Maya Village’s Water, Future Threatened by Mexican Train Mark Stevenson - Associated Press
go to original August 25, 2022

An environmental activist sits on a bulldozer after her group spoke with its operator, who turned off the machine and left the site, as they temporarily stop the clearing of forest that will make way for the Maya Train in Akumal, Quintana Roo state. (Eduardo Verdugo/AP)

Mexico’s ambitious Maya Train project is supposed to bring development to the Yucatan Peninsula, but along the country’s Caribbean coast it is threatening the Indigenous Maya people it was named for and dividing communities it was meant to help.

One controversial stretch cuts a more than 68-mile (110-kilometer) swath through the jungle between the resorts of Cancun and Tulum, over some of the most complex and fragile underground cave systems in the world.

It is one of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s signature projects and has drawn objections from environmentalists, archaeologists and cave divers, who have held protests to block backhoes from tearing down trees and scraping clean the thin layer of soil.

But for the largely Maya inhabitants of the village of Vida y Esperanza – a clutch of about 300 people and 70 houses whose name means “Life and Hope” – the train is going to run right by their doors. They fear it will pollute the caves that supply them with water, endanger their children and cut off their access to the outside world.

A few miles away from the acres of felled trees where the train is supposed to run, archaeologist and cave diver Octavio Del Rio points to the Guardianes cave that lies directly beneath the train’s path. The cave's limestone roof is only two or three feet thick in some places, and would almost certainly collapse under the weight of a speeding train.

“We are running the risk that all this will be buried, and this history lost,” Del Rio says.

López Obrador dismisses critics like Del Rio as “pseudo environmentalists” funded by foreign governments.

Many critics say López Obrador’s obsession with the projects threatens Mexico’s democratic institutions. But the president counters that he just wants to develop the historically poor southern part of Mexico.

Read the rest at WSLS.com

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