Alejo Peralta

HE industrial revolution came late to Mexico, perhaps because it was held back by other less beneficial revolutions. Alejo Peralta, who as much as anyone fostered industrialisation in Mexico, set up in business in 1939. By then, Britain's industrial revolution, founded on James Watt's steam engine, had been pounding away for some 170 years, and Henry Ford, the pioneer of assembly-line production, was an old man. Anything on sale in Mexico that was made in a factory quite likely came from America or Britain. “I was the beginning of Mexican industrialisation,” Mr Peralta liked to say. It was not wholly true, but he was enough of an innovator for the claim, made with his usual forcefulness, to go unchallenged.