

Left behind was an eerily empty landscape bigger than Paris, circled by the sprawl of Greater Mexico City. Then, in a post-election referendum launched by López Obrador’s party, the public had voted to scrap it (though critics claimed the results were unrepresentative, with just one in 90 Mexican voters casting a vote). During his campaign, López Obrador had railed against the project’s management for overspending and corruption.

Weeks after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in 2018, the combative leftist leader enraged international investors and Mexico’s business community by canceling the airport, which was already around one-third complete.
