(Bloomberg) -- Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador defended Tuesday his government's decree to give its major infrastructure projects national security protections, arguing that it is needed to speed up permitting processes.
The directive, published Monday, orders authorities to issue provisional permits for a swath of government infrastructure projects five days after the request is received. If the permits aren't decided in that period of time, they will be deemed “to be resolved positively,” the decree says, adding that the provisional permits will be valid for 12 months.
“This is an agreement to speed up procedures, so that bureaucratic procedures don't slow down projects,” Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, said at a daily press conference. Large parts of some of his main projects, like the Mayan Train tourist route in the Yucatan peninsula, have been held up by injunctions filed against the projects' permits.
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Legal experts and transparency activists have said the decree casts a shroud over government actions, hindering oversight, cutting through legal protections and potentially endangering the environment and human rights.
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