04-09-2014: Latin American Weekly Report

There was a sense that Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto needed something big to mark his second state-of-the-nation address (Informe) this week. Over the course of the last 21 months he has successfully pushed through congress all of the groundbreaking reforms contained within his cross-party ‘Pact for Mexico’ but many of these will take years to deliver tangible results and opinion polls suggest that the public is not content with the promise of jam tomorrow. Peña Nieto marked the next phase of his mandate by announcing a massive public infrastructure investment programme over the next four years to drive economic reactivation: the flagship project is a huge new international airport, with six runways, at a cost of M$120bn (US$9.17bn). He also reached out to poorer Mexicans by promising to transform the social welfare programme ‘Oportunidades’.