(Bloomberg) -- Mexico’s military splurged well beyond its original budget allotment last year — and most of those funds were used for infrastructure projects. 

The Defense Ministry — which includes the army and air force — was approved to spend 112 billion pesos, or roughly $6.6 billion, in 2023, according to the recently released public budget. It ended up spending 144 billion pesos, or 29% more. The Navy, a separate ministry, spent 57.5 billion pesos, or 37% more than its initial budget of 42 billion pesos. 

Much of the extra spending was used for President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s pet projects, such as the Maya Train and the state-owned airline he created, Mexicana. AMLO, as the president is known, has used the country’s armed forces to build infrastructure that he views as his legacy. To do that, he’s increased the military’s budget by 150% since he took office in 2018. 

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But the military also spent beyond those disbursements. The budget for the Maya Train, which runs through the Yucatan Peninsula, was originally placed under Fonatur, a government tourism agency. AMLO transferred the project to Defense in September 2023, so it went from having a zero-peso allotment for the project to spending 10.1 billion pesos, or nearly $600 million, by the end of the year — without Congressional approval.

It also spent 873 million pesos on the Mexicana airline, from the zero pesos Congress allotted.

“It’s very surprising that they would increase from zero to those amounts,” said Aura Martinez, information coordinator at the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency. “In the best of cases, it shows a lack of planning, and in any case it weakens the country’s budgetary credibility.”

Defense was able to spend more than was alloted for such projects through what’s known as an amendment - a tool that lets a ministry change the budget without Congress’ approval. The legislative body is only informed about amendments in rare circumstances in which the changes exceed 5% of a given governmental branch’s budget, according to Martinez.

Another program within Defense that funds upgrades and expansions of the military’s footprint also got a boost from zero pesos to 11.4 billion pesos. Through this program, the ministry spent an additional 100 million pesos on modifying a ranch to include an equine reproduction center. That project, which started in 2021, has already cost taxpayers 290 million pesos. An additional 9.4 million pesos went into building and equipping a porcine gestation facility in the state of Queretaro.

In December, Defense paid 6.8 billion pesos for two Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules aircraft. Congress had also not approved of that spending. 

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“An absence of budgetary credibility makes the country’s financing more expensive and weakens its economic institutionalism,” Martinez said. 

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