Illustration: © iStockphoto.com/Wildpixel
Over the past three months, I have had the marvelous privilege of speaking with several dozen of the most important businessmen and political leaders in Latin America. I would say that even after years of being in this position of mixing economics and business with information, it was the most interesting intellectual pilgrimage I have experienced in my life.
Mexican businessmen, Chilean politicians, Brazilian directors, American environmental leaders, Colombian financiers, a succession of people who, one could easily say, have rewritten the history of the region, because many of them were key actors in some of the most important events of the last 20 years.
The reason for all these conversations was the 20th anniversary of the BRAVO Business Awards that the magazine Latin Trade gives out, and that will be celebrated in 2014. As the articles show, all of those whom I interviewed have won this distinction at one time or another since its creation.
This edition is, then, the result of those chats in which we tried to review how, or why, they made some of the most important decisions of the two previous decades. No doubt all the actions to which I refer have one characteristic in common. Because of them, in one way or another, Latin America is today a very different place from what it was in the ’80s.
We at Latin Trade are very pleased that now we can tie these articles to the offices and cities where the strategies or business plans were forged. We hope that you will find there is enough information to better understand the dramatic change that is taking place in this region, and perhaps gain a sense of those that are going to happen in the years to come.
And so, welcome to this excursion through the world of high-level decision-making in business and politics. To visit together those who, from the most diverse situations, have drawn the map of the entrepreneurial and political geography of Latin America.
Santiago Gutiérrez
Executive Editor
sgutierrez@latintrade.com