A couple of months after taking office in December last year, Agustín Carstens, Mexico’s finance minister, made two things clear: that Mexico would pass a fiscal reform in 2007 and that the reform would not be too ambitious.

Speaking to the Financial Times this year, Mr Carstens said: “The best fiscal reform is the one that you can get through congress.” The implication was that he and Felipe Calderón, his centre-right president, would adopt a gradualist approach to overhauling Mexico’s arcane and inefficient system of ­taxation.