The army, which is currently building a new international airport at the site of the Santa Lucía Air Force Base, may be called upon to build bank branches next.

President López Obrador suggested Tuesday that the army could build 13,000 branches of the new Banco del Bienestar (Bank of Well-Being) in less than a year.

“We’re looking at the possibility of military engineers building them . . .” he told reporters at his morning conference. “What’s important to us is to have them, we need the infrastructure.”

To that end, the federal government’s super-delegates in each of the states and Mexico City are seeking land on which to build the branches.

“. . . We don’t want them to be in marginal spaces, we want them to be a respectable office, a real bank. It’s going to be the bank with the best infrastructure in the whole country,” the president said.

López Obrador emphasized the importance of the bank as a more secure means to deliver government assistance provided through the new Secretariat of Welfare.

“We’ve had some 10 robberies [of resources] and people have lost their lives receiving welfare payments. So we don’t want to use cash, we want to use the [benefits] card in these 13,000 banks.”

Welfare undersecretary Ariadna Montiel reported that around 20 million pesos (US $1.02 million) of government assistance intended for senior citizens was stolen between January and September.

The robberies occurred in Chiapas, Hidalgo, Michoacán, Guerrero and Oaxaca.

The new bank replaces the federally-owned Bansefi.

Source: El Financiero (sp)