Photo: José Pablo Domínguez/Unsplash

By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF

Aeroméxico, Mexico’s largest airline, reiterated Friday, Nov. 19, that it will continue to use exclusively the Benito Juárez International Airport for all its flights into and out of Mexico City.

The announcement came as a blow to the administration of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who has invested vast amounts of political and financial capital is building the controversial and still-unfinished Felipe Ángeles International Airport in Santa Lucia at Zumpango, State of Mexico (EdoMéx), after having canceled the more-than-half-completed, $7 billion New Mexico City Airport in Texcoco, EdoMéx.

Aeroméxico had originally said it would not use the Santa Lucía facility back in September.

In a press conference at the travel fair in Mérida, Yucatan, on Friday, Aeroméxico corporate director Christian Pastrana said that despite pressure from the government to change its flights to the Felipe Ángeles Airport, the airline will not switch its routes to the new airport.

“On the subject of Santa Lucía, Aeroméxico has absolutely not changed its position,” said Pastrana.

And the simultaneous operation of flights in and out of Santa Lucía and Benito Juárez are both impractical and virtually impossible, he said.

Consequently, Pastrana said that Aeroméxico has opted to strengthen its position at the Mexico City International Airport instead.

Several days earlier, Aeroméxico announced that it would soon move 20 departures from terminal 2 of the capital airport to terminal 1, where it has not operated for 13 years.

Pastrana also said that the airline is in the final phase of its financial restructuring under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Law in the United States with a $1 billion loan from the New York-based Apollo Investment Corporation.