Thursday, October 16, 2025

Government raffles land in Sinaloa development to fund hydroelectric plant

A beachfront property in Sinaloa will be the star prize in a lottery whose proceeds will help build a new hydroelectric plant in the state, President López Obrador said Tuesday. 

The 12,000-square-meter property on Playa Espíritu, located on the Sinaloa-Nayarit border, has 11 bedrooms, a swimming pool and a terrace and is valued at 28.9 million pesos (US $1.36 million) 

The government hopes to generate 5 billion pesos (almost $233 million) from the lottery to meet half the cost of the Santa María hydroelectric dam in El Rosario, 73 kilometers southeast of Mazatlán.

“Everything that is obtained by raffling this land goes to Sinaloa … [the dam] is a project of around 10 billion pesos,” the president said.

“Buy your ticket … to get yourself a safe property … It’s an Eden, a paradise.” A ticket costs 250 pesos and the draw will be held Sunday.

Second, third and fourth-place prizes of 5 million pesos each will be awarded, followed by 200 waterfront lots, each with a value of about 1.2 million pesos.

The total value of the prizes is 297 million pesos, said the head of the National Lottery, Margarita González Saravia.

The lottery’s first prize is a ranch that belonged to former Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governor Antonio Toledo Corro. The land in the area was bought in 2008 by the National Tourism Promotion Fund (Fonatur), during the administration of president Felipe Calderón, to create a tourist destination. 

However, the project failed because the property was bought at an elevated price, López Obrador said. He added that the cost of the upkeep posed a challenge. “Fonatur bought it for around 2.5 billion pesos ($22 million in 2008) and since then they had to continue spending on the land … they exceeded 4 billion pesos. It is difficult to maintain it. No one has wanted to invest … because it is not accessible,” he said. 

Presidential raffles have been a frequent sideshow during the López Obrador administration. The presidential plane was advertised as a prize in a 2020 raffle, but symbolic cash prizes were awarded instead, and the plane is still in possession of the government. Box seats in the Azteca Stadium, which were a governmental asset, and the properties of drug traffickers were given away as prizes in September.  

The lottery will be broadcast live on Sunday at 8:00 p.m.

With reports from El País

Have something to say? Paid Subscribers get all access to make & read comments.
collection center for donations

Here’s how you can help victims of flooding in central Mexico

1
The recent heavy rains in central Mexico left countless victims homeless and in need of supplies. Collection centers have been set up to receive donations of food, clothing and medicine.
a monarch butterfly rests on a flower

Northern states welcome first waves of migrating monarchs

2
Pollinator gardens and wildlife watering stations have been established in the Tamaulipas municipality of Gómez Farías and the nearby El Cielo Biosphere Ecological Park, a UNESCO-recognized area prized for its biodiversity and ecotourism.
DHS agents

DHS: Mexican cartels offering bounties of up to US $50,000 for attacks on US federal agents

44
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a statement on Tuesday claiming that Mexican criminal networks "have issued explicit instructions to U.S.-based sympathetics, including street gangs in Chicago, to monitor, harass and assassinate federal agents."
BETA Version - Powered by Perplexity