Mexico’s Runaway Train Problem

With a little over two years left in his term, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is racing against the clock to get his massive Maya Train project built and running by the end of 2023, regardless of the environmental, human and legal obstacles standing between him and his over-budgeted flagship project.

Environmentalists see AMLO’s 1,554-km (965-mile) tourist train line, which would stitch together five states in the Yucatán Peninsula, as a threat to the area’s lush rainforest, rivers, caves and water-filled sinkholes that lie in the path of the tracks. But the biggest threat the project poses is to the indigenous people whose name the train will bear.

“The biggest damage we will undergo with the train is the disappearance of the Mayan people,” says Pedro Uc, a writer, poet and Maya activist who lives in the Yucatán. “Whoever thinks this project is just about a train, it’s not. It’s a pretext to completely alter the Yucatán Peninsula.”

Since its inception, the Maya Train project has bumped up against all sorts of opposition, mostly in the form of environmental lawsuits from indigenous communities. Residents of the Yucatán Peninsula, civil society organizations and larger organizations such as Greenpeace Mexico have all filed complaints against the project.

The opposition to the megaproject starts with its name.

“There is nothing Mayan about the misnamed Maya Train,” says Uc, a member of the indigenous rights group “Asamblea de Defensores del Territorio Maya Múuch´ Xíinbal.” In a flurry of lawsuits, the organization managed to effectively halt construction on three sections of the train project in 2021, but the reprieve didn’t last long. To sidestep the courts, AMLO declared the project a matter of national security, which grants the government special powers to push forward with construction despite the judges’ stop-work orders. A federal judge subsequently sided with AMLO and revoked most of the temporary suspensions granted to activists earlier this year.

Uc says the Mayan people of the Yucatán view the encroachment of AMLO’s train project as a continuation of their centuries-old struggle to defend their ancestral territories from outside invasion — a conflict that started with the arrival of the Spanish over 500 years ago, and has continued with multinational resort developers, the agribusiness industry and other megaprojects that have bitten into their forested lands.

The Mayan community has won other legal challenges in the past, but the Maya Train poses a different type of threat altogether. "The legal battle was over before it started because the government is both the judge and a participant in these violations,” says Uc. “The Maya Train is a project of the federal government — the National Fund for Tourism Development (FONATUR), which oversees the project, and the Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), in charge of carrying out the necessary environmental impact studies, are part of the same federal government. There’s no way we can make our legal defense.”

Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula is one of the largest tropical rainforests in Latin America after the Amazon, according to the nonprofit Global Forest Watch. The area is home to hundreds of endangered jaguars as well as pumas, ocelots and armadillos. The underground caves under a section of the proposed train route also hold the archeological remains of Naia, one of the oldest human remains found in the Americas.

The train route is divided into seven sections, all of which are being built simultaneously, despite multiple legal challenges. Residents of San Francisco de Campeche fought to reroute a section of the track that was meant to cut through their town and would displace hundreds of households.

The biggest point of contention right now is Section 5, a stretch of tracks between the major tourist destinations of Cancún and Tulum. In April, residents of Quintana Roo filed lawsuits claiming the megaproject had been rushed and environmental concerns ignored. The activist group Selvame del Tren — comprising environmentalists, speleologists, divers, scientists and residents of the Riviera Maya — warned that the heavy machinery used to build the railroad would damage the underground cave system. Experts have pointed out that much of the Maya Train track will run through karstic areas, where sinkholes and underground caves appear as limestone and other rock types erode through constant contact with water.

José Urbina, a diver living in Playa del Carmen who has worked to protect sharks in Mexico’s Caribbean Sea for years, filed one of the many lawsuits to stop the construction of Section 5, arguing the damage caused by the train violated people’s right to a healthy environment. On top of that, Urbina told Ozy, FONATUR, the government entity tasked with overseeing construction, had not done the necessary environmental impact studies for the project.