After four years of work, Mexico’s government has mostly completed construction of the ambitious 1,540km Tren Maya, a railway service traversing five states that circles the Yucatán Peninsula.
The goal of the project, ostensibly, is to redistribute tourist flows from concentrated coastal resorts such as Cancún and provide inland access to historic Maya sites, thereby encouraging development.
Its proponents—led by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who saw this as his legacy megaproject—and much of the political establishment have hailed it as both a triumph of development in a neglected region and as the right kind of an “environmentally friendly” transportation project.
Its critics, however—sidelined and branded reactionary by the corporate left and their overseas cheerleaders—say otherwise.
They point to the irreversible impact of massive deforestation and other environmental changes on globally important ecosystems and to the unique landscape of the Yucatán which is perforated by fragile “cenotes” or sinkholes.
The Selva Maya through which the railway cuts is the second largest tropical rainforest in the Americas and a critical global ecosystem.
They point to the Mexican state’s failure to inform local people about the full environmental and social consequences of the development, arguing that from the outset it has been uniquely opaque about every aspect of the project and that there has, as a result, never been “informed consent”.
They point to the little known fact that the military will run this railway and monopolise the financial benefits, and that one result of this is that there has been extensive militarization of the Yucatán Peninsula in recent years
They stress the violent evictions of and threats against those living in the way of the line and cases of corruption in securing land for it.
They note that a roll call of the usual corporate suspects linked to Mexico’s richest people are set to derive considerable benefits from the railway, and that freight services using it will carry large quantities of oil and chemicals through fragile ecosystems.
And finally, they question the escalating price tag—so far it has cost $28.5bn to build the Tren Maya, running an estimated three times over budget. Much of this has been financed by debt. Worse, ridership figures suggest it is drawing just 5 per cent of the passengers expected.
A film has been produced by critics of the project called Una herida en el sur/A Wound in the South, which can be watched on YouTube.
At a recent screening in London, we caught up with Mina Moreno, a spokesperson of the group SOS Cenotes, which was formed in Quintana Roo to raise awareness about the destructive environmental consequences of the Tren Maya in the region.
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