Mexico launches army-run airline with flight to resort
MEXICO CITY — Mexico launched its armyrun airline Tuesday, when the first Mexicana airlines flight took off from Mexico City bound for the Caribbean resort of Tulum.
It was another sign of the outsized role President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has given to Mexico’s armed forces. The airline’s military-run holding company now also operates about a dozen airports, hotels, trains, the country’s customs service and tourist parks.
Gen. Luís Cresencio Sandoval, Mexico’s defense secretary, said that having all those diverse businesses run by the military was “common in developed countries.”
In fact only a few countries, such as Cuba, Sri Lanka, Argentina and Colombia, have military-run airlines, mostly small carriers.
Mexicana plans to carry tourists from Mexican cities to resorts such as Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Los Cabos, Zihuatanejo, Acapulco and Mazatlan. The carrier hopes to compete mainly on price: The first 425 tickets sold offered prices of about $92 for the flight from Mexico City to Tulum, which the government claimed was about one-third cheaper than commercial airlines.
However, Mexicana’s first flight didn’t go according to plan. The company said it had to be rerouted to the colonial city of Merida because of poor weather in Tulum. After a wait, it finally took off again and arrived in Tulum about five hours after it left Mexico City, about double the usual travel time.
Mexicana also hopes to fly to 16 small regional airports that currently have no flights or very few.
Sandoval said the airline began operations with three Boeing jets and two smaller leased Embraer planes, and hopes to lease or acquire five more jets in early 2024.
López Obrador called the takeoff of the first Boeing 737-800 jet “a historic event” and a “new stage,” marking the return of the formerly government-run airline Mexicana, which was privatized, then went bankrupt and finally closed in 2010.
The airline combines López Obrador’s reliance on the military — which he claims is the most incorruptible and patriotic arm of the government — and his nostalgia for the staterun companies that dominated Mexico’s economy until widespread privatizations were carried out in the 1980s.
López Obrador recalled fondly the days when government-run firms operated everything from oil, gas, electricity and mining to airlines and telephone service. He bashed the privatizations, which were carried out because Mexico’s indebted government could no longer afford to operate the inefficient, state-owned companies.
“They carried out a big fraud,” the president said at his daily morning news briefing. “They deceived a lot of people, saying these state-run companies didn’t work.”
In fact, the state-run companies in Mexico accumulated a well-deserved reputation for inefficiency, poor service, corruption and political control. For example, when the national telephone company was owned by the government, customers routinely had to wait years to get a phone line installed and were required to buy shares in the company in order to eventually get service, problems that rapidly disappeared after it was privatized in 1990.