Lopez Obrador ditched an airport project backed by some of the nation’s wealthiest businessmen By Andrea Navarro
What once was a busy construction site, with many thousands of workers building an airport on land the size of Manhattan, is slowly becoming a ghost town since Mexicos’s incoming president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, pulled the plug on the project late last month. Cranes are coming down; teams are packing up. Even though the construction won’t be officially canceled until Dec. 1, when Lopez Obrador takes office, some companies have started preparing for the inevitable. Bloomberg News photographer Brett Gundlock took his third trip to the construction site, where he estimates that only about 25 percent of the workforce remains. Word has it that a holiday party has been moved up to next week—because who knows who will be around to celebrate in December?
Lopez Obrador had campaigned against the hub, one of Mexico’s biggest infrastructure projects, saying it was a waste of money and rife with graft.

Billionaire Carlos Slim’s construction company is heavily involved in the project. His Grupo Carso teamed up with Empresas ICA and others to build the futuristic terminal designed by renowned British architect Norman Foster in a contract worth close to $4 billion. Carso is also building one of the runways, the whose estimated cost was about $400 million when the contract was awarded.
According to Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, the cost of canceling the new airport could come to as much as $10.5 billion. The project is already 32 percent complete, according to an estimate by the outgoing presidential administration of Enrique Pena Nieto in September, and much of the money for its completion has been raised.



