Mexico’s clamp-down on its drug cartels continues to capture media attention. Gone relatively unnoticed: the strong rebound in the Mexican economy since 2010.

Wages in Mexico are up 3 percent to 4 percent annually the past five years, and unemployment is the lowest it’s been in more than three years. Mexico has benefited from a manufacturing shift back to the Western hemisphere due to higher shipping costs, the relatively weak dollar, and rising wages in Asia— Chinese wages are up 13 percent to 14 percent annually the past five years.

As a result, domestic consumption has picked up in Mexico, offsetting the recent drop in exports. For third-quarter 2012, Mexico’s economy grew more than 3 percent, with the country’s service sector expanding nearly 5 percent. Full-year 2012 growth is expected to be 3.5 percent.

The fundamentals of the Mexican economy are also attractive. Credit as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) is only about 20 percent vs. about 50 percent in Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy. That makes Mexico less vulnerable to another global credit crisis, as well as leaving it plenty of room for growth.

Inflation, once a scourge, is hovering between 2 percent and 4 percent, its lowest point in more than a year. This is well within the Banco de Mexico’s target band, reducing the nearterm risk of an interest rate hike.

Finally, several economic reforms ranging from more open labor markets to incentives for private investment in the energy sector are in the legislative pipeline and expected to become reality in 2013, including a hike in the minimum wage.

Grupo Televisa (NYSE: TV). This is an excellent play on the virtuous cycle of rising consumer incomes. A Spanish-language television powerhouse, the company is the largest broadcaster in Mexico and wholly owns, or has substantial interests in, both cable and satellite TV providers. It also owns a vast library of Spanish-language programming.

An estimated 70 percent of Mexican viewers tune in to Grupo Televisa networks during primetime, allowing the company to command rising ad rates.

The company is also very good at monetizing its content library, recently inking a deal that provides programming access to Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), which is pushing its services into Latin America.

And Grupo Televisa is garnering growing content revenue, as it exports more programming to Univision, a dominant Spanish-language TV station in the US.

The company’s pay-TV services are also enjoying substantial growth in Mexico, where cable and satellite TV have only 45 percent of the market.

Sky, Grupo Televisa’s satellite TV service, has seen strong subscriber growth since it began offering lowpriced subscriptions with greater variety in content than its competitors. Satellite TV should prove a major growth driver for the company for years to come.

While Grupo Televisa’s aggressive acquisitions have dampened earnings recently, annual revenue growth has averaged more than 10 percent the past five years and earnings should soon catch up.

America Movil (NYSE: AMX). The telecom industry should be another major beneficiary of rising Mexican incomes. America Movil operates the country’s largest cell phone network and controls about 70 percent of the market. The company’s 2010 takeover of Telmex also made it the country’s leading provider of fixed-line telephone service.

Although cell phones are already ubiquitous in Mexico, there’s still plenty of growth potential. While Americans routinely send text messages and read their email on smartphones, such data services are still largely unheard of south of the border. In fact, only about 15 percent of Latin Americans have access to data services via smartphones.

As a result, America Movil is investing heavily in building its data infrastructure, devoting more than $8 billion to capital expenditures last year and launching 4G LTE service in Mexico this past November. Over the next three years, the company plans to spend another $8 billion on its infrastructure.

Because of its network improvements, America Movil has begun aggressively marketing smartphones along with competitively priced data plans. Given the low penetration rate for smartphones, that’s a huge growth market, and America Movil is in the lead.

This massive infrastructure investment will not only serve America Movil’s own customers, but will also allow the company to lease access to other providers, providing a potential revenue boost down the road.