Mexico City –
Mexico put the military-run airline into service on Tuesday, with Mexicana Airlines’ first flight taking off from Mexico City bound for the Caribbean resort of Tulum.
This was another sign of the major role President Andrés Manuel López Obrador gave to the Mexican military. The company’s military-run holding company currently also operates about a dozen airports, hotels, railways, customs and tourist parks.
Mexican Defense Secretary Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval said it was “common in developed countries” for the military to run such diverse businesses.
In fact, only a few countries have military-run airlines, including Cuba, Sri Lanka, Argentina, and Colombia. These are mostly small airlines with a small number of propeller planes, operating primarily on underserved or remote domestic routes.
But Mexicana Airlines plans to carry tourists from Mexican cities to resorts such as Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Los Cabos, Zihuatanejo, Acapulco and Mazatlan. Flights seem to be scheduled for him every 3-4 days, mostly on weekends.
Airlines want to compete primarily on price, with the first 425 tickets sold costing a flight from Mexico City to Tulum around $92, and the government said it would outpace commercial airlines by around $92. They claimed it was a third cheaper.
However, Mexicana’s first flight did not go as planned. The company announced that MXA flight 1788 had to be rerouted to the colonial city of Merida due to bad weather in Tulum. After a long wait, the plane finally took off again and arrived in Tulum in about five hours, about twice the normal time after takeoff from Mexico City.
Mexicana also hopes to serve 16 smaller regional airports that currently have no or very few flights. For those worried about being told “fasten your seatbelts, that’s an order”, the flight attendants on the Mexicana flight appeared to be civilians. In Mexico, the Air Force is a wing of the Army.
Sandoval said the company has started operations with three Boeing jets and two leased Embraer jets, and hopes to lease or acquire five more by early 2024.
President López Obrador called the takeoff of the first Boeing 737-800 jet a “historic event” and “a new phase” for the airline, which was privatized, then filed for bankruptcy and finally closed in 2010. He said it commemorated the revival of the former national airline Mexicana. .
The airline was built on President López Obrador’s reliance on the military (which he claims is the most enduring and patriotic branch of government) and until extensive privatization was implemented in the 1980s. It is a combination of nostalgia for the state-owned enterprises that dominated Mexico’s economy.
López Obrador fondly recalled the days when state-run companies ran everything from oil, gas, electricity and mining to airlines and telephone services. He decried privatization, which was carried out because Mexico’s debt-ridden government could no longer afford to run inefficient state-owned enterprises.
“They committed a massive fraud,” the president said at his daily morning press conference. “They deceived a lot of people by saying that the state-owned enterprises were not working.”
Indeed, Mexico’s state-owned enterprises have developed a well-deserved reputation for inefficiency, poor service, corruption, and political control. For example, Mexico’s state newsagents often refused to sell newsprint to opposition newspapers.
When the national telephone company was owned by the government, customers often waited years to get a phone line installed, and ultimately had to buy stock in the company to receive service. This problem quickly disappeared after privatization in 1990. .
Although the government cannot restore state-owned enterprises to their former glory, efforts to rebuild smaller, state-owned enterprises as part of a historic fight to return Mexico’s economy to a more collectivist past is drawing.
“This will be the great legacy of your administration, and it will echo forever,” exclaimed a controller at Mexico City’s Felipe Angeles Airport as the first Mexicana flight took off.
President López Obrador also put the military in charge of many of the country’s infrastructure projects and gave it a leading role in domestic law enforcement.
For example, the military built both Felipe Angeles Airport and Tulum Airport.
Apart from increasing traffic at the disused Felipe Ángeles Airport, military-run Mexicana appears to be planning to provide flights to supply passengers for the president’s Maya Train tourism project. The military is also building a railway line that will connect the ruins to beach resorts on the Yucatan Peninsula.
The military, which had no experience operating commercial flights, established a subsidiary in charge of Mexico.