San Salvador Atenco, Mexico ? Church bells that recently called townspeople to battle instead summoned them to a celebration Friday after the government scrapped plans to build Mexico City’s new international airport on their land.

The government, caving into machete-wielding protesters, insisted there were other alternatives.

Last month, the airport conflict escalated into a clash with state police in which dozens of people were injured and 15 hostages were seized, creating a five-day crisis for the government of President Vicente Fox.

On Thursday night, Fox’s transportation secretary, Pedro Cerisola, said the government would abandon the Texcoco lake bed site on the eastern outskirts of Mexico City that included Atenco.

“No other (site) will have the technical operating advantage that Texcoco would have had, but they are not necessarily bad,” Cerisola said. “We move from the ideal to the convenient, to what is viable, to what is possible.”

He refused to say how many options were under study.

“Some alternatives that in the past were rejected … are now worth reconsidering,” he said.

Not all involve relocating farmers, he said.

Among ideas dropped in the past were expanding the current airport into a federally owned lake bed on its eastern edge, or putting the airport near Cuernavaca to the south.