Vote was against the New MEX airport

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October 28, 2018 / 10:23 PM / Updated 10 hours ago

In blow to business, Mexicans spurn new Mexico City airport

 

Christine Murray, Noe Torres

4 Min Read

 

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexicans voted to scrap a part-built $13 billion new airport for the capital in a divisive referendum pushed for by President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, dealing a blow to business leaders like Carlos Slim, and causing the peso to slide.

 

FILE PHOTO: Employees work on the terminal area at the construction site of the new Mexico City International Airport in Texcoco on the outskirts of Mexico City, Mexico, August 16, 2018. REUTERS/Henry Romero/File Photo

Roughly a million people, just 1 percent of Mexico’s electorate, participated in the referendum held over four days, the Arturo Rosenblueth Foundation, the non-profit organization that supervised the count, said after voting ended on Sunday.

Almost 70 percent voted against the new airport, it said.

Called a “public consultation”, the vote was non-binding, but the leftist Lopez Obrador, who had called for the referendum and was against the new airport, has pledged to respect the result.

The peso weakened some 2 percent against the dollar after the results were announced, making it by far the biggest loser among major currencies against the dollar.

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The public was asked if the next government should finish the new airport to replace the current hub, or add two runways to convert a military air base in Santa Lucia, around 50 km (31 miles) north of the capital, and keep the current airport.

Lopez Obrador, who takes office on Dec. 1, argued during the election campaign that the new airport was tainted by corruption and would be expensive to maintain due to the geological complexity of the terrain. It has been under construction on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco east of Mexico City since 2015.

Companies owned by the family of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, once the world’s richest man, were co-designing, co-financing, and co-building the Texcoco project. Mexico’s pension funds had also put up money.

In a statement on Sunday in English, Lopez Obrador’s transition team said the incoming government would not allocate new resources to the Texcoco project, but that the rights of investors and bondholders were fully guaranteed.

Designated transport minister Javier Jimenez has canvassed to convert the air base at Santa Lucia.

Still, Gustavo de Hoyos, head of employers’ confederation Coparmex, urged Lopez Obrador to finish the Texcoco project, one of the flagship public works of outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Cancelling the new airport would cost about 120 billion pesos, the Grupo Aeroportuario de la Ciudad de México (GACM), which has been handling the project, said earlier this year.

CRYING FOUL

The public vote was organized by Lopez Obrador’s National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), without the national electoral authority INE. Opposition parties say that the consultation did not follow the proper rules.

Several local media outlets reported cases of people who were able to vote more than once, and highlighted failures in software used to register voter identification cards.

On Twitter, the PRI accused the incoming government of rigging the vote in favor of Santa Lucia.

Javier Lozano, a former labor minister and backer of the defeated PRI candidate in the presidential election, described the vote to cancel the airport as “terrible news”.

“We look like a banana republic to the world,” he said in a televised discussion of the decision on broadcaster Televisa.

MORENA lawmakers sought to cast the vote as a referendum on the business ties of the PRI government, whose credibility was battered by allegations of corruption and conflicts-of-interest.

“The markets have our respect, but this decision was for the people to make,” Marti Batres, the leader of the Senate and a senior member of MORENA, told the Televisa discussion.

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Mexicans want to stop construction on $13.3 billion international airport

Mexicans want to stop construction on $13.3 billion international airport

Oct 29, 2018 Ben Goldstein

 

Mexicans want president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador to cancel construction of the $13.3 billion new Mexico International Airport (NAIM) project, according to the results of a four-day referendum that concluded Oct. 28.

The vote had asked the public to decide whether to continue construction on the airport at Texcoco, located 25 miles northeast of Mexico City, or to nix it in favor of keeping the existing airport in Mexico City (MEX) and adding a new terminal and runways at the Santa Lucia (NLU) military base, located north of the capital.  

López Obrador said during his presidential campaign the Santa Lucia plan would lead to substantial cost savings for the Mexican government. That claim has been disputed by the Mexican College of Civil Engineers, who say the Santa Lucia option may be more expensive than continuing with the NAIM, once sunk costs from the project are factored in.

Just over 1 million people—or 2% of the Mexican population—voted in the referendum at 1,000 voting stations set up in town squares across the country. According to the results, 747,000 people voted in favor of the Santa Lucia option, and 310,463 voted to continue construction at Texcoco, with results in from 98% of polling places.

Five billion dollars and thousands of tons of concrete have already gone into construction of the NAIM, and the federal government has issued $6 billion in bonds to finance the work. While the bonds are backed up by airport taxes, cessation of the construction could lead creditors to demand immediate payment from the governmenConstruction of the new airport at Texcoco was initiated because of saturation at the current airport, which handled 44 million passengers last year and has little room to grow. While the proposed expansion at NLU would offer some relief, the number of flights would be limited by airspace restrictions, according to the UN’s International Aviation Organization, which said Texcoco remains the best long-term solution to the lack of airport capacity at MEX.

The Santa Lucia plan was opposed by groups including Airlines for America; IATA; ámara Nacional de Aerotransportes (CANAERO); Latin American and Caribbean Air Transport Association (ALTA); Air Canada; and Air France.

[Kip Powick]

Oh how I wish we could use only 1 % of the electorate to make changes with our Municipal , Provincial and Federal governments.