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Construction of new Mexico airport rejected in referendum
MEXICO CITY, Oct 29, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Mexicans voted to halt construction
of a controversial new airport for the capital, according to results of a
referendum announced Sunday that saw 69 percent of voters reject the project.
With 98 percent of the votes tallied, 747,000 voted in favour of
repurposing the Santa Lucia military airport instead, according to Enrique
Calderon, president of the Arturo Rosenblueth Foundation, which is in charge
of counting the votes.
The 64-year-old incoming leftist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who
succeeds Enrique Pena Nieto on December 1, had threatened to cancel the
multi-billion-dollar new airport, charging it was a waste of taxpayer money.
The soon-to-be president, a former Mexico City mayor, has also criticized
the environmental impact of the project — whose estimated cost is more than
$13 billion — and said it is marred by corruption.
But the four-day consultation put him on a collision course with the
business world, which says the new terminal is needed to ease woes at the
aging current airport, which handled nearly 45 million passengers last year.
Lopez Obrador says instead of building a new terminal northeast of the
capital, a military airbase south of the mega-city could be repurposed.
Billionaire Mexican businessman Carlos Slim is the main investor in the new
airport, and has led the business community’s criticism of Lopez Obrador, who
won the presidency in a resounding victory in July.
“Canceling the project would amount to canceling the economic growth of the
country,” Slim said in April.
Slim’s construction company CICSA was awarded the $4.7 billion contract to
build the airport’s terminal in consortium with six other companies.
Pena Nieto’s government says the new airport would create up to 450,000
jobs and have the capacity to handle 125 million passengers a year when fully
operational.
Lopez Obrador’s decision to submit the airport project — a technical one
that has implications for air safety — to a public vote has been widely
questioned.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, a specialized UN agency,
supports the building of the new airport.
Mexican voters were asked to answer the following question: “Given the
saturation of Mexico City International Airport, which option do you consider
to be the best for the country?”
Two choices were given: repurposing the Santa Lucia military base, a plan
that would also mean renovating the current airport and one in neighboring
Toluca; or continuing to build the new one and abandoning the old one.
BSS/AFP/GMR/1130 hrs