In 1969, Cancún was not really a place. There was no bridge to the island, no airport, and Quintana Roo was not even a state yet. That was where a group inside Mexico’s central bank decided to build a tourist resort from scratch. Not because tourists were asking for Cancún — almost nobody had heard of it — but because Mexico needed more dollars and Americans were taking more beach vacations. They fed everything they could measure into computers and used Banco de México's machines so heavily that th