CALAKMUL, Mexico—Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has an ambitious plan to generate income for the mostly poor and indigenous communities of the Yucatán peninsula: a $6.5 billion, 950-mile train that would bring thousands of visitors to Maya archaeological sites.
Conservationists, on the other hand, say the train will damage the environment by bringing too many tourists and new residents to the region, which could result in overtaxed water supplies, deforestation and pollution.
Especially vulnerable is the Calakmul jungle, a highly biodiverse ecosystem that together with two adjacent preserves in Mexico and Guatemala forms the second-largest contiguous rainforest in the Western hemisphere after the Amazon.
“With rainforests, their great importance is the filtration of water. It’s a resource that we all depend on as a society. The region of Calakmul is one of the most important areas of water-capture on earth,” said Maria Andrade, head of ProNatura Yucatán, an environmental group, and a critic of the project. “If this rainforest disappears, we are condemning key species, charismatic, flagship species of Mexico, to extinction.”
Behind the debate over the Maya Train, as the project is known, is the question of what to do to improve social conditions in the Yucatán, which historically has been left out of the development and prosperity enjoyed by Mexico’s central and northern regions, and whether or not increasing tourism can even be done in an environmentally-friendly way.
Mr. López Obrador says he views environmental degradation as the result of inequality: When poor people have no other options, they resort to activities like illegal logging and clearing rainforest land for cattle to make a living. The solution, he says, is economic development.
“The environmental problems of this country are the result of the failure to integrate certain populations into society so they can co-exist with the rainforest," said Rogelio Jiménez Pons, head of Mexico’s National Tourism Fund, the agency in charge of the Maya Train. “Deforestation is not a problem for biologists. It’s a social problem.”
The Maya Train is one of a few planned megaprojects—including a new Mexico City airport and an $8 billion refinery being built in the president’s home state of Tabasco—that Mr. López Obrador has said wouldn’t be slowed by the coronavirus crisis. In an address to the nation in March, he said the answer to the economic damage caused by the pandemic was increased public investment and job creation in Mexico.
Mexican officials say the train project is being planned in a sustainable way that will avoid the environmental damage wrought by overdevelopment in the wildly-popular beach resorts of Cancún, Tulum and Playa del Carmen. Once pristine shorelines and beaches on the peninsula’s east coast have been damaged by pollution and paved over to make way for hotels and highways.
Environmentalists point to examples of ecotourism initiatives around the world that have backfired. In Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, famous as the place where Charles Darwin did research that developed into his theory of evolution, the government opened or expanded two airports in the archipelago in 2007 and 2012, resulting in a huge jump in the number of tourists. The increased traffic brought invasive species that killed off some native animals.
“There’s no such thing as cost-free tourism,” said David Weaver, a geographer who teaches at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and has written a book on sustainable tourism. “We’re still waiting for those exemplars of sustainable tourism done right.”
Last year, the federal government held a series of consultations on the Maya Train with indigenous communities in the Yucatán. Some leaders, like Elias Cauich, commissioner of a 500-family Maya-speaking village along the two-lane highway that passes by the entrance to the Calakmul preserve, have come out in support of the train.
Mr. Cauich said that the economic benefits of the train outweigh the environmental impact of an influx of tourists coming to the area. Many in the community would like to start businesses such as hotels or all-terrain-vehicle rental shops to serve the increase in tourists coming to the area to visit archaeological sites, rather than having to rely on cutting timber or selling the region’s famous honey, he said.
“We’ve been cutting timber here for 40 years, and our community is still 90% forested and green. My grandkids will do the same thing that I do,” he said. “I think nature knows how to take care of itself.”
Existing railroad
To be constructed
The train will use 385 miles of already-built track, with 562 miles to be constructed. When complete, a full train will carry between 300-500 passengers and travel at speeds of up to 99 mph.
Maya archaeological sites
The government’s goal is to generate income from tourists for the communities of the Yucatán by drawing visitors to the region’s Maya archaeological sites. The train project is expected to create about 80,000 new jobs, the president said, without elaborating on what types of jobs.
Protected areas in Mexico
Conservationists say the project could accelerate deforestation, tax natural resources like water and further pressure endangered species in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve.
Unesco World Heritage sites
Mexico’s National Tourism Fund says that it coordinated with Unesco to preserve the integrity of six World Heritage sites—landmarks protected because they are considered of importance to humanity—located near the train’s proposed route, while pushing to increase the number of tourists who visit them each year.
Calakmul
The Maya Train project calls for “development zones” around each of its 15 proposed stations. A spokesman for the National Tourism Fund, the Mexican government agency responsible for the project, said the planned communities wouldn’t be large, but local environmentalists worry that won’t be the case.
For over a decade, Rafael Reyna, a wildlife biologist from southeastern Mexico, has been tracking the white-lipped peccary, a wild hog that has become one of the rarest species in the country, through Calakmul. Each year, the animal becomes harder to find.
The main culprit is persistent deforestation by ranchers and timber-cutters who live nearby. Mr. Reyna says that even 1,000 tourists a day visiting Calakmul would be highly disruptive. In presentations, the government has said the train could bring up to 8,200 tourists a day, many of them to visit the more than 1,500-year-old Maya city, whose majestic pyramids rise from the thick, unbroken green of the jungle.
Calakmul is the home of one of the ancient Mayan civilization’s most important archeological sites.
Animals such as the jaguar, Baird’s tapir and peccaries, require large, contiguous habitats in order to mate and rove for food. More people means more limits on the ranges of hundreds of species that are found primarily in the preserve.
On a recent hike through the jungle, Mr. Reyna checked motion-sensor cameras he set up near watering holes. He yelped with enthusiasm to find dozens of pictures of pumas, tapirs, and even an ocelot—but no peccaries.
“If the Maya Train isn’t done well, it could be very dangerous,” Mr. Reyna said. “Planning two new population centers here is a total absurdity.”
Bacalar
A young couple on a pier in Bacalar.
Visitors enjoy the moonrise.
To the east of the rainforest, near the coast, the picturesque town of Bacalar sits perched on a freshwater lake. Despite its remoteness—more than 200 miles south of Cancun, which has the region’s closest major international airport—Bacalar has been growing steadily in popularity in recent years. A planned stop on the Maya Train would make it more accessible.
Last summer, Allan Patiño, a Mexico City native whose girlfriend is from Bacalar, opened Hotel Makaabá, an “eco-boutique” property with a restaurant, bar, a lakeside club that offers boat tours, and rooms that rent for about $150 per night, located on the side of the Laguna de Bacalar, the town’s main body of water and a visually stunning tourist attraction.
Mr. Patiño says that Bacalar’s rapid growth in recent years has been a boon to the local economy, but he worries that overdevelopment could ruin the town’s main appeal: untouched natural beauty.
“More development has meant more money, more jobs, more sources of income for families here,” Mr. Patiño said. “But this is a very small, very fragile ecosystem. There are more people coming, more boats on the lake every day. We really have to be conscious of the velocity of development, or we could totally destroy a good thing.”
Bacalar’s popularity is already beginning to take a toll. In early 2018, the Clear Water Committee, a citizens’ group led by a local biologist, found that during the high tourist season, levels of the bacteria E. coli in the lake exceeded safe levels by a 100 times. The committee said this was the result of a local sewage system that has been overtaxed by the rapid growth.
Tulum
Tulum, once a remote fishing village, is now a major tourist destination.
Further up the Riviera Maya, as the Yucatán’s east coast is known, is Tulum, a once-quiet bohemian beach town with an indigenous pyramid at its north end.
Tulum has exploded in popularity, especially among European and American tourists, over the past two decades. Its beach is lined with dozens of expensive boutique hotels and high-end restaurants, and the pulse of electronic dance music from late-night dance parties throbs during high season.
Tulum’s population has grown from a few hundred to more than 40,000 over the last few decades, flooding the area with foreign investment and jobs for locals in the tourism industry. There’s a Starbucks a few hundred feet from the Mayan archaeological site on the beach.
But local environmental advocates have raised the alarm about public infrastructure, especially sewage treatment, that is insufficient to accommodate the influx of tourists.
Cancún
Tourists relax at Playa Delfines in Cancún.
Cancún is the classic Mexican tourist development story. Until the early 1970s, the area was a sleepy, unincorporated string of beaches and sand dunes. A huge influx of federal and private investment, including the building of a string of megahotels, an international airport, golf courses and other infrastructure, transformed it into the most prosperous city in the Yucatán.
The development of Cancún played a big role in diversifying Mexico’s economy, which until the free-trade boom of the 1990s relied heavily on oil exports and agriculture.
Today, tourism is one of Mexico’s biggest industries, accounting for 8.5% of Mexico’s gross domestic product and 5.8% of the country’s full-time employment, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
More than 7.8 million foreign passengers arrived at the Cancún airport in 2018, according to government numbers. The Maya Train is slated to have a stop in the city, partly to encourage foreign tourists to venture beyond the beach and visit indigenous cultural sites with a convenient form of transportation.
Mérida
A young man plays the guitar in Mérida.
Mérida in March.
With nearly a million people, Mérida is the economic and cultural capital of Yucatán state. The surrounding area has a large population of indigenous speakers, many of whom depend on tourism for income.
A handsome colonial town, Mérida is famous for its Spanish colonial architecture, a large cathedral and indigenous-inspired Yucatán cuisine.
Campeche
The Maya Train would also stop in Campeche, the largest industrial city in the peninsula. Not known as a major tourist destination, Campeche is capital of the state of the same name and a major center of the oil industry because of its proximity to drilling installations in the Gulf of Mexico. Of the states that the train would pass through, Campeche has the biggest contribution to Mexico’s economic activity.
Palenque
A view of the ruins of Palenque. (Jaime Avalos/EFE/ZUMA Press)
At the western edge of the Maya Train’s proposed route is Palenque, one of the most culturally important Maya ruins in Mexico. A city-state that flourished in the sixth century, Palenque receded into the jungle and was only excavated in the 20th century.
Around 150 miles from the nearest airport in the city of Villahermosa, Palenque receives far fewer visitors than other indigenous sites in the country.
President López Obrador has said the solution to environmental degradation is economic development. (Alejandro Cegarra/Bloomberg News)
The Maya Train is just the latest in a series of moves by Mr. López Obrador that have angered environmentalists. They chafe at the deep cuts that the president has made to Mexico’s environmental protection agency and to green civil-society groups, while at the same time doubling down on investments in Petróleos Mexicanos, the state oil company.
The administration has also canceled bidding rounds for clean-energy projects in solar and wind power, while boosting natural-gas pipelines and refineries, which experts say will complicate Mexico’s goals under the Paris Climate Accords to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 22% by 2030.
“It’s become clear that this guy does not care about the environment at all,” said Gustavo Alanis-Ortega, director of the Mexican Center for Environmental Rights, or Cemda, a prominent nonprofit. Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Mexico Climate Initiative, said he feels “totally betrayed.”
This week, the government said that it is beginning work on the Maya Train without having published an environmental impact report, as required by law. The agency responsible for the train said it had sought and received an extension on the deadline to file the report.
The idea for a large infrastructure project in the Yucatán dates back to the late 1970s, when Mr. López Obrador was an activist living in the swampy tropics of his home state of Tabasco, working on behalf of the Chontal Maya people.
Back then, Mexico was flush with newfound oil wealth, and the powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party held a monopoly on how it was distributed. Mr. López Obrador agitated for housing, better roads, clean water and electric power for the disenfranchised indigenous group.
The campaign eventually morphed into an idea known as La Ruta Maya, or the Maya Path, a proposed network of highways, water treatment plants and other infrastructure that would bring economic development to the region.
The idea gained some momentum, then fizzled, and the young activist moved on to other things, like organizing protests against the state oil company, and later, politics.
When Mr. López Obrador campaigned for president in both 2006 and 2012, one of his political allies from his home state of Tabasco, Juan Ferrer (who now serves as Mexico’s public health minister), revived the idea in the form of a train, making use of preexisting, disused railways in the peninsula.
After winning the presidency in 2018, Mr. López Obrador held a vote on whether to build the Maya Train, part of a populist model of letting small groups of voters decide individual issues, including the cancellation of Mexico City’s partially built airport and the construction of the new oil refinery. The vote was criticized because it was organized by Mr. López Obrador’s party, not an impartial electoral authority. About 950,000 Mexicans voted, with about 90% of them favoring it. In December of 2018, he held a ceremony with indigenous leaders to ask Mother Earth for permission to build the project.
Earlier this month, Mr. López Obrador spoke at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Maya Train in the beachside municipality of Lázaro Cárdenas, near Cancún, his first trip outside Mexico City since the coronavirus crisis escalated, saying that the project would allow tourists to “get to know the southeast, so that they don’t only go for the beauty of the Caribbean Sea or the gulf, but rather also for the cultural richness” of the Yucatán.
“We’re going to keep on supporting the north, the central plains, the center, the south, but now, also the southeast of Mexico,” Mr. López Obrador said.