Attempt To Raffle Presidential Plane Goes Awry.
ANDERSON: Welcome back. Remember this?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The nerve of some people.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I know forging a ticket. Come on. The golden ticket!</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You found Wonka's last golden ticket.</s>ANDERSON: Great book, of course, which made a fantastic movie. Charlie got his golden ticket and the Chocolate Factory in the end, but it turns out real life magical raffles aren't quite so easy. How do we know? Mexico had a dream raffle, or, rather, dream liner raffle of its own in mind. For this, its presidential 787 jet plane, it costs an absolute fortune and it's so fancy, it looks like a flying palace. It was so expensive that the new president wouldn't even fly in it. So we decided to do raffle it off, but it's not been plane failing by any means. Matt Rivers has been following what is a very unusual saga that has captivated the country and left many wondering, where am I supposed to park a plane? He joins us from Mexico City. Matt?</s>MATT RIVERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Becky, this has been a process going on for months, and officially this raffle was the raffle of the presidential plane, but by the time this process wrapped up yesterday, the raffle wasn't actually technically, didn't have anything to do with the plane. So if you are confused, that is understandable. Let us explain. On Tuesday, as this tradition in Mexico, a group of kids read out the winning numbers for a lottery, except nothing was normal about this lottery. This is the culmination of the saga of a presidential plane. It started simple enough. In 2012, Mexico's government bought a roughly $220 million presidential plane. Critics said it was excessive, be it the leather bound and extra wide seats, the king-size bed or the boardroom. The current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador toured the plane a few weeks ago and said his predecessors lived like kings. He has never used it and has promised to sell it since taking office in late 2018, to no avail. So it was in January of this year he announced he would raffle off the plane. Anybody could simply buy a ticket, win, and the wide-bodied Boeing 777 would be all yours. That prompted questions. One, where would you park it and what about the maintenance? The president said we would offer the winner one or two years of maintenance. The raffle quickly became a national joke. The #Si Me Gano El Avion, #ifiwontheplane went viral with means marking the contest. So the president changed tactics. The plane raffle would remain, but the price wouldn't be the plane. Instead 100 winners would win about $1 million. Despite these lines, the government has actually had troubles selling enough tickets to actually be able to pay out the prizes that they said they would in fact it took them more than six months to sell the required amount of tickets. The government over the summer turned the raffle into a call to help fight the pandemic. Any money that doesn't go to winners will go to public hospitals.</s>RIVERS: This ticket buyer says I'm hoping if this helps the hospitals where so much COVID exists. But the latest sales data shows that there's only about $5 million that won't get paid to the winners, or about enough for only a little more than 5 grand for each public health facility treating COVID patients. The government did give out roughly 1,000 raffle tickets to each of those hospitals. If they win, they can use the money to buy medical supplies, but it's a lottery, not a budget allocation. Critics have long said, the public health system is chronically underfunded and the idea that this raffle can substantively help is absurd, a mere distraction from the government's failings during the Coronovirus crisis. Many in the country think that people should have spent their money elsewhere. This woman says, I don't know, maybe to people that aren't working right now and don't have enough to eat. The winners of the lottery will be announced in the next few days. Here's hoping that some of the Mexican hospitals entered in the contest to actually win. Meanwhile, if you are in the market for a 787, I've got an idea for you.</s>ANDERSON: What's that idea? What is the idea?</s>RIVERS: I mean, you know, I could bring you over to the Mexico City Airport, I could show you where the plane is parked in the hangar. Maybe if you've got some spare change around, you can buy it. But Becky, the point I want to make and emphasize here is that, there is a thousand tickets, roughly, that have been given out to those hospitals around the country. That cost the government $25 million worth of taxpayer funds to secure those tickets. I followed one doctor on Twitter who asked the seemingly very obvious question, why didn't they just give the $25 million directly to the hospitals? And when you think about it like that, it is very obvious why so many are outraged in this country over what is seemingly an unnecessary PR stunt.</s>ANDERSON: Did you buy a ticket, yes or no?</s>RIVERS: Well, as a non-Mexican resident I could not have won the plane whether it was earlier or now, so no, I was a neutral journalist in this particular situation.</s>ANDERSON: Matt's on the story for you. Thank you, sir your golden ticket viewers as ever an unlimited invitation to join us every day right here on CNN. Thank you for being with us. Stay safe.