The
Mayan Train:
Last
week, on his first trip abroad as Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López
Obrador was meeting with Donald Trump in Washington, presumably to
celebrate the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, an updated version of the 1994
North American Free Trade Agreement.
This
visit has been harshly criticized in both countries.
The
meeting finds both presidents on shaky ground, with considerable sectors of
society questioning their unilateral decisions on crucial matters and their
capacity to govern.
The two
presidents have more in common than it seems, and both have shown how the
erosion of democracy often goes hand in hand with environmental illiteracy and
a reckless assault on nature.
At
moments their encounter brings to mind Bruegel’s Parable of the Blind: “if the
blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”
By Homero Aridjis*
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And now, the president has embarked on a megaproject that threatens the entire Mayan region with untold social and environmental devastation.
For three millennia, from c. 1500 BC
until the arrival of the Spaniards in 1519, Mayan civilization
flourished in present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El
Salvador. Yet over the past centuries, Mesoamerica has been despoiled,
its indigenous population repeatedly subjugated and sidelined. Forests
are disappearing at an alarming rate, victims of haphazard development
based on monocultures such as sugar cane and henequen, intensive farming
and cattle ranching, mining, highway building, the oil industry and
mass tourism.
Upon taking office on 1 December
2018, AMLO, as he is known, pledged to “purify public life in Mexico”
and “put the poor first.” Fostering his man-of-the-people reputation, he
conducted a referendum featuring a questionable vote on building a
railway to link Mayan tourist and archaeological sites in five
southeastern states, also to be used for freight and fuel shipments. A
piddling .65% of Mexico’s
89,250,881 registered voters said yes, making “the people’s will” known
in a referendum invalid under Mexican law. When scientists,
environmentalists, human rights defenders, cultural figures and
non-governmental organizations condemned the decision-making process,
AMLO accused them of elitism, suggesting they “rub shoulders with the
people.”
Ignoring intense opposition, AMLO
forged ahead with the train, slated to cost $8 billion dollars and run
on 950 miles of track, one third crossing dense tropical forests. The
train will cut through Campeche, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and the
Yucatán, states that are home to critical habitats of extraordinary
biodiversity as well as archaeological treasures including Chichén Itza,
Uxmal, Tulum, Coba, Calakmul and Palenque. 18 new stations will also
service Caribbean tourist resorts such as Cancun and Playa del Carmen,
and “urban development centers” will be built around the stations,
furthering the destruction. Contracts have been awarded for the first
four of seven sections to Mexican, Portuguese, Chinese and Spanish
companies. The train will be powered by diesel fuel in the first three
sections, emitting 430, 936 tons of carbon dioxide annually.
The president’s pet project will
result in fragmentation and destruction of one of Mesoamerica’s
remaining pristine rainforests. It will divide communities, bring
insecurity and crime. Pedro Uc, a Mayan activist who has received death
threats, predicts, “The train is going to open the heart of the
peninsula and bleed it dry little by little”.
In December 2019 a new referendum
was held in the five states. A scant 2.86% of 3,536,000 registered
voters in 84 affected municipalities voted, mostly municipal employees.
It was criticized by the UN Human Rights Council for not mentioning the
project’s negative impacts and for the low turnout. Mayan communities,
numbering more than 7 million people, have said, “There’s nothing Mayan
about the train,” while the Zapatistas have vociferously opposed it,
declaring war on AMLO and his project.
In Campeche, the Mayan Train will
penetrate deep into the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, Mexico’s largest
tropical forest reserve. The UNESCO World Heritage site known as the
Ancient Maya City and Protected Tropical Forests of Calakmul harbors
above 6,500 well-preserved structures, and is at the core of the second
largest expanse of tropical forests in the Americas, after the Amazon
rainforest. The Reserve is the planet’s third most crucial biodiversity
hotspot, home to 100 species of mammals, 350 of birds, 500 of
butterflies, 1,600 of plants and a host of tropical and subtropical
ecosystems. The top predator is the jaguar, whose survival is threatened
by habitat loss and fragmentation, overhunting of its prey, conflict
with livestock farmers and poaching for the wildlife trade. Mexican law
lists the jaguar as endangered, and in Calakmul and adjacent protected
areas in Guatemala the population is estimated at 609 individuals. The
Reserve is sparsely populated by humans, but once the railway is built
unbridled development at the expense of nature will ensue.
Also at risk along the train’s route
is Quintana Roo’s Laguna Bacalar, whose limpid waters of the ‘lake of
seven colors’ are already being polluted by hotels and private houses. A
surge in tourism will turn the lake into a cesspit.
The Mayan Train will also have a
severe impact on more elusive landscapes and vital resources. Recently,
an underwater cave dating from 2.5 million years ago was discovered in
Tulum, in the Yucatán Peninsula. The cave is part of an interconnected
215-mile-long cave system which has been called the world’s most
important submerged archaeological site. Vestiges found include remains
of extinct fauna and early humans, cave paintings, staircases and Mayan
ceramics and graves.
Another astonishing discovery are
three well-preserved caves used 10,000-12,000 years ago for mining red
ocher pigments. The caves were flooded some 8,000 years ago as the seas
rose, and now offer new light on human activity in the early Americas.
The system’s depth varies from 6 to
330 feet. The soil of the entire Peninsula is made of fragile and highly
porous karst, and its platform of calcium carbonate, up to 6,500 feet
thick, provides an aquifer that is the sole source of freshwater in the
region and sustained Mayan civilisation for centuries. Links between
many of northern Quintana Roo’s 358 underwater cave systems, between 932
miles and 4,350 miles long, have yet to be found.
Pollution of the highly permeable
Yucatán Peninsula karst aquifer has been steadily increasing, and the
urban development, population growth and mass tourism brought by the
Mayan Train will severely endanger the aquifer, putting the water
supply of millions of people at risk.
Archaeologists at the site of Aguada
Fénix, in Tabasco, announced their discovery of the oldest monumental
building ever found in the Maya region and the largest in the area’s
pre-Hispanic history. The enormous structure is nearly 3,000 years old,
a mile long and 33 to 50 feet high, with 9 broad causeways radiating
outwards, and is believed to have been a ceremonial center. A station
will be built only 9 miles from this tantalizing site, with tracks
passing close to Aguada Fénix. Researchers are justifiably worried.
Hundreds of groups and individuals
have called on AMLO to suspend work on the train during the COVID-19
emergency, arguing that its construction is not essential, will require
eviction of residents from their homes and put at risk the health and
life of workers and the mainly indigenous local population.
Flaunting his government’s persistent
admonition to “Stay Home,” AMLO traveled to Lázaro Cárdenas, in
Quintana Roo, on June 1 to inaugurate section 4 of the project, between
Cancún and Izamal. On June 2, he moved on to Yucatán to wave the
starting flag for construction on section 3. On June 22, after
indigenous communities filed an injunction to prevent work on section 1,
a court ordered a temporary suspension during the pandemic, to protect
the “right to health” of the Ch’ol indigenous group. AMLO accused the
injunction of having “political overtones,” and, as it allows
rehabilitation or maintenance on existing stretches of track, work
continues at the site. The president claims the megaproject will solve
the areas’s migration problems by providing work for migrants, and help
Mexico recover from the pandemic-induced economic crisis.
Mexico is struggling to survive on
many fronts, and the Mayan Train, a social, environmental and cultural
disaster in the making, should feature far more prominently on the
world’s radar. It is hard to imagine that anything good will come to our
country from this week’s meeting of two megalomaniac populists, both of
whom prioritize profit over natural preservation.
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