Hope, fear, and fragmentation as train tracks laid in Mexico’s southeast

Part of the swath cut through the forest in Quintana Roo to lay the tracks for the peninsular train. Photo: Orsetta Bellani.

Reportage • Orsetta Bellani • May 5, 2023 • Originally published May 1, 2023 by Animal Político

Two teenagers kiss on the wharf at Síijil Noh Ha, one of seven lakes in the Much Kanan K’aax voluntary conservation area. It’s a clear day, the water is crystalline, and there are no other visitors interrupting their privacy. Unlike many of the other lakes in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, most of the visitors to Síijil Noh Ha, which is part of the municipality of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, are locals.

But over the past few months, Line 6 of the peninsular train (Tren Maya) linking Tulum and Chetumal, has been built just kilometers away.

“It’s a good project because we don’t have much tourism here and the Tren Maya will bring visitors to this region,” said Daniel Andrés Reyes Pat, who runs the community ecotourism project Síijil Noh Ha. “There’s also drawbacks: many trees have already been cut, and the animals will flee. In addition, we’re afraid that mass tourism will bring noise and violence, when what many of our guests want is tranquility.”

Fragmented habitat

Line 6 of the peninsular train is 255 kilometers long, and will be made up of two tracks, one for passengers and another for cargo. The Secretariat of Defense (SEDENA) is responsible for its construction and operation—as is the case for Lines 5 and 7—as well as for six hotel complexes that are being built along the tracks, and the new Tulum airport.

Line 6 cuts a 60 meter wide line through the forest in southern Quintana Roo, which is among the richest in vegetation in the Yucatán Peninsula. It runs just a few meters apart from federal highway 307, beginning at Tulum and from there dipping in and out of the forest along the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, before ending up in Chetumal.

According to Omar Irám Martínez Castillo, a biologist from the U’yoolche association in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the meters wide strip between the highway and the train tracks has become no man’s land where some monkeys were trapped.

“The fragmentation of the habitat concerns me more than deforestation: the train divides the forest in two and for wild populations—we’re talking about jaguars, tapirs, spider monkeys and other animals—this impacts their ability to maintain genetic diversity and avoid endogamy,” he said.

Martínez Castillo is also worried about the backfilling of a natural depression alongside highway 307 which previously connected with the Much Kanan K’aax lake system.

“This hydraulic flow connects with other depressions that, when flooded, flow into the wetlands that are part of the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve,” said Martínez Castillo. “They haven’t done studies, so we don’t know if these will be impacted by construction, or whether there will be implications for the train,” he said. “These are fragile and porous ecosystems that are filled with caves and small caverns, and the vibration of the train could cause them to collapse, as took place on Line 5.”

The Environmental Impact Statement (MIA) for Line 6 was approved by the Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat in November of 2022 without the required geological or geo-hydraulic studies. According to the Mexican College of Civil Engineers, the MIA is “rushed and lacking in technical foundations. It’s obvious that the petitioner cannot know if the projected line will cross over significant channels or caverns.”

“There have been some biologists who have made statements against the Tren Maya, but they’re just words, they’re not the owners of the land. We are 250 communal land owners (ejidatarios) and we gave our permission for the train to pass through,” said Elías Be Cituk, head of the communal landowners association of Felipe Carrillo Puerto. “We’re in favor of this project because it is going to benefit us and our lands will be worth more, we’re already seeing it, we already have a sense of what’s going to happen,” he said.

Be Cituk sits behind his desk in the Ejidal office. His long forehead and round glasses can’t hide the enthusiasm he feels for Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “The President of the Republic is looking out for us,” he said.

He notes that the government quickly paid the communal landowners’ asking price: one million pesos per hectare, for a total of 196 hectares. “That money fell like a drop of water on a really hot rock,” said Be Cituk. According to his calculations, that’s now the starting price for land in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, and it’s 10 times higher than what it was worth before the plans for the Tren Maya in the municipality were released.

A society trained to accept megaprojects

On September 6, 2022, a public consultation on Line 6 of the Tren Maya was held in the X-Hazil Ejidal Office. It was attended by representatives from some state institutions like the Tourism Secretariat and the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples, communal landowners sent on behalf of ejidos, and some local residents. 

“The only thing the government said during the consultation was that there was finally going to be justice for the southeast after years of discrimination and poverty for our people. It was like propaganda, and the risks or the negative environmental or cultural impacts were never mentioned,” said Wilma Esquivel Paz, who is a member of the  U Kúuchil k Ch’i’ibalo’on Community Center in Felipe Carrillo Puerto. 

Her town is one in which every house has a plot of land and iguanas soak up the sun the way stray dogs do elsewhere. “We already know the dangers that the militarization of our territory can bring,” she said.

For U Kúuchil k Ch’i’ibalo’on, the peninsular train is the second megaproject in the Yucatan Peninsula. The first was the Comprehensive Planned Center (CIP) in Cancún, which went into operation in 1974 with the supposed intention of sparking economic development and sustainable tourism. Today, Cancún is the most successful CIP in Mexico: according to Quintana Roo’s Tourism Secretariat, more than 6.7 million visitors arrived there last year.

The state of Quintana Roo was also created in 1974. Most of the population lived in the center and south of the state, which is the ancestral home of Mayan Indigenous communities. The new state experimented with the building of a new society based around the idea that large scale tourism would usher in optimal social and economic development. It is because of this that, according to the U Kúuchil k Ch’i’ibalo’on Community Center, the population of Quintana Roo has been trained to enthusiastically embrace megaprojects like the peninsular train. 

Nationally, Quintana Roo is the state with the highest rate of population growth. Between 2010 and 2020, the population grew by 40.2 percent. Over the last 50 years, Cancún and Playa del Carmen have transformed from fishing hamlets to cities of hundreds of thousands. What residents of the center and south of the peninsula fear is that the arrival of the peninsular train could spark uncontrolled growth in their towns.

“What is one of our goals? To breathe life into and to reactivate the economy in five states, including the southern region, because during the neoliberal period this [the northern region] has grown, over the last 20, 30 years, and everywhere else, even with Mérida and the Yucatán so close by, there was no growth,” López Obrador said in January.

Tourism, violence and cultural expropriation

“López Obrador is a great president, he’s the first who really cares about us,” said Jorge, a taxi driver who speeds through the wide, mostly empty streets of Felipe Carrillo Puerto. “Tourism is going to bring jobs and development, although I am concerned about increased violence: if the town grows, so will crime. That’s what we’re seeing in Tulum, here in Carrillo Puerto we live much better.”

The potential for increased crime seems to be the main worry among residents of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who are aware of what’s been taking place in the neighboring municipality of Tulum. There, the population has grown 65.3 percent over the last decade. As the town expanded, new hotels opened, and beachfront palapas were turned into nightclubs, killings and disappearances rose.

In 2021, the rate of homicides carried out with a firearm in Quintana Roo rose from 2 to 25.3 per 100,000 residents. Shootouts that began in Cancún’s hotel strip and spilled over into the city became international news. At the beginning of Easter this year, four bodies were found on the beach.

“We’re always hearing about homicides and femicides in the north of Quintana Roo. When a region grows in that manner, with projects of that size, organized crime, trafficking and violence against women become major issues,” said Wilma Esquivel Paz. “There is damage done when the fabric of the community and our connection with the land is torn, and when our memory is erased.”

Mayan artist Marcelo Jiménez Santos has spent decades considering the cultural expropriation that has resulted from the arrival of mass tourism to his community.

“They talk about the Mayan Train, the Mayan Riviera, the Mayan World, but Mayan people are only invited to incorporate themselves as low wage labor. The Prehispanic Mayans are held up, their vestiges are a product that can be sold to tourists, but ‘living Mayans’ aren’t given any consideration,” he said. “That said, I don’t think our culture is going to disappear, we have the ability to react, as we’ve proven during 500 years of attempts to exterminate us.”