Business etiquette: No margaritas in macho Mexico

Mexico, and Mexico City in particular, can be bewildering. On the far western edge of the 22m-strong metropolitan area, there is a neighbourhood of office buildings so modern and orderly that it could easily be mistaken for a business district of Dallas.

In the downtown area, where many of the government’s ministries are located, shamans dressed in little more than a loincloth and a headdress made of pheasant feathers, dance in circles around smouldering urns of incense and herbs.

To succeed as a foreigner doing business here, you have to be flexible. Try not to be surprised, do not be scared and, above all, be willing to go along for the ride.

At least, that is the advice of Andrés Antonius, a former assistant secretary for energy and now founder and chief operating officer of Plan B, a security and corporate investigations company in Mexico City.

“The foreigner who arrives in Mexico and is scared to walk to the corner of the street for fear of being kidnapped is going to get off to a bad start,” he says. “This country may have a reputation for being unsafe, but we are not Iraq.”

While Mexico’s image as a safe destination continues to slide, recent findings show that the country may not be as dangerous as most people think. One study, for example, suggests that the national murder rate over the past decade has declined from about 17 per 100,000 inhabitants to 10.

To put that into perspective, the murder rate in Brazil, where foreign investors have been falling over themselves to invest their money this year, is about 25 per 100,000.

So once you have braved the short walk from the car to the restaurant for lunch, what should you do? If you are male, the first, and most important rule, is do not under any circumstances order a margarita. Ever. Order tequila, and order it straight.

To order a margarita, says one prominent banker in Mexico City, is to tell your hosts that you are “deeply effeminate . . . it is such a faux pas”. Moreover, it will almost certainly broadcast a message that you do not possess what it takes to do business in macho Mexico.

Unfortunately, this journalist discovered the sacred rule the hard way: during my first week in Mexico, and in the company of a young and testosterone-charged male employee of the country’s central bank, I committed the fatal sin.

No sooner had I uttered the “ri” of margarita, than I felt his intense glare gorging a hole in the side of my head. “Real men don’t order margaritas,” he said curtly. Point taken, lesson learned.

The second golden rule is do not rush lunch, do not skip on the starter and do not order a salad as your main course. As Luis Téllez, a former government minister and now president of the Mexican Stock Market, told the FT: “If you don’t order three full courses at lunch, you will look provincial . . . It just isn’t done.”

The Mexican lunch is an institution, and to succeed you must take it seriously. Never arrange to meet anyone before 2pm – many restaurants do not open their doors before that time – and be prepared to finish late. If your hosts offer alcohol, say yes.

Requesting non-spicy dishes is perfectly acceptable, though demonstrating your ability to eat chilli without breaking into a sweat is a plus, and will earn kudos.

In addition, and if in Mexico City, be acutely aware of where you plan to lunch – navigating the traffic-clogged streets is a logistical nightmare, and making your Mexican business partner travel from one side of the city to the other will probably ruin any good will you have garnered.

Once you have mastered lunch, says Ana Paula Ordorica, a columnist with Mexico’s Excélsior newspaper, you must understand when “yes” means “no”.

“The problem is that we still haven’t learned how to say it,” she says. “A yes isn’t always a yes.” (As if to drive home the point, I invited her to have a drink with some friends later that evening. She said “yes” enthusiastically and never turned up).

Foreigners with the gift of patience often succeed where others do not. Damian Fraser of UBS in Mexico City says that one way to overcome the potential frustrations of doing business in Mexico is to have several projects going at once. “If one is held up, you have the others to keep you occupied,” he says. “The trick is to avoid doing things sequentially.”

Finally, and for those foreigners who fancy their linguistic skills, watch out for one Mexican idiosyncrasy: “mi casa es tu casa”. In Mexico, people will often refer to their homes as “your home” as a mark of hospitality and trust. Yet this openness can often cause severe confusion.

In one well-known but unconfirmed tale, a US businessman was told in Spanish by his hosts that there was “a party at your house on Friday”. Puzzled, he bought food and alcohol for the party, and duly waited for the guests to arrive. In fact, they already had – but at a house on the other side of the city.