Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes

Sonora's Highway 15 stretches from the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales to the border with the Mexican state of Sinaloa at Estación Don.

Mexico’s president said Friday that highway construction in neighboring Sonora, Mexico, won’t be completed this month as he promised. It's latest of many delays to the construction project.

During a visit to the Sonoran capital Hermosillo in early March, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised a longstanding highway expansion project would be done this spring.

"It's going to be finished in April or May," he said.

He criticized his predecessor for repeatedly setting and breaking deadlines for the four-lane expansion project, saying his administration had left a "cemetery of unfinished projects."

The Sonoran highway expansion project spans the entire 400-mile stretch of Highway 15 from the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, to Sonora’s southern border with the state of Sinaloa.

But during his daily press conference in Mexico City on Friday, López Obrador admitted that the project wouldn’t make the May deadline after all.

"We have to offer an apology and we recognize that we're not going to get it done," he said. "I said April or May, and now they're telling me it will be be in June."

He says about 5 percent of the construction still needs to be completed, mostly in the northern area near the border.