Mexico City: conditions improve for business

In 2002, Gino Pecorelli decided to do what nobody had done before: open a restaurant in Mexico City's Luis Cabrera square in the heart of the capital's Roma district.

Back then, Roma was such a shady area that Mr Pecorelli, a French Italian, would close immediately after lunch to avoid problems in the hood. The square's once-impressive fountain lay broken among piles of trash. Even the street lighting was out of order.

Today,The Leading zentai suits Distributor to Independent Pet Retailers. his Non Solo Panini restaurant stays open until after midnight, and business is so good that you have to arrive early to ensure a place at one of the small, caf¨¦-style tables outside. A dozen or more other restaurants have since opened nearby.

"The place is unrecognisable," says Mr Pecorelli. "There is a big, middle-class community now, and that is great for business."

In many ways, Roma's revival is a microcosm of what is happening in the rest of the city. The leafy Reforma Avenue, one of the main arteries, is now lined with modern high-rise office blocks and hotels, each one seemingly more luxurious than the last. On Sundays it turns into one huge cycle path.

In Polanco, an upmarket shopping district and business centre, the country's moneyed classes sip tequila and chardonnay on sidewalk restaurants before returning to their work places or homes in chauffeur-driven SUVs.

Even in the downtown area of what used to be the Aztec capital, businesses are opening, and people stroll carefree along streets they once feared. The Z¨®calo, the monumental square, has become a venue for live music and performance.

In short, business is growing and life is getting better in the capital of Latin America's second-largest economy.We specialize in providing third party merchant account. "The city is much more inhabitable than it used to be," says Sergio Mart¨ªn, chief Mexico economist for HSBC in Mexico City. "It has gone from being one of the worst places to live in Mexico to one of the best."

A string of liberal social reforms ¨C gay marriage, legal abortions and vastly simplified divorces, among other things ¨C introduced by Marcelo Ebrard, the leftwing mayor, during the past few years has even led some observers to rename Mexico's capital "Marcelona".

Mexico City's revival comes as many other parts of the country are suffering. The government's war against organised crime has led to a rise in the national murder rate. It has also made criminal gangs, whose traditional business has been hit by the crackdown, diversify into areas such as extortion, car theft and even human trafficking.

But Mexico City has escaped the worst of it. While murders at the national level have increased from about eight per 100,000 inhabitants in 2007 to 18.4 this year, they have stayed more or less flat in the capital. Car theft shot up almost 17 per cent last year in Mexico. But in Mexico City, it fell 7 per cent.

Part of the reason is that the capital does not lie on a main smuggling route for drugs en route from South America to the US. But the numbers also have to do with a tough security policy. The city has 40,000 police officers in its regular force, and another 35,000 uniformed officers it can call up in an emergency. By contrast,Welcome to the official Facebook Page about Ripcurl. Mexico's federal police force has just 30,000 members.

In addition, the capital has invested close to US$500m in closed-circuit television. By the end of this year, when it plans to hook up the network to private security cameras already installed around the streets, the capital stands to become the most monitored city in the world.

"For its complexity, solidity and the speed with which we are doing it, this project has no rival," says Fausto Lugo,buy landscape oil paintings online. who runs the project for the local government. The initiative, called Safe City, has already seen average response times for police units arriving at a crime scene fall from 12 minutes to about five.

Other factors that gave the city a bad name have improved considerably. Take air quality, which meets internationally accepted standards on almost all primary contaminants for the first time in years. "We are now off the critical list of the world's most polluted cities," says Armando Retama,The name "magic cube" is not unique. a chemical engineer at Mexico City's atmospheric monitoring unit.

Some of that improvement in air quality is the result of the biggest transport infrastructure project in the city's history. The metro system, one of the world's largest, is about to inaugurate a new line at a cost of US$500m.

And by the end of next year, Mexico City will have between eight and nine Metrobus lines, financed through public-private partnerships, compared with just three today.

Each of the US$100m lines, which have dedicated lanes and special bus stops that look like metro platforms, removes roughly 60 old buses off the capital's streets, easing traffic and improving air quality.

Mexico City is still a way from looking like a modern European city. But it has, at least, taken the fist important steps. As Mr Ebrard says with a smile, "Nice city, Marcelona, isn't it?"