Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is racing to finish his Maya Train project in the remaining two years of his term over the objections of environmentalists, cave divers and archaeologists
The Mexican government has invoked national security powers to forge ahead with a tourist train along the Caribbean coast that threatens extensive caves where some of the oldest human remains in North America have been discovered.
“I never knew we lived in a country where the president could just do whatever he wants,” said Jose Urbina Bravo, a diver who filed one of the court challenges. “I don’t know what could be more important than this, right?” said Del Rio. “We are talking about the oldest remains on the continent.” But his boss, Diego Prieto, the head of the institute, appeared to rule out changing the path of the train, for which workers have already cut down a 50-yard wide swath of jungle dozens of miles long. He suggested most of the relics, in the few months left before the train is built, can simply be picked up and moved.
Urbina Bravo, a diver and environmentalist who has worked on the Caribbean coast for decades, said “making decisions without the support of science, without the backing of specialists has cost us very dearly” in projects around the world. “We continue and will continue to pay the price for these errors.”
So obsessed is Lopez Obrador with his pet projects – a huge oil refinery on the Gulf coast, a rail link between the Gulf and a seaport on the Pacific, and the Maya Train – that he issued a decree stating that priority government projects no longer needed environmental impact statements, or EIS, to start work; they could start construction, cut down trees and excavate, and submit an EIS later to justify damage already done.
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