If you’ve been kind enough to read this column regularly, you’ll recall that since 2023 there was a certain obsession with construction data—specifically the category called “civil engineering works”—which I described as fictitious. Not because INEGI was altering the information, but because its source was. And that source was the Defense Ministry, builder of the Maya Train. As is often the case, colleagues attributed that obsession to some character defect of the author. However, we can now confirm that I was right: the data were wrong, and the drop we are seeing today is not from those imaginary peaks they invented, which is even worse.
The earliest mention I found of this issue was July 26, 2023, in these pages, revisited on September 8, but stated clearly on the 20th of that month. So, a little over two years ago. Back then, the data suggested that civil engineering works were growing at an annual rate of 114%. That didn’t match the data from the National Survey of Construction Companies, but it was still being published. A year later, the figure for the second quarter of 2023 had been corrected to 99%, but the third quarter reported a growth of 118%. The bubble continued.
With the most recent data, it turns out that in the second quarter of 2023, growth was actually 41%—nothing to do with the previously reported 114% or 99%. And the third quarter of that year, instead of 118%, turns out to have been only 60%. The cumulative figure for all of 2023, instead of being nearly 80% according to the numbers published in 2023 and 2024, is now 44%. That growth does make sense, because the Maya Train construction (and part of Dos Bocas recorded during that period) was undeniably significant.
The levels of civil engineering works (measured against the 2018 reference of 100 points), which reached 160 points in the 2023 publications and almost 180 in those of 2024, are now below 150. And it is against that level that today’s collapse is measured. In the past twelve months—coinciding with the first year of the current government—the drop averages 26%. Not against the imaginary earlier figures, but against the more reasonable ones INEGI has now been able to estimate. As a result, this construction component stands at 91 points in the third quarter of this year. For reference, in the third quarter of 2018 it stood at 98. Construction overall is now at 96, compared with 101 in that pre-airport-cancellation quarter.
In other words, after the white elephants (which are now losing money), we are below the starting point. For years, those figures were used repeatedly to insist that the economy was on the right path, that investment was growing, that we were entering the nearshoring boom—and business and investor confidence suffered yet another deception. Almost simultaneously, as you’ll recall, the government pushed for an exaggerated increase in the minimum wage, expanded the number of pension recipients and the size of those pensions, and to the fictitious investment bubble they added a consumption bubble. Both peaks occurred precisely around the 2024 election, and everything has fallen since. It no longer matters—they got what they wanted, and they financed it with public money. For those who like inventing electoral frauds, few cases compare to this one.
Even so, congratulations are in order for INEGI for having (quietly) corrected the Defense Ministry’s fictitious figures. I think the same will gradually happen with other data (mining, for example). And I hope it serves as evidence of the level of conmen we have placed in power.