100 million Mexicans...only

• 150 millions announced forty years ago
• Fewer than thrée children per woman today
• Seven woman out of ten are contraceptive users
• Mexico City, the second largest megalopolis in the world

For Mexico, as for most countries in the world, the 20th century will have been the century of demographictransition, characterised by population growth rates hitherto unknown. The decline in mortality,which began in the 1930s, preceded the decline in fertility by approximately thirty years, thus explainingwhy the population increased at such a pace. In spite of the million deaths during the MexicanRevolution (the armed phase of which lasted from1910 to 1918), in 2001 the country had eight times moreinhabitants than in 1913: a hundred million comparedwith thirteen million.