The Inegi figures were horrible: industrial production was down by 4.8% year-on-year. Manufacturing, the key sector of the economy, was down by 6.7%.
The only reasonable bits of the economy were farming (up 2.7%, despite the worries about cheap imports at the beginning of the year) and services (up 0.6%).
Inegi tried to put a gloss on the figures by saying that they were distorted by Holy Week, which fell in April this year. Ignoring this, output was 0.5% up on April 2002.
What is worrying is that key sectors, such as construction, which seemed to be on the mend earlier in the year, are now floundering. April 2002 was the poorest month for the industry since President Vicente Fox took office in 2000. Yet output in April 2003 was just 0.4% up on this.
Inegi's new data on construction companies show that those that are working are doing so at only just over 62% of capacity.
In the private sector, too, there are those who are trying to talk up figures that do not look all that encouraging. Daniel Romero, president of the national council of the maquiladora industry, CNIME, proclaimed last week that the crisis in that sector had bottomed out, and that in 2004 it would recover the 300,000-or-so jobs lost in the past couple of years.
Actually, Inegi figures show employment in the sector in January-April only 2.9% above the same period last year -and that was a low point. Employment in the maquiladora sector last year alone shrank by 10%.
Exports in the first quarter of this year totalled US$17.8bn, a decline of 1.5% on the same period of 2002. With imports at US$13.3bn, the sector's net contribution in the first quarter was US$4.48bn.
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