Baja California Sur’s anticorruption office is probing 31 Los Cabos public works that were contracted and allegedly never built.
Residents of Los Cabos are again being asked to trust that the justice system can catch up with politics and concrete. Baja California Sur’s anticorruption prosecutor is now reviewing 31 complaints over public works in the resort municipality that were contracted and allegedly never built.
The specialized office, created to pursue corruption across the state, has opened case files for each of the 31 complaints. The complaints allege that contracts promised public infrastructure but that there is little or no trace of what was paid for. In several files, authorities have already identified as many as four possible officials linked to the disputed projects.
For now, the prosecutor’s office has not publicly named those officials or detailed the exact locations of the contested works. No one has been formally charged in connection with these 31 complaints, and any officials mentioned in the case files remain presumed innocent while investigators decide whether there is enough evidence to go before a judge.
The stakes are high for a municipality that has poured large sums into construction in recent years. A state infrastructure fund reported investing more than 344 million pesos in six road projects in Los Cabos this year alone, with at least ten more works planned for 2026. In a place where some neighborhoods still face water rationing and patchy services while hotel zones grow, every peso that fails to reach the ground deepens mistrust.
Los Cabos public works under suspicion
The new investigation follows a political transition already marked by accusations. Earlier this month, current mayor Christian Agúndez said his administration had filed 31 complaints against the previous municipal government for public works that were paid for but never carried out, as well as for inherited debts running into the hundreds of millions of pesos. He said those complaints had been submitted to the state’s anticorruption prosecutor.
That previous administration was headed by Oscar Leggs Castro, who governed Los Cabos from 2021 to 2024. Leggs already faces a separate corruption case, in which he and a former municipal treasurer have been accused of abuse of authority for allegedly simulating payments. Those proceedings concern earlier conduct but show how the municipality has become one of the main pressure points in Baja California Sur’s wider fight against corruption.
Across the state, the anticorruption prosecutor’s office has said that 18 former officials from different levels of government are already bound over for trial on corruption-related charges, most of them from municipal administrations in Mulegé, La Paz and Los Cabos. Prosecutors have also requested initial hearings for at least 16 more people and expect to seek several additional hearings before the end of the year. The fiscal in charge has warned that crowded court calendars mean those first hearings can take months to be scheduled.
At the same time, the office itself is under financial pressure. Just days before the Los Cabos case was made public, the state government presented a budget proposal that would cut the anticorruption prosecutor’s funding by roughly half for next year. Officials inside the institution have argued that a cut of that size would slow the growth of the young office and limit its ability to hire staff and expand its presence outside the state capital, even as new complaints continue to arrive.
What the 31 cases mean for residents
The 31 Los Cabos complaints focus on public works that residents were told would improve daily life but that, on the ground, still look like dirt streets, flooding risks and long detours. For families already living with chronic water shortages and sharp gaps between tourist zones and working-class neighborhoods, each alleged phantom project deepens frustration.
Legally, the process is still in the investigation phase. Prosecutors must decide whether the evidence supports charges such as abuse of authority or illicit use of powers, or whether the facts point only to mismanagement. Only when a judge agrees to open a formal trial will the public hear detailed allegations and see which officials are called to answer in court.
For Los Cabos, the outcome will test the young anticorruption system. If the 31 complaints move from paper to courtrooms, residents may start to feel that contracts signed in their name are no longer a blank check. If the cases stall, the message will be different, suggesting that in one of Mexico’s most profitable tourist corridors, unfinished works and unpaid debts still carry few consequences.
