Mexico's president offers to buy US company's coastal property for $375 million to end dispute

abcnews.go.com:

Mexico’s president says he has offered to buy an American company’s Caribbean coast property for $385 million to end a bitter, years-long dispute

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president said Thursday that he has offered to buy an American company’s Caribbean coast property for about $385 million to end a bitter, years-long dispute.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said a formal offer would be presented to Alabama-based Vulcan Materials. The company operated gravel extraction pits at the Yucatan peninsula site before López Obrador's administration closed them.

The company said it had not yet received the president's proposal or responded to the idea. In papers filed for a case before an international arbitration panel, Vulcan Materials valued the almost 6,000-acre (2,400 hectare) property, located just south of the resort town of Playa del Carmen, at $1.9 billion.

López Obrador said his much lower offer was fair and based on a government assessment. He said the most attractive part of the property was the freight shipping dock, which he plans to turn into a dock for cruise ships.

As the only significant port facility on that stretch of the Caribbean coast, the dock would also be useful for transporting gravel and cement for the president's massive train construction project, known as the Maya Train.

López Obrador said he also wants to use the flooded gravel pits that the company dug out of hundreds of acres of the limestone soil as “swimming pools” or an «ecotourism» area that would be operated as a concession by a private operator.

The huge pits are inhabited by crocodiles, which are a protected species in Mexico.

López Obrador left open a vague threat of seizing the property if the offer wasn't accepted by the time he