Mexico: López Obrador sells his presidential plane to Tajikistan

By Laura Fernández Cañas

A little more than a year before the end of his six-year term, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said goodbye to his presidential plane after officially selling it to Tajikistan.

The luxurious aircraft, which once cost Mexicans, under the mandate of Felipe Calderón, US$218 million, has been sold for almost half of its initial price, US$92 million.

According to AMLO, for being “a luxury for self-conscious little pharaohs” and even though on several occasions, López Obrador assured that he would not sell the plane for less than US$110 million.

Calderón criticized the origin of the funds for purchasing the plane and the fact that it was sold at much lower than the price originally paid for its acquisition.

The former president shared a publication on social networks indicating that the money obtained from the sale of the presidential plane could not enter the country because “the Money Laundering Prevention Law prohibits it”, pointing out alleged links of the funds from Tajikistan with drug trafficking.

Obrador, for his part, has justified the sale price by pointing out that it had a malfunction, for which the aircraft had been undergoing maintenance in the United States since 2018 and was transferred to Mexico City International Airport in early March.

The attempts to get rid of the Boeing 787 began four years ago, when he tried to rent it to private companies, use it as a stage for weddings, birthday parties, and family events, and even sell tickets to raffle the presidential plane among a group of business people, who were never informed of the winner.

Not long before, in true Lola Flores style, he asked one peso from each Mexican to pay for the plane.

The buyer, a neighbor of Kyrgyzstan, China, and Afghanistan, spent more than €90 million to acquire this plane, named José María Morelos y Pavón, in honor of the priest and military insurgent who organized and led the second stage of the Mexican War of Independence.

It was designed to carry 80 people and has a presidential suite with a private bathroom, among other amenities.

Before Tajikistan, Argentina was the country that was willing to reach an agreement with AMLO, but the US$30 million they offered did not convince the Mexican president.

According to official sources, the money will go to the ‘Instituto para Devolver al Pueblo lo Robado’, the body in charge of transforming into social policy for the neediest, the historical governmental squandering, and the wealth seized from drug traffickers.

The sale coincides with the controversy provoked by the multiple allegations of theft within the body, which have put the management of the institute’s administration created by AMLO in the spotlight.

With this money, the Government has committed, so far only in words, to build two hospitals, one with 80 beds, in the mountains of Guerrero, in Tlapa, the poorest area of Mexico, and the other in Tuxtepec, Oaxaca.

According to the Mexican President, they will be inaugurated before September 2024.

With information from LGI