With the construction of the Tren Maya “not a single tree will be torn down,” said Andrés Manuel López Obrador on December 16, 2018, December 2018. Today, 6 years after that false statement, its government recognized that 7 million trees were cut down between 2019 and 2023; There is still no official record of those felled in 2024.
However, civil associations for the protection of the environment claim that more than 10 million trees have been felled along the railway route, which has a circuit of 1,554 kilometers through five states in the southeast of Mexico: Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan.
On November 28, Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) shared an audio with testimonies from people affected by deforestation.
“We are fighting against dispossession: they took over our language, our way of life and it is excruciating, really very sad to see how trees are falling.
“Look how the capitalist system only cares about power and money, it doesn’t care about the people, it doesn’t care about the territory, it doesn’t care about anything,” says Alama Ileana May Herrera, a resident of Campeche, on the Yucatán Peninsula.
“How can’t even a person who is Mayan embrace his cultural heritage from his community, but from this other perspective that they are giving us, that your culture, your town, is only useful when you can sell when you can put on a show about your culture,” the interviewee said.
It was in Palenque, Chiapas on that Sunday in 2018 when the work on the Tren Maya began with an Indigenous ritual, supposedly to “ask permission from Mother Earth”, which had more of an appearance of a show than a desire for consent because then it did not matter. They didn’t tell Mother Earth they would kill millions of “children” (trees).
Years after that show, through a report from the National Transparency Platform (PNT, which by the way is going to disappear, endorsed by Morena and allies) that the Animal Político news portal requested in March of this year, the AMLO government recognized that with the construction of the Mayan Train, they have already cut down more than 7 million trees between 2019 and 2023.
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