber over the archaeological wonder of Chichen Itza – rates as safer than Finland or Luxembourg, and only just more dangerous than Canada.
The Glorieta Angel de la Independencia statue on Paseo de la Reforma
IMAGE PROBLEM
In a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Mexico is listed as having an overall intentional death rate of 22.7 per 100,000 population, putting the country on par with Kyrgyzstan, Panama, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia. A closer look at the data, however, shows that four states are largely to blame for skewing the national average: Chihuahua (which contains Mexico’s bloodiest city, Ciudad Juárez), Durango, Sinaloa and Guerrero, whose death rates are 111, 85, 66 and 48 respectively. Other areas are more serene, with a third of states at or below seven per 100,000, matching the US states of Maryland, Tennessee and Alabama.
Mexico City, the capital, once feared as being the most dangerous city on the planet, has become significantly safer in recent years. After Mexico’s economic collapse in the mid-1990s, violence increased tremendously – in 1994, Mexico City’s crime rate increased by a third, a jump that was repeated in 1995. In 1996, an average of three murders a day was recorded in the capital. In 1998, for the first time, the US State Department warned that crime in Mexico City had reached critical levels.
At that time, a new public security initiative called Safe City, which involved setting up a network of security cameras and a focus on community police work and patrols, was launched. Now, 13,000 video cameras – 8,000 surveillance cameras on streets and 5,000 more in the subway – capture the city’s every move, making Mexico City one of the most monitored cities in the world.
In 2011, police unveiled a new command and control centre – known as C4 for “command, control, communications and computation” – to handle the data the cameras provide and make it useful to police. The highly specialised computing centre, and five other C2 centres, make use of specially trained dispatchers to analyse and act on a video system that handles 13,000 images per second.
The Mexico City metropolitan area, which is home to more than 20 million people, nearly a fifth of the country’s population, now employs the largest police force in Latin America. This massive police presence plus the greater surveillance has forced street gangs to recede to fringe neighbourhoods, and crime has fallen, lifting the city out of a decade of stalled urban renewal programmes. The relentless focus on reducing crime, especially in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods such as Polanco, Condesa and La Roma, has helped change the city.
The Torres de Satélite, located in the suburban district of Ciudad Satelite
TOP-DOWN MEASURES
In 2012, the US dropped its critical crime level warning for Mexico City. The city is once again buzzing with entrepreneurs, restaurant owners and young professionals, who also enjoy the city’s healthy, vibrant nightlife.
The new Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto (sometimes called the Pretty Boy because of his styled hair), who came to power at the end of last year, has promised to maintain security in the capital and reduce the violence spawned by the drug trade and organised crime in other parts of the country. Belonging to the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Nieto aims to improve his country’s image by shifting talk about his nation away from cartels and killings.
The capital’s improved security is attracting a growing number of visitors, both tourists lured by the city’s exceptional cultural and archaeological sites, and business travellers tapping into the country’s positive economic growth. The World Bank lists Mexico’s economic growth last year at 3.9 per cent, and predicts 3.6 per cent for 2013. Mexico City has, according to non-profit research and policy organisation Brookings Institution, a gross domestic product of US$470 billion, placing it 14th in the world, after such globally dominating cities as Tokyo, New York, London, Moscow, Shanghai, Beijing and Washington, DC.
Rogelio Toledano, director of business performance for Latin America and the Caribbean at booking agency The Leading Hotels of the World, which has two properties in the city – the Marquis Reforma Hotel & Spa and the Habita Hotel – says safety is no longer a problem for foreigners. “Mexico City is the heart of financial, political and cultural activities in the country, so security is guaranteed for all visitors coming for either business or leisure,” he comments.
Mexico City Stadium and Bullring
TRANSPACIFIC OUTLOOK
Mexico is growing as a destination, especially for Asians. According to the Mexico City Congress and Conventions Office, in 2011 Mexico received about 40,000 visitors from Asia, representing 173 per cent more than in 2005 and 30 per cent more than in 2010. Mexico City receives less than half of these visitors with about 18,000 Asian visitors.
Last month Peña Nieto embarked on a tour of Asia to strengthen his country’s trade relations with the economically robust region, and attended the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan where he met new Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Carlos Collado, executive director of the Congress and Conventions Office of the City of Mexico, says that tourism – both business and leisure – is expected to boom. “Mexico City has become the centre of the country in many ways,” he says. “In the future, the tourism industry is likely to grow and become the most important activity in the city.”
The primary businesses in Mexico City are related to the service and financial industries. At the top of the list is the financial sector, followed closely by real estate. Tourism-related business, such as hotels and restaurants, is also considerable, as are the transport and communications sectors. The service industries related to scientific, academic and corporate activities are also big employers. Manufacturing is the only major business in Mexico City that is not involved in the services sector.
The capital has also recently emerged as an aspiring environmental model, with the government introducing everything from barter markets for recyclables to bicycle-sharing arrangements, and from “No Driving Today” programmes (in which cars are kept off the road one working day each week) to zero emissions bus corridors. Companies in the green sector, especially alternative technology developers, are flourishing.
The capital’s strength in technology is attracting foreign interest. “Mexico City has become the centre of technology in the country,” says Collado. “We are seeing a growing number of Asians coming to the city with the interest of implementing their own technology and manufacturing in our largely middle-class market. Many Asian companies have also given their knowledge and cooperation in helping us implement green policies.”
Mexico is a Spanish-speaking country, but in hotels and the business district in the capital, English is fairly widely spoken. Many of the younger generation are fluent in English, having been educated abroad, and occupy high positions in business and government.
“Mexico City is a very cosmopolitan city with multinational investors, and I have never heard of any difficulty in finding qualified specialist interpreters and translators,” says Toledano.
Having had long experience of doing business with the rest of the world, particularly the US, Mexicans are well versed in international business practice. While the stereotype of Mexican men having a “machismo” attitude to women persists, in today’s Mexico, the modern Mexican woman is urbane, professional and well respected.
GETTING THERE
Mexico City International Airport, located about 10 kilometres east of the city centre, operates around 1,000 daily flights with 39 direct flights to international destinations in 23 countries. Twenty-five airlines, including 20 international and five national airlines, fly through the city. There are flights to international trans-boarding centres including Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Paris, Frankfurt, London and Madrid, and air connectivity to Asian cities is beginning to expand. There is now a direct flight from Mexico City to Tokyo-Narita.
GETTING AROUND
Mexico City is enormous and it can be difficult for newcomers to orient themselves. In the Centro Historico, the historic epicentre of the city, streets are in a grid pattern and distances are short, so this part of town is ideal for walking. Otherwise, taxis and the subway are advisable. The subway covers most tourist and business stops in the city, and is fairly easy to navigate.
If travelling by taxi, use only the authorised “sitios” (taxi ranks); avoid hailing a taxi from the street, especially at night. Private taxis from hotels charge a rate per kilometre and are expensive. Taxis from sitios charge on a meter; always check that the meter is switched on. Tariff 1 is for daytime, tariff 2 for journeys after 10pm. Renting a car is not advisable as the city is huge and difficult to navigate.
HOTELS AND CONVENTION FACILITIES
Hotel supply in Mexico City is adequate, with 240 hotels across the budget spectrum offering 30,000 rooms. There are 21 national and international chains, including properties under the brands St Regis, Four Seasons, JW Marriott, Westin, Hilton, Hyatt Regency, Courtyard, Intercontinental, W, Melia, Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn.
There are several options for convention facilities in the city. The major venues include Centro Banamex (on the western side
of the city), the World Trade Center (about 7km southwest of Centro Historico) and Expo Bancomer Santa Fe, which is farther out about 25km west of the city centre.
Centro Banamex has 185,000 sqm of space, with a giant 34,000 sqm pillarless hall that can be divided into four rooms, plus 25 multifunctional rooms that can accommodate from five to 10,000 people. The World Trade Center offers 24,000 sqm, while Expo Bancomer Santa Fe has 33,400 sqm of space available.
The Glorieta Angel de la Independencia statue on Paseo de la Reforma
IMAGE PROBLEM
In a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Mexico is listed as having an overall intentional death rate of 22.7 per 100,000 population, putting the country on par with Kyrgyzstan, Panama, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia. A closer look at the data, however, shows that four states are largely to blame for skewing the national average: Chihuahua (which contains Mexico’s bloodiest city, Ciudad Juárez), Durango, Sinaloa and Guerrero, whose death rates are 111, 85, 66 and 48 respectively. Other areas are more serene, with a third of states at or below seven per 100,000, matching the US states of Maryland, Tennessee and Alabama.
Mexico City, the capital, once feared as being the most dangerous city on the planet, has become significantly safer in recent years. After Mexico’s economic collapse in the mid-1990s, violence increased tremendously – in 1994, Mexico City’s crime rate increased by a third, a jump that was repeated in 1995. In 1996, an average of three murders a day was recorded in the capital. In 1998, for the first time, the US State Department warned that crime in Mexico City had reached critical levels.
At that time, a new public security initiative called Safe City, which involved setting up a network of security cameras and a focus on community police work and patrols, was launched. Now, 13,000 video cameras – 8,000 surveillance cameras on streets and 5,000 more in the subway – capture the city’s every move, making Mexico City one of the most monitored cities in the world.
In 2011, police unveiled a new command and control centre – known as C4 for “command, control, communications and computation” – to handle the data the cameras provide and make it useful to police. The highly specialised computing centre, and five other C2 centres, make use of specially trained dispatchers to analyse and act on a video system that handles 13,000 images per second.
The Mexico City metropolitan area, which is home to more than 20 million people, nearly a fifth of the country’s population, now employs the largest police force in Latin America. This massive police presence plus the greater surveillance has forced street gangs to recede to fringe neighbourhoods, and crime has fallen, lifting the city out of a decade of stalled urban renewal programmes. The relentless focus on reducing crime, especially in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods such as Polanco, Condesa and La Roma, has helped change the city.
The Torres de Satélite, located in the suburban district of Ciudad Satelite
TOP-DOWN MEASURES
In 2012, the US dropped its critical crime level warning for Mexico City. The city is once again buzzing with entrepreneurs, restaurant owners and young professionals, who also enjoy the city’s healthy, vibrant nightlife.
The new Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto (sometimes called the Pretty Boy because of his styled hair), who came to power at the end of last year, has promised to maintain security in the capital and reduce the violence spawned by the drug trade and organised crime in other parts of the country. Belonging to the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Nieto aims to improve his country’s image by shifting talk about his nation away from cartels and killings.
The capital’s improved security is attracting a growing number of visitors, both tourists lured by the city’s exceptional cultural and archaeological sites, and business travellers tapping into the country’s positive economic growth. The World Bank lists Mexico’s economic growth last year at 3.9 per cent, and predicts 3.6 per cent for 2013. Mexico City has, according to non-profit research and policy organisation Brookings Institution, a gross domestic product of US$470 billion, placing it 14th in the world, after such globally dominating cities as Tokyo, New York, London, Moscow, Shanghai, Beijing and Washington, DC.
Rogelio Toledano, director of business performance for Latin America and the Caribbean at booking agency The Leading Hotels of the World, which has two properties in the city – the Marquis Reforma Hotel & Spa and the Habita Hotel – says safety is no longer a problem for foreigners. “Mexico City is the heart of financial, political and cultural activities in the country, so security is guaranteed for all visitors coming for either business or leisure,” he comments.
Mexico City Stadium and Bullring
TRANSPACIFIC OUTLOOK
Mexico is growing as a destination, especially for Asians. According to the Mexico City Congress and Conventions Office, in 2011 Mexico received about 40,000 visitors from Asia, representing 173 per cent more than in 2005 and 30 per cent more than in 2010. Mexico City receives less than half of these visitors with about 18,000 Asian visitors.
Last month Peña Nieto embarked on a tour of Asia to strengthen his country’s trade relations with the economically robust region, and attended the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan where he met new Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Carlos Collado, executive director of the Congress and Conventions Office of the City of Mexico, says that tourism – both business and leisure – is expected to boom. “Mexico City has become the centre of the country in many ways,” he says. “In the future, the tourism industry is likely to grow and become the most important activity in the city.”
The primary businesses in Mexico City are related to the service and financial industries. At the top of the list is the financial sector, followed closely by real estate. Tourism-related business, such as hotels and restaurants, is also considerable, as are the transport and communications sectors. The service industries related to scientific, academic and corporate activities are also big employers. Manufacturing is the only major business in Mexico City that is not involved in the services sector.
The capital has also recently emerged as an aspiring environmental model, with the government introducing everything from barter markets for recyclables to bicycle-sharing arrangements, and from “No Driving Today” programmes (in which cars are kept off the road one working day each week) to zero emissions bus corridors. Companies in the green sector, especially alternative technology developers, are flourishing.
The capital’s strength in technology is attracting foreign interest. “Mexico City has become the centre of technology in the country,” says Collado. “We are seeing a growing number of Asians coming to the city with the interest of implementing their own technology and manufacturing in our largely middle-class market. Many Asian companies have also given their knowledge and cooperation in helping us implement green policies.”
Mexico is a Spanish-speaking country, but in hotels and the business district in the capital, English is fairly widely spoken. Many of the younger generation are fluent in English, having been educated abroad, and occupy high positions in business and government.
“Mexico City is a very cosmopolitan city with multinational investors, and I have never heard of any difficulty in finding qualified specialist interpreters and translators,” says Toledano.
Having had long experience of doing business with the rest of the world, particularly the US, Mexicans are well versed in international business practice. While the stereotype of Mexican men having a “machismo” attitude to women persists, in today’s Mexico, the modern Mexican woman is urbane, professional and well respected.
GETTING THERE
Mexico City International Airport, located about 10 kilometres east of the city centre, operates around 1,000 daily flights with 39 direct flights to international destinations in 23 countries. Twenty-five airlines, including 20 international and five national airlines, fly through the city. There are flights to international trans-boarding centres including Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Paris, Frankfurt, London and Madrid, and air connectivity to Asian cities is beginning to expand. There is now a direct flight from Mexico City to Tokyo-Narita.
GETTING AROUND
Mexico City is enormous and it can be difficult for newcomers to orient themselves. In the Centro Historico, the historic epicentre of the city, streets are in a grid pattern and distances are short, so this part of town is ideal for walking. Otherwise, taxis and the subway are advisable. The subway covers most tourist and business stops in the city, and is fairly easy to navigate.
If travelling by taxi, use only the authorised “sitios” (taxi ranks); avoid hailing a taxi from the street, especially at night. Private taxis from hotels charge a rate per kilometre and are expensive. Taxis from sitios charge on a meter; always check that the meter is switched on. Tariff 1 is for daytime, tariff 2 for journeys after 10pm. Renting a car is not advisable as the city is huge and difficult to navigate.
HOTELS AND CONVENTION FACILITIES
Hotel supply in Mexico City is adequate, with 240 hotels across the budget spectrum offering 30,000 rooms. There are 21 national and international chains, including properties under the brands St Regis, Four Seasons, JW Marriott, Westin, Hilton, Hyatt Regency, Courtyard, Intercontinental, W, Melia, Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn.
There are several options for convention facilities in the city. The major venues include Centro Banamex (on the western side
of the city), the World Trade Center (about 7km southwest of Centro Historico) and Expo Bancomer Santa Fe, which is farther out about 25km west of the city centre.
Centro Banamex has 185,000 sqm of space, with a giant 34,000 sqm pillarless hall that can be divided into four rooms, plus 25 multifunctional rooms that can accommodate from five to 10,000 people. The World Trade Center offers 24,000 sqm, while Expo Bancomer Santa Fe has 33,400 sqm of space available. 
