Strategic Projects Will Continue

On his Monday morning’s daily press conference, President López Obrador reiterated his commitment to his administration’s most visible infrastructure projects, insisting that dire economic circumstances would not cause the cancellation of either the Mayan Train, the Santa Lucia airport, the Dos Bocas refinery or even the Transisthmic corridor. Político.mx reported that the president called for a redoubling of efforts to combat corruption and to “apply total obedience to the law of republican austerity” in order to face this crisis without canceling these major projects. The president said these projects must not be cancelled because of the jobs and economic benefits they will generate. He also made it clear that recovery and relief efforts will be focused on the economy’s most “popular” (in this context, meaning the poorest) sectors, dismissing what he referred to as “neoliberal measures” such as tax waivers.

These topics were discussed during Tuesday's morning conference, where the president took time  to explain the newly installed protocols to face Phase 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic and continued again to highlight that these specific infrastructure projects would not be cancelled.

These announcements could be interpreted as direct contradictions to a number of recent calls for these projects to be cancelled. EL Heraldo de Mexico reports that the Private Sector Economic Studies Center (CEESP), a partner of CCE, believes this is a great opportunity to cancel these projects which were “never justified in the first place and that in the current circumstances seem superfluous”. Additionally, El Universal reports that the PAN party, through its national leader Marko Cortés, published a decalogue of actions that the government must take to face the current crisis, which include the cancellation of all of these infrastructure projects. Cortés also called for a number of taxes to be waived.