The Mayan Train, emblematic work of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, began operations this Friday with a promise of prosperity for one of the most impoverished regions of Mexicoand under accusations of having devastated the environment.
After declaring the megastructure inaugurated, the president boarded one of the tourist class cars of the train painted white and green and which will be guarded by 3,000 members of the National Guard.
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This first tranche -of seven that will be operational in the first quarter of 2024- It connects the colonial city of Campeche with the Caribbean resort of Cancún (east), the country's main tourist destination, which between January and October received 34 million foreign visitors, according to official figures.
“It is a magnum opus” that was built “in record time,” López Obrador highlighted in his usual morning conference, prior to the inauguration.
The president also unveiled a plaque at the San Francisco Campeche station in the company of several collaborators.
The train will travel a total of 1,554 km around the Yucatan Peninsula, an area rich in flora, fauna and archaeological ruins.
The project, whose construction began five years ago, received the starting signal six months before the presidential electionsin which – according to polls – the left is the favorite to remain in power with the former mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, who will face the former opposition senator Xóchitl Gálvez.
The government originally budgeted 150,000 million pesos for the work (about 8,700 million dollars)which suffered temporary modifications and paralysis due to lawsuits during its execution, run by private companies and the Mexican army, which will be its administrator.
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Howeverthe Mexican Institute of Competitiveness (IMCO, private) estimates that the cost multiplied to 30,000 million dollars.
It's an 'ecocide'
The train, whose carriages were built by the French company Alstom at its plant in Ciudad Sahagún (central Mexico), represents one of the main infrastructure projects of the López Obrador government along with a refinery in Tabasco, a new airport that serves Mexico City and an interoceanic corridor, which is being built as an alternative to the Panama Canal.
The first left-wing president of Mexico assures that the project – which in a second phase will include freight cars – will detonate the economy of the southeast of the country, a historically lagging region facing the industrialized north, bordering the United States.
Prior to the inauguration, the president said that the Mayan Train, which will combine electric and biodiesel trainsl, will have a multiplier effect in the rest of Mexico, by highlighting that several inputs were manufactured locally.
The route includes parts of the paradisiacal Riviera Maya, which covers a jungle region considered the second forest reserve in Latin America after the Amazon, as well as cenotes (freshwater wells) and underground rivers.
Activists and environmental organizations maintain, however, that the work damages said ecosystem, and managed to temporarily paralyze it through judicial appeals that denounced “ecocide.”
But López Obrador issued a decree that declares his infrastructure works a matter of “national security” and construction continued. Greenpeace and other NGOs have warned that the train threatens to contaminate cenotes and underground rivers in particular.
They also point out that the ground can collapse due to the weight of the structure, in addition to affecting flora and fauna.
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The Mexican president accuses the protesters of being “pseudo-environmentalists” and of being in cahoots with his political adversaries.and has defended the work on several occasions, promising to plant millions of trees in the intervened area.
However, official figures released by the Animal Político portal in February of this year indicated that 3.4 million trees had already been felled or removed.
AFP
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