Mayan anthropologist Ezer May fears that the tourism development and real estate construction boom that will be unleashed by the Mayan Train, the main infrastructure project of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will disrupt his community.
What we think is that the east of the town could be affected, May told IPS by phone from his hometown of Kimbilá.
The most negative impact will come when they start building the development hub around the train station, he said. We know that the tourism industry and other businesses will receive a boost. There is uncertainty about what is to come; many ejidatarios [members of an ejido, public land held in common by the inhabitants of a village and farmed cooperatively or individually] don’t know what’s happening.
This town of 4,000 people, whose name means water by the tree, is in the municipality of Izamal in the northern part of the state of Yucatan, about 1,350 km southeast of Mexico City. The district will have a Mayan Train station, although its size is not yet known, and the prospect awakens fears as well as hope among the communities involved.
In Kimbilá, 10 km from the city of Izamal, there are 560 ejidatarios who own some 5,000 hectares of land where they grow corn and vegetables, raise small livestock and produce honey.
These ejido lands are going to be in the sights of tourism and real estate companies, real estate speculation and everything else that urban development implies. We will see the same old dispossession and asymmetrical agreements and contracts for buying up land at extremely low prices; we’ll see unequal treatment, said May.
The government’s National Tourism Fund (Fonatur) is promoting the project, which is to cost between 6.2 and 7.8 billion dollars. Construction began in May.
The plan is for the Mayan Train to begin operating in 2022, with 19 stations and 12 other stops along some 1,400 km of track, which will be added to the nearly 27,000 km of railways in Mexico, Latin America’s second largest economy, population 129 million.
It will run through 78 municipalities in the southern and southeastern states of the country: Campeche, Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Chiapas and Tabasco, the first three of which are in the Yucatan Peninsula, which has one of the most important and fragile ecosystems in Mexico and is home to 11.1 million people.
Its locomotives will run on diesel and the trains are projected to carry about 50,000 passengers daily by 2023, reaching 221,000 by 2053, in addition to cargo such as transgenic soybeans, palm oil and pork, which are major agricultural products in the region.
The Mexican government is promoting the megaproject as an engine for social development that will create jobs, boost tourism beyond the traditional attractions and energise the regional economy.
But it has unleashed controversy between those who back the administration’s propaganda and those who question the railway because of its potential environmental, social and cultural impacts, as well as the risk of fuelling illegal activities, such as human trafficking and drug smuggling.
The megaproject involves the construction of development hubs in the stations, which include businesses, drinking water, drainage, electricity and urban infrastructure, and which, according to the ministry of the environment itself, represent the greatest environmental threat posed by the railway.
U.N. Habitat, which offers technical advice on the project’s land-use planning aspects, estimates that the Mayan Train will create one million jobs by 2030 and lift 1.1 million people out of poverty, in an area that includes 42 municipalities with high poverty rates.
The region has become the country’s new energy frontier, with the construction of wind and solar parks, and agribusiness production such as transgenic soy and large pig farms. At the same time, it suffers from high levels of deforestation, fuelled by lumber extraction and agro-industry.
The environmental impact assessment itself and several independent scientific studies warn of the ecological damage that would be caused by the railway, which experts say the Mexican government does not seem willing to address.
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