Christian Agúndez is back behind the mayor’s desk in Los Cabos, and he wants everyone to know the potholes have his full attention now. The mayor formally resumed his duties on October 5 after a leave of absence that stretched 104 days — three months and twelve days, if you’re counting, and plenty of residents waiting on permits or public-works requests were.
The absence began June 23, when Agúndez first requested time off to compete for a leadership post inside Morena, the governing party. He was seeking the state coordination role for what Morena calls the Defense of the Transformation and National Sovereignty, essentially an internal party organizing position in Baja California Sur. That contest wrapped with Manuel Cota Cárdenas winning the job, which cleared the way for Agúndez to come home.
This wasn’t a clean three-month disappearance. The mayor ducked back into city hall once or twice along the way, including for Independence Day’s Grito celebration, and the city council kept approving fresh leave extensions rather than one long absence. The arrangement meant Los Cabos technically had a mayor on paper the whole time, even when he wasn’t around to sign off on much. It’s the kind of governance-by-proxy that makes sense on an org chart and less sense if you’ve been waiting since July for someone to look at a drainage complaint.
Agúndez says he’s already filed the paperwork making his return official, and that his first order of business is the backlog left by recent storms, according to El Sudcaliforniano. That means streambeds, damaged roads and trash that piled up during the rains — a cleanup list that was presumably growing the entire time he was away. He also promised a renewed pothole-repair push across the municipality, which he described as restarting “with all the energy in the world,” the kind of phrase mayors reach for when they know residents have heard it before.
Desalination Plant Still the Big Question Mark
The more consequential pending item is Cabo San Lucas’s water supply, specifically the long-promised second desalination plant. Agúndez said he expects to meet with BCS Governor Víctor Castro Cosío in Mexico City as soon as this week to push the project forward, noting that President Claudia Sheinbaum has personally asked about its status. Given how often that plant has come up in official statements without a shovel hitting dirt, a presidential inquiry might be the nudge it needs — or it might just be another line in another press release.
For residents who want to skip the press conference and go straight to the source, Agúndez also rolled out a direct WhatsApp line, 624 100 1192, for reporting potholes, water outages, garbage pickup problems, ecological concerns or public-works issues. He asked that pothole complaints come with a photo and location, which is a reasonable system as long as someone on the other end is actually reading the messages and not just letting them pile up the way the storm debris did.
Agúndez’s political ambitions haven’t entirely cooled, even if this round didn’t land him the party post; he has previously pushed back on suggestions he was stepping away from Morena politics altogether. For now, the practical test is simpler than party positioning: whether the backlog of storm damage, stalled permits and pothole reports actually clears faster now that the mayor’s return to full-time duty is more than a temporary stopover between leave requests.
