In southeastern Mexico, which includes the Yucatan Peninsula, the Mayan Train killed some 10 million trees in the Maya jungle, the lung of southeastern Mexico that is being gradually destroyed, environmental activists say.
The flagship work of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador government has caused ecocide in the Mayan jungle, maintains Roberto Rojo, a member of the Sélvame del Tren organization.
“We have fought and, however, until now we have not been able to save this fragment of jungle that was thrown away. We estimate that more than 10 million trees were ‘killed’ in one of the healthy forests we have left in Mexico.”
And this, says the biologist, is just one of the damages that the Mayan Train has caused, which includes more than 1,500 kilometers of railway to transport cargo, tourists, and local passengers in five states in the southeast of Mexico: Campeche, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Yucatán.
After taking a tour of the works in Playa del Carmen, in Quintana Roo, the speleologist also spoke about the machinery that has devastated millions of plants.
Even a Yucatecan has just received an international award issued by the Natural History Museum in London for documenting the damage caused by the Mayan Train, with a photo that shows once lush arid areas, full of life and vegetation.
You can see a half-collapsed part, where the machinery made its way by knocking down the trees that were in the way. They are gloomy images that anticipate a stronger negative impact due to climate change, offering a sad, hopeless image of the Mayan jungle.
In Playa del Carmen they knew that this area, where there are more than 1,800 kilometers of caves and two of the largest underground rivers in the world, was going to be an important point of the Mayan Train work. Although the Government assured, in the beginning, that the work would be carried out parallel to the highway, in the end, this was not the case.
Shortly after the plans changed and the López Obrador government modified the route, the Mayan Train ‘killed’ 10 million trees in the Mayan jungle when passing through the middle of it.
For this reason, environmental groups raised their voices to prevent the railway from crossing the jungle and protect dozens of caves and cenotes affected by the construction of Section 5 of the Mayan Train, Cancún-Playa del Carmen, one of the most controversial.
“We demonstrated and made a very big SOS to tell the president and the government ‘Wait, it can’t be, we can’t destroy what little jungle we have left,’ but we were not listened to,” lamented Roberto Rojo.
“The jungle has to be allowed to rest.” According to figures from the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio), the humid jungles in Mexico, an ecosystem in the southeast of Mexico, have lost 49% of their territory, and that registers a deterioration of 66% in recent decades.
Only a fifth of the jungle remains since Roberto Rojo stated that of the 254,800 square kilometers (25.4 million hectares) of these jungles, only 40,086 square kilometers (4 million hectares) remain, something aggravated by the megaproject.
TYT Newsroom