The president of Messico Andrés Manuel López Obrador, populist of the left, managed to sell the presidential plane he had wanted to get rid of for years and which, at one point, he had even thought of raffling off in a lottery. The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, bought a few years earlier by one of his predecessors and which for López Obrador was one of the symbols of the country’s inequalities, was eventually bought by Tajikistan for an amount corresponding to around 84 million euros.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who became president in 2018, promised to end corruption and reduce inequality. He had announced that he would not live in the presidential palace (he is living in his house and the presidential palace has become a museum) and that he would sell the expensive presidential plane ordered in 2012 by the conservative then president Felipe Calderón, but he did not make it in time to fly there, because at the end of that year his mandate ended. To use it was therefore Enrique Peña Nieto, his successor, leader of a center party. Peña Nieto tried to block the order for the plane, but it was not possible and so he decided to keep it and call it José María Morelos y Pavón, after a Mexican priest and patriot who died more than 200 years ago. The plane is estimated to have cost around 200 million euros.
It has been calculated that Peña Nieto used the plane – which among other things has a bedroom, a private bathroom with marble inserts and a conference room – for more than 200 domestic and international flights. López Obrador, on the other hand, never used it. Partly because he practically never travels abroad, partly because when he has to make internal flights he takes commercial planes, with economy class tickets. At the beginning of his mandate, López Obrador had decided to move the aircraft abroad, to a California hangar. Then he had tried to sell it by offering it, among others, to then US President Donald Trump. After that he had had the idea of organizing a national lottery whose prize would have been the plane.
(Britta Pedersen/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)
Now, on Twitter, López Obrador has announced the sale to Tajikistan for an amount that is in line, he wrote, with the plane’s official valuation, but still constitutes a significant loss compared to the price at which the plane had been sold. bought.
In a video accompanying the post, the president said that this sale demonstrates how Mexican politics has changed: that before “the authorities” behaved “like little pharaohs” and that now all this will not happen again. He also said: «We are happy. We are like the nouveau riche who buy a yacht or a plane like this and are only happy the day they launch it and the day they sell it».
I inform the people of Mexico that the purchase-sale contract for the presidential plane was concluded today. The government of Tajikistan deposited 1,658,684,400 pesos, in accordance with the official appraisal, to the account of the Institute to Return the Stolen to the People. This money… pic.twitter.com/ILw0IDlSn6
– Andrés Manuel (@lopezobrador_) April 21, 2023
Details of the sale, as well as maintenance costs for the aircraft, will be made public next week. Jorge Mendoza, head of the Mexican national bank Banobras, said that the plane will pass to the Republic of Tajikistan in about ten days: “We have finalized the sale of the presidential plane at a price of 1,659 million pesos, i.e. about 92 million dollars. This price is in accordance with the evaluation. The transaction was made with the Republic of Tajikistan, an Asian, ex-Soviet country, through its State Administration of Investment and Property.’
The money from the sale of the plane will be used to build two 80-bed public hospitals in the southern states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, among the poorest in the country: “They will be inaugurated before the end of my mandate,” the president said. The next presidential elections will be held in 2024.