Eugenio Garza Sada
Built a brewery empire in northern Mexico, then funded a university to keep young engineers at home
Eugenio Garza Sada was born in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1892, into a family that had founded the Cuauhtémoc brewery in 1890. He studied mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of relatively few Mexicans in an American engineering programme at the time, before returning home to join and expand the family businesses.
Under his direction from the 1920s onward, the Monterrey group grew well beyond beer into glass manufacturing, packaging, steel and banking, becoming one of the largest industrial conglomerates in Mexico and a major employer in the country's north. He was known for an unusually direct, hands-on management style, regularly walking factory floors and pushing for technical improvements himself rather than delegating entirely to managers.
Concerned that Mexico's best engineering students were going abroad, chiefly to the United States, for technical education and often staying there afterward, he used his own money and industry connections in 1943 to found the Monterrey Institute of Technology, known as Tec de Monterrey, modelled partly on MIT and built to train Mexican engineers and managers without them having to leave the country. The institution grew into one of Latin America's most significant private universities, with campuses across Mexico.
Garza Sada was assassinated in Monterrey in 1973 during a botched kidnapping attempt by a leftist guerrilla group targeting him for ransom. His death was a major shock in Mexican business circles, and the university he founded remains his most widely cited legacy.