2023-04-22 19:45:50
Text: Cuba News 360 Writing
The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced in recent days that the controversial presidential plane that his administration had put up for sale since December 2, 2018, was finally sold to the Government of Tajikistan.
As AMLO commented on his Twitter account, the purchase-sale contract was signed after a deposit of 92 million dollars (USD), a figure far removed from the 218 million USD that former Mexican President Felipe paid for the plane in 2012. Calderón, followed by his successor Enrique Peña Nieto.
The Mexican minister specified that the money was placed in the account of the Institute to Return the Stolen to the People and that it will be used to build “two 80-bed hospitals in the poorest areas of Mexico,” the BBC reported.
“After a long time, this plane was sold.” “We are happy, we are like the nouveau riche who buy a yacht or an airplane like this and are only happy the day they open it and the day they sell it,” AMLO said.
Selling the “José María Morelos y Pavón” Boeing 787-8 plane was one of the Mexican president’s electoral promises, but due to its highly personalized model, it became one of his biggest headaches.
The luxury inside the plane (it has marble finishes, bathrooms and a presidential bedroom) had been criticized by the president, who identified it as a symbol of the waste of previous governments.
After staying for more than a year in a private hangar in the United States, and no sale proposal prospered, in 2020, the plane returned to Mexico to avoid high maintenance costs abroad.
In September of that same year, AMLO decided to “raffle” the plane among the population through a symbolic raffle, since what was at stake was the money equivalent to the value of the plane at that time.
At the end of 2022, the president announced that the plane would be delivered to the Defense Secretariat to form part of the fleet of the new Mexicana de Aviación company, but with its sale this intention will not finally materialize. Tajikistan now has ten days to take the plane.
Finally, AMLO assured that more details will be given in the coming days about how expensive the maintenance of the aircraft was and how little use it had. He did not use the plane and also prohibited public officials from using it.
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