- Mongabay sent a team to the Yucatán Peninsula to ride the Tren Maya, a multibillion-dollar train that’s become controversial for its environmental impacts.
- Reporter Maxwell Radwin and videographer Caitlin Cooper set out to ride the train from Cancún toward Palenque and back, with a stop in Playa del Carmen.
- On their journey, they looked for evidence of deforestation, the relocation of local and Indigenous communities, and the pollution of waterbodies — all part of multiple injunctions filed by communities and activist groups.
- In addition to deforestation, one of the major concerns is that pilings under line 5 are penetrating cave systems along the Caribbean coast, threatening freshwater and subterranean habitats.
CANCÚN, Mexico — The Mexican government finally opened its huge, controversial train project last December, connecting Cancún and Tulum with the rest of the Yucatán Peninsula. And yet, despite all the anticipation leading up to that moment, no one seems to know what’s going on with the train right now. Like, is it really open? Can you buy a ticket?
The Tren Maya has been celebrated and contested, sued from every possible angle and covered excessively by the media. But now that it’s open, people don’t really seem to believe in it. No one I spoke to in the months after its opening knew how often the train ran or even where it might take them.
Personally, I wanted to ride Tren Maya the same way people want to meet a celebrity. But I also thought it would be interesting to see whether the train had left the trail of destruction activists said it would: deforestation, relocation of local communities, the demolition of entire watersheds.
And equally interesting: whether the train was a viable form of transport. If you’re going to slam a nearly $30 billion, 1,554-kilometer (966-mile) railroad through the middle of the rainforest, it might as well be faster and easier than renting a car or taking a bus. If it’s not, what was the point?
So I decided to fly down to Cancún and ride the train the 10-plus hours to the end of the line, Palenque, to see what I could find. It was Holy Week when I went — spring break for a lot of people — and I knew the train would not only be running at full capacity, but would also be packed like it’s never been before.
I brought videographer Caitlin Cooper along to document the experience. As soon as we got to the Cancún train station, officials started pestering her about not taking pictures. Tren Maya’s construction was partially overseen by the Secretariat of National Defense — then declared a matter of national security in 2021 — and there was a sense that everyone working there had been told to stay on high alert.
Funny that no one ever patted us down, though, or checked our bags (a guard said metal detectors would be installed at a later date). Clearly, they were still getting things up and running. Construction workers drilled away in empty stores. Dust covered the platform.
All aboard
We were scheduled to leave at 7 a.m. and we pulled out of the station some time before 7:10.
The train had four cars, all basically identical, and no sleeper cars, despite the fact that some passengers would be riding for more than 10 hours. Most passengers had come for vacation; only a couple were typing on laptops or doing things that looked like work. One woman said she rode the train locally to go back and forth to a relative’s house.
Passengers filmed out the window as we moved out of Cancún toward the Leona Vicario station and, later, Chichén Itzá, a tourist destination popular for its Maya pyramids. They filmed even though there was nothing to see — some forest, some fields. It had more to do with the excitement of being on board, I think. Then, after a couple of hours, everyone settled into their seats.
This was one of my biggest takeaways of Tren Maya: It isn’t an attraction, per se, like a nature ride that shows you the wonders of the Yucatán out your window. It’s just a mode of transportation. If you want more freedom in your itinerary, rent a car. If you want a more comfortable ride, take the bus. But the train lets you stretch your legs, walk to the café car and have a bite to eat. It’s nice.
On the other hand, the train is surprisingly slow. Out the window, on the highway, I watched cars outpace us or come close.
Around 10 a.m., we pulled through Mérida, making it about a four-hour ride with the time change. The train navigated around, rather than through, several reserves outside the city, then continued on through Yucatán state and into Campeche. Green forests turned gray and dry as we moved inland. Except for an occasional bridge, some farms, a couple of guys in hard hats laying barbed wire, there was no sign of development. There was certainly no sign of “destruction.”
Parts of the lines we were riding now — lines 1 through 4 — had been built on an old railroad, presumably limiting the trees they’d had to cut down. But the government had also cleaned up the area once construction finished, so it was hard to tell what any of this had looked like before.
I talked to the man sitting behind me about it. Middle-aged, seemingly traveling alone, he’d been alternating between sleeping and working on his laptop since getting on at Cancún. The environmental side of things, he said, wasn’t a problem for him. He gestured out the windows where forest stretched on out of sight, as if to say, What deforestation?
Most of the passengers I spoke to agreed with him. Some even went a step further: Forest loss was sad, yes, but also inevitable if we wanted development. And if the development worked well, like the train seemed to, why be upset about it? They frowned at me when I insisted, and rightfully so, I think; no one wants to talk about the moral implications of their actions while on vacation.
Or maybe they felt that they weren’t the right people to ask. They talked about the train as if it were a choice that had been made for them. They rode the train but they hadn’t built it, hadn’t voted on its designs in any direct way. All the squabbling about budgets and forest loss was just the stuff of politicians. Now that it was done, there was no point in letting the infrastructure go to waste.
“Unfortunately, from my point of view, if you want to have development, there has to be some collateral damage,” one passenger told us. “I don’t think the impact was as bad as they advertised. I don’t think the impact is that bad.”
Mixed feelings in Campeche
We got off in Escárcega, in central Campeche, because people seemed to know it when I mentioned it, and because it marked the connecting point of line 1 and line 2. It will also connect to the future line 7 that goes toward Chetumal. But the town seemed to cater to truck drivers and tourist buses pulling in at rest stops. It was more like a throughway to other places than a tourist destination.
We also got off there to meet Sara López, an activist who continues to speak out against the train. She drove us to the first stop on line 1 in Candelaria, a much more scenic town with a cute little plaza and river.
She showed us the houses that had been built for the people relocated by the construction, which had resulted in an injunction on claims that a tourist project doesn’t have the legal right to forcibly relocate private citizens. She led us through wetlands that had been filled in when builders moved dirt to elevate the train line.
“These wetlands are where the water was stored, where the water was kept so that the river wouldn’t rise and it wouldn’t flood,” López said. “Now that it’s filled in … If there’s a strong hurricane, this is going to be chaos.”
The new houses looked nice, or at least I didn’t see any obvious fault with them. Even López said the owners were satisfied, although she suspected they’d been paid off. And as for the filled-in wetlands: They didn’t look very big. Which isn’t to say they weren’t important, that there won’t be flooding there in the future — but it wasn’t as if a huge ecosystem had been destroyed. Overall, the damage along this line seemed relatively minimal.
Another injunction that applied to this part of the train concerned residents’ constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, which the project was jeopardizing by “fragmenting” the forest and obstructing the “connectivity of habitats.” But habitat connectivity isn’t something you can see the impact of just walking around the train line, so it was hard to say how much damage had been done. We’ll have to wait for the scientific studies to come out.
López led us along the Candelaria River, where men and their children fished with lines tied around their fingers. Others swam in their clothes. The river was clean, López told us, provided drinking water to the area, but was also under threat because of the unfinished line 7 farther east. Communities there had only agreed to construction in exchange for a solution to the water scarcity problem, which involved bringing river water from here to over there.
Later we got a taxi out to a cenote, like a sinkhole, located only a few hundred meters from the train line. Out-of-towners swam off a dock and paddled in kayaks. The cenote operators were in favor of the train, they told us. It passed close to the cenote but not so close that it posed a threat. More people might visit now.
Three local women stood under the shade of an umbrella waiting for the train to pass, and we joined them so Caitlin could get a shot of it. But we ended up waiting for nearly two hours without any luck. Later, we learned that one of the cars had slipped off the tracks, creating delays for the entire system.
A rough ride back
The next day, we returned to the Escárcega train station to buy tickets back to Cancún, only to discover they were sold out for the next two days. More trains would be added later, the person at the ticket desk said, in a tone that made this sound more like a guess than a promise. Hanging around Escárcega would put us behind schedule, so we decided to book tickets farther up the line in Campeche City, about two hours away.
The best option to reach the city ended up being a combi, a 12-person van similar to a rustic Uber pool that was packed with families and their bags. By the time we got into Campeche City — an old Spanish fort on the Caribbean coast, though without much of a beach — it was already dark. It was Monday night. Restaurants were closed and the hotels had overbooked their rooms because of spring break.
The hotel we eventually managed to book was near the historic center and the plaza. Vendors spoke to us about the environmental destruction caused by Tren Maya, the spirituality of the forest that was under threat. And yet they also seemed to approve of the train. Like the passengers we’d spoken to earlier, they viewed it as a necessary sacrifice. Economic development had to happen somewhere; it might as well be for a train.
“A lot of people are talking about, ‘Oh, the environment, the deforestation,’ and all that, but that’s existed my entire life,” said Myrna Chan Zapata, one of the vendors selling crafts in the plaza.
A boom in tourism excited them the most. Everyone was united on that point. Never mind that tourism hadn’t come yet. Or that the train wasn’t even set up to make it easy for tourists to visit. We found, heading out to Cancún the next day, that the Campeche City station was inconveniently far away, so much so that our taxi driver said he’d never been there before.
It was a seven-hour train ride back to Cancún. We got in at about 2 p.m. and waited 45 minutes to change to line 5 toward Playa del Carmen, a smaller beach town with a spring break party vibe. The ride there was rougher, less finished, with open lots and bulldozers in view out the window. Construction workers waved to the train as we passed.
This marked the end of the lines that were open. We had taken the train to every possible stop except for four. The destruction had been noticeable, although not shocking, but I wanted to know what was going on at the construction sites of the future lines. They’d gotten even more media attention than lines 1, 2, 3 and 4. Maybe the worst was still to come.
Down in the caves
An hour outside of Playa del Carmen, we met up with cave expert Roberto Rojo, who’s been raising awareness about the destruction of cave ecosystems along the southern half of line 5, which was still under construction. Much of the Yucatán Peninsula is made up of caves with massive subterranean rivers that provide the region with freshwater. Line 5 runs directly over many of the caves, and has already damaged some of them, he said.
Rojo is a serious guy with a long, fraying ponytail. The only way to understand the destruction, he said, was to see it up close, and so he’d arranged a visit to one of the caves with a party of other activists, archaeologists and politicians. This was a cave hidden from tourists, deep in the back of someone’s private property. The owner declined to share their name due to security concerns.
One of the politicians was Diana Vega, the daughter of presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, a right-leaning former senator who opposed Tren Maya and promised to “compensate” for the environmental damage it caused. Vega had brought along what looked like her boyfriend and a couple of her friends, or maybe they were some kind of hired media team; they filmed her on their phones nearly the entire three hours we were down in the cave.
The narrow corridors began to shrink as we moved between caverns and waded through rivers. It would have been pitch black without our helmet lights. The stalactites hung down over us and the stalagmites grew up around us. Records of thousands of years of geological history, Rojo said, were at risk of being lost.
Eventually we reached a cavern with a beam of sunlight cast down from the ceiling. Workers up above had drilled a hole for a piling to support the train line. Farther on, other pilings had already been installed. They were dirty to the touch (rusty or maybe covered in some kind of chemical). A new piling was in the process of being installed, too. We could hear the drilling overhead, and then a huge cylindrical object started spinning through the cave ceiling.
“You realize, every movie about a natural disaster begins after they don’t listen to the scientists … and in the end, they have a natural disaster,” Rojo said. “That’s what’s happening here.”
Train operators didn’t respond when I reached out later asking how many pilings they actually planned to install. But even just a few seemed to pose serious environmental risks to the area.
“Caves aren’t just tubes down below, empty, ugly and dark,” Rojo said. “They’re ecosystems full of life that work as a team with jungle ecosystems.”
Vega positioned herself in front of the piling and did multiple takes speaking dramatically about the environmental impacts. Then, as soon as the cameras were off, she went back to swimming in the deeper parts of the cave with her friends, laughing and posing for photos near interesting rock formations.
It was fascinating to watch her leverage the train for her mother’s presidential campaign. Tren Maya is an environmental issue, sure, but it’s a lot of other things, too: an economic driver, a well of corruption, a sign of Mexico’s growing military-industrial complex, a marker of progress.
After having seen most of the project, it’s clear that Tren Maya was better than a lot of critics had claimed and also, in other parts, much worse than its supporters would admit. The train had done some good and some bad, and it was too easy to represent it how you wanted.
Undoubtedly, that will come into play during the presidential elections in July, when Gálvez faces off against the more liberal Claudia Sheinbaum, who supports the train (she’s currently the favorite, according to polls).
Caitlin and I talked it over for hours after getting out of the cave. Would they eventually halt work on line 5? Would anyone even care once the caves were gone? There was also the safety issue to consider. Can you really build on top of hollow ground like that?
We drove to Playa del Carmen for the night and then, in the morning, tried to find a way back to Cancún. We were tired after a week of traveling. We’d stayed in five hotels in seven nights. We just wanted to get to Cancún as quickly as possible. Buses were one option. Combis. Also private taxis. But we decided to take the train one last time, even though our work was done and it wasn’t necessary. For better or for worse, it really was the fastest way.
Banner image: Passengers wait to board Tren Maya. Photo by Caitlin Cooper.
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