Mexico's defence ministry has backed away from plans for a vast military museum complex inside Bosque de Chapultepec, following an unusually public intervention by the capital's mayor. The defence secretariat, Sedena, announced in September that it would build a museum of the army, air force and national guard — along with an archive, storage facilities, a 464-seat auditorium, parking for 447 vehicles, a shop, a café and accommodation for soldiers — on land it owns within the park's boundary. The complex would have run to at least four multi-storey buildings, taken around three years to build and cost 1.66bn pesos ($92m). The backlash was swift. Clara Brugada, head of the Mexico City administration, declared the park would not host the project. Her opposition carried unusual weight: a senior figure in the ruling Morena party, she broke with a trend that has handed archaeological sites and tourism assets — including the ruins at Tulum and their considerable ticket revenues — to military control. Cultural commentators questioned why the army needed yet another museum in a city with more than 150 museums, and why the money could not instead rehabilitate the park itself, a legally protected ecological area twice the size of New York's Central Park with over 55,000 trees. Sedena now says it will seek another military base for the project. The episode lands amid wider unease in Mexico's cultural sector over budgets, late pay, and the transfer of the Gelman Collection — works by Kahlo, Rivera and Tamayo classed as national patrimony — to a new Spanish venue.