Mayan train: Activists fear environmental impacts

PRESIDENT’S López Obrador says it can help solve the region’s migration problems by generating work

Mexico City, June 3: Residents of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula remember riding trains to visit relatives or sell their produce decades ago, so when President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made a nostalgic pitch to build a “Mayan train” through the region’s jungles the mainly indigenous residents were initially receptive to the idea.

Two years later, as the president inaugurates a leg of the project’s construction, that initial enthusiasm has dissipated for a project that would run through five southern states carrying tourists from the resorts of Cancún and Playa del Carmen to the Mayan ruins at Palenque.

Many communities in the train’s path feel deceived by scarce and incomplete information, while activists fear the social and environmental impacts. But López Obrador remains laser focused on completing one of his signature projects despite the legal challenges and even a pandemic that has killed more than 10,000 Mexicans.

If anything, the pandemic has made the project more urgent in the president’s mind. López Obrador says it will create 80,000 jobs at a time when nearly 10 lakh have been lost to the lockdown caused by the Covid-19. The train would run some 950 miles from Caribbean beaches to the peninsula’s interior while stimulating economic development around its 15 stations.

The government says it will cost as much as $6.8 billion, but others say it will be much more. López Obrador originally conceived of it as an economic development project to help a long-neglected part of the country. But many locals are beginning to see it differently.

“The train is going to open the heart of the peninsula and bleed it dry little by little,” said Pedro Uc, a member of the assembly of defenders of Mayan Territory Múuch Xiinbal and resident of Buctzotz, a community east of Merida. “There will be (benefits), but in whose pockets?” Uc said the project will divide communities and bring insecurity.

Cancun’s rapid development as a tourist mecca led many away from their communities in search of work only to return years later as crime accelerated. López Obrador launched the project in early 2019, shortly after taking office.

From the start critics questioned the financial viability of a tourist and cargo train. Even the man in charge of executing the project, tourism development director Rogelio Jiménez Pons, concedes the timeline was accelerated.

“Yes, we’ve skipped some steps, but we are forced to by the circumstances of the political terms,” he said last year, referring to the president’s six-year term. Since then, the Mayan train has been the cureall for every challenge. In addition to boosting the southeast’s economic development, López Obrador said it could help solve the region’s migration problems by generating work for Central American migrants. Now, he says it will play a critical part of Mexico’s economic recovery from the pandemic.

The train will run through Mexico's largest tropical forest, yet few environmental assessments have been made public and those that have warn of significant impacts. The region is full of prehispanic archaeological sites and has a distinctive hydrological system of interconnected subterranean caverns and sinkholes that could be at risk.