For almost a year, he has been operating in southern Mexico. With 1,500 kilometers of track surrounding the Yucatan Peninsula, this megaproject has been protected by the Government of Mexico and criticized by civil society organizations. This Tuesday, a group of local, national and international groups published their report. Focused on sections 5, 6 and 7, the most ecologically complex and entrusted to the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), the document details a total of 15 aspects such as environmental impacts, military, territorial and corporate occupation, insecurity, social impact, privatization of the territory… which, they argue, have been caused or accelerated by the Mayan Train.
“We made a field trip in April 2025, always with the idea of a civil society initiative to try to monitor and report the progress of the situation in violation of human rights and nature linked to the megaproject,” explains Giovanna Gasparello, anthropologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and one of the authors. The report is a follow-up to the investigation of the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature, a citizen institution that documents impacts on ecosystems caused by governments and corporations.
The Mayan Train was the darling megaproject of the Administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024). During its construction, in addition to, there were, and. With a programmed budget of 150,000 million pesos, it finally exceeded 500,000 million pesos. While the first sections were built by civilian companies, seeing that these were not going to be able to finish within the political deadlines, López Obrador commissioned the military with sections 5, 6 and 7.
The consequence of this decision is one of the dimensions highlighted in the report: “Military Occupation.” “The Mission heard testimonies of humiliation, abuse of power and excess of functions of military elements over the people, land, community institutions and public spaces of the communities,” reads the document, which indicates that this is combined with a significant deployment of the National Guard (GN), the Secretary of the Navy (Semar) and the Sedena, which has turned “military intervention into the main disciplining mechanism for the development of the work.”
“This armed agent is monopolizing the public works sector, the control of the tourism economy and the Protected Natural Areas, the infrastructure such as ports and airports, arbitrarily occupying public spaces, such as beaches, squares, or even schools and cultural centers,” accuses Gasparello, who points to the military idiosyncrasy itself as the culprit for the fact that there is no one to complain to about the mistreatment of the civilian population.
Among the organizations that have participated in this report include, in addition to human rights centers such as the Coordination of the National Indigenous Congress, the Regional Indigenous and Popular Council of Xpujil or the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, environmental associations such as Cenotes Urbanos, the Mexican Civil Council for Sustainable Forestry or Greenpeace.
In this field, the document points out that the construction generated irreversible environmental impacts, which include fragmentation of the territory, deforestation, construction on wetlands, opening of new quarries… In addition, it analyzes Section 5, the part of the project goes from Cancún to Tulum in Quintana Roo. Its original layout, parallel to the highway that connects these towns, was moved several kilometers into the jungle due to pressure from businessmen who did not want the works to hinder the entrance to their hotels. This led to “more than 15,000 metal and concrete pillars being implanted in the cave system, ignoring the specialists, speleologists and divers who explore and know them, causing damage to 125 cenotes.”
A third aspect that stands out is the axis of real estate speculation, privatization and dispossession. “As a result of the construction of the railway, the adjacent land and those located on the outskirts of the cities that the train passes through have increased their price by up to 400%,” the document reads. This also points out that, during the development of the megaproject, new irregular settlements have emerged and “luxury housing developments that do not have authorizations for changes in land use, construction or even legal ownership of the land” are being built. This was recognized by the authorities of Quintana Roo, who a year ago explained to It is reportedportal specialized in tourism, which .
