Defense has been an avid user of amendments, spending 27% more than Congress approved from 2019 to 2022, according to the analysis.

“We’d never seen so many spending mechanisms made available to the armed forces as we’re seeing now,” Sanchez said. “Defense’s overspending equals all of the Labor Ministry’s annual budget.”

While he’s spending more on the military, Lopez Obrador’s priorities have differed from those of his predecessors. Historically, Mexican presidents have devoted nearly 50% of the Defense administration’s budget to training, recruiting and deploying soldiers, and buying weapons. Under Lopez Obrador’s administration, that share of the budget, in real terms, will have fallen to 17%.

Instead, 51% of the Defense and Navy’s combined budgets of 331 billion pesos in 2024 was earmarked for infrastructure projects.

Nearly half of the 259 billion pesos that Defense got this year will be used to finish the third of the Maya Train line it’s in charge of building. The railway is designed to ferry passengers between tourism hotspots like Cancun and Merida, and to hotels the military is building and operating deep in the Mayan jungle.

Another chunk will go to operating the new state-owned airline as well as managing airports near Mexico City and Tulum.

Much of the military’s business operations are housed under a government-run company called Grupo Aeroportuario, Ferroviario, de Servicios Auxiliares y Conexos, Olmeca-Maya-Mexica SA — better known as Gafsacomm. AMLO created the conglomerate in 2022 to oversee most government-built infrastructure projects and handed over its operation to the Defense Ministry. Its budget this year of 15 billion pesos will help it operate 12 airports, five hotels, three natural parks, two trains, a museum and the Mexicana airline.

Hardly anyone expects the airports or the airline to turn a profit in the near future. While the group’s losses will be covered by public coffers, it will get to keep any profit it does make and redirect it to the military’s pension system.

“The trend is that increasingly, the armed forces are going to have different money-making streams,” said Sanchez. “And that’s dangerous because you’re giving more money to an armed corporation that has a legitimate use of power and 400,000 soldiers.”

Lopez Obrador sees the projects as a way to develop the economy of traditionally poor parts of the country, which will create more employment and lead to better conditions, ultimately improving public safety. And the military has to be in charge of it all because, in the president’s view, it’s able to rise above the corruption that plagues civilian agencies handling funds for major projects. The military can deliver at a fraction of the cost of a private company and in a much shorter time, he says.

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