The Maya Train is intended to drive economic development to some of Mexico's poorest areas, in part by bringing up to three million tourists each year.
Miguel Angel Diaz walks slowly so his footfall on dry leaves doesn't drive away what he's trying to find in this dense forest of seeded breadnut and sapodilla trees. Coming to a small wetland, a sign warns: Beware of the crocodile.
Some 20 kilometres from the crocodile wetland, bulldozers are felling the jungle for the Maya Train, a US$20 billion dollar project envisioned by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. A path 40 metres wide is making way for the train, and logs are stacked along the narrow road to the hidden archaeological site. Currently, from the top of nearly-deserted pyramids, the roar of howler monkeys sounds across a sea of green.
Now the focus has shifted to this section that crosses the intact Calakmul jungle, which is part of the larger Mayan jungle, the largest tropical forest in the Americas after the Amazon. "They only talked about the benefits of the megaproject, not about the impacts or the damages," said Jesus Leon Zapata, a member of the Xpujil Indigenous Council. The United Nations human rights office warned in December that the national security decree threatened the rights of Indigenous peoples.
The area has always been forgotten, said Omar Hernandez, Norma's husband, "and from that point of view whatever they give us is significant. But these benefits are small scale because we're just farmers, we can't build hotels. Those will be built by investors." "I have seen with my own eyes troops of spider monkeys coming through the canopy and suddenly reach the clearcut and there is no way for them to cross," he said.
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