The biggest share of San Miguel’s state-debt allocation is not going to a new local project. It is being directed to a road section that was left unfinished due to legal trouble, contract limits, and a shifting state budget. The city also gets money for hospital imaging equipment. The decision puts fresh scrutiny on how Guanajuato is using borrowed money, what was promised on Bulevar La Libertad, and why one missing stretch became San Miguel’s largest debt-funded item.
San Miguel puts debt money into an unfinished road
San Miguel de Allende will use 266.1 million pesos from Guanajuato’s debt-funded public works package to finish the La Cieneguita section of Bulevar La Libertad, a road project that was delivered last year with one key stretch still unresolved.
The money is part of the state’s Manos a la Obra program, a package that Guanajuato says will finance 386 projects across the state’s 46 municipalities. The state government said the broader program includes 7.943 billion pesos in works, with 4 billion pesos coming from financing approved by the state Congress through the Manos a la Obra announcement.
San Miguel’s share is 288.1 million pesos. Almost all of it is tied to the road. The remaining local project is the replacement or operation of a CT scanner at the General Hospital, with the local allocation described at 22 million pesos. A separate state health release put the scanner investment at 21 million pesos and said the equipment must remain operational to provide regional coverage.
An old promise becomes a new debt item
The road project is not new. Guanajuato launched the modernization of Federal Highway 51 between San Miguel de Allende and Dolores Hidalgo in 2023, with an announced cost of 3.025 billion pesos. The original state release said the work would cover 30.7 kilometers, widen the route to four lanes, and include related works, including bridges, crossings, returns, lighting, and a ciclovía along part of the corridor as part of the Bulevar La Libertad project.
The state later presented the corridor as delivered on October 1, 2025, stating that it connected San Miguel de Allende with Dolores Hidalgo and would improve the movement of people, goods, and services throughout the region. That same official release described an investment of more than 3.025 billion pesos and said the project included four lanes, side roads, pedestrian crossings, bridges, lighting, and signage, with delivery through October 2025.
The unfinished piece is the 2.7 kilometer La Cieneguita section near the entrance to San Miguel. That stretch was left out after a legal dispute over land rights stalled work. The state Public Works Secretariat said that because the amparo remained active, the section was removed from the original contract in April 2025. Once the community later withdrew from the amparo, the agency said the project could resume, but not under the old contract.
That explanation leaves a budget consequence. The missing stretch now requires a new funding source, new cost updates, and a new procurement process.
The mayor says the road became a bottleneck
Mayor Mauricio Trejo Pureco has framed the new allocation as necessary, while also pointing to what he considers a failure by the previous state administration.
“We are very happy in San Miguel de Allende that Bulevar La Libertad will be finished because that work had become a problem,” Trejo said in an interview cited in the local allocation report.
He added that a project of more than 3 billion pesos should not leave “a bottleneck of a little more than three kilometers.”
Trejo also said he would have preferred the debt allocation for drainage, paving, or local streets, but argued that finishing the boulevard serves a regional economy linking San Miguel and Dolores Hidalgo. That is the political tension in the funding. San Miguel receives one of the largest local shares in the package, but most of it goes to complete a state road project that had already been presented as delivered.
The state has said municipalities will not pay a direct share of the debt-funded works. The cost is carried by the state government. That does not remove the public finance issue. It shifts the repayment burden to the state level while tying a large slice of San Miguel’s allocation to an unfinished segment from an older project.
San Miguel has already been the focus of other road-access plans, including the proposed Guanajuato-to-San Miguel toll road link, which state officials said earlier this year was still in the approval stage. That project is separate from Bulevar La Libertad, but both fit into the larger state push to reshape road movement around one of Guanajuato’s busiest tourism and residential corridors, as part of San Miguel’s regional highway planning.
Hospital scanner funding also moves forward
The second San Miguel item is health equipment at the General Hospital.
The state health department said its broader medical infrastructure package totals 86.1 million pesos statewide. It includes funding for medical units in Apaseo el Alto and Apaseo el Grande, work at the State Public Health Laboratory in León, and the investment in a CT scanner at the Hospital General de San Miguel de Allende.
The health department said the scanner helps avoid patient transfers and diagnostic delays, keeps specialized imaging studies available, strengthens the regional imaging network, and reduces the risk of service interruption in northeastern Guanajuato through the state health investment release.
