PULSE NEWS MEXICO

Nearly a year after its official opening in March 2022, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) pet megaproject, the inaccessible and essentially abandoned Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) is still hemorrhaging money and depends on the federal government for 90 percent of its operating costs.

According to the AIFA’s own internal end-of-year financial statements, 90 cents out of every peso that the terminal has reported as “income” between its inauguration on March 21, 2022, and Dec. 31 of last year were, in fact, government subsidies.

According to the AIFA financial statements, tax authorities injected 1.282 billion pesos into the airport to avoid registering losses.

That amount is more than double what was expected to be provided to the AIFA from the state up until September, when government financial transfers for the amount of 564 million pesos were recorded.

At the end of the year, the amount of government subsidies allocated to the AIFA amounted to more than 100 times the support that the flagship airport project had originally from the administration when its was first proposed in 2021, estimated to be about 12 million pesos.

According to the financial statements, the transfers from Mexico’s Finance and Public Credit Secretariat (SHCP) were intended to offset the losses of the new terminal, which to date continues to spend more than it earns.

The AIFA 2022 state of activities report, which was obtained by the daily El Universal, detailed that the airport generated its own income from the sale of goods and services for a sum of 139 million pesos, an amount which was not even enough to make the basic payroll of 384 million pesos.

In total, the AIFA obtained “income and other benefits” in 2022 for the amount of 1.421 billion pesos, but 90 cents of each peso came from transfers, assignments, subsidies and other aid from the federal government.

The largest amount of these resources (829 million pesos, or 58.3 percent) was used to pay for general services.

In addition, 384 million pesos (27 percent) of those resources were earmarked for personnel salaries, and 69 million pesos (4.8 percent) went to materials and supplies.

With the support granted to the new air terminal, Mexico’s federal government subsidized practically all its operations in 2022.

During the entirety of 2022, the AIFA only accommodated 912,415 air passengers.