Xpujil, Campeche | Desinformémonos. Sara López González, founder of the Regional Indigenous and Popular Council of Xpujil (CRIPX) in 1995, part of the Civil Resistance movement against High Electricity Rates and active defender of the Mayan territory from different spaces, explains in an interview with Desinformémonos the impacts on the Yucatán Peninsula of the Mayan Train, a strategic project of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is one month away from the end of his six-year term.
The interview takes place in Xpujil at the end of August, next to the Tren Maya construction site, which in this section has not been completed, so they are working day and night to have it ready, something that for Sara is practically impossible. In any case, she says, “they are going to inaugurate it unfinished for the photo, which is what matters to them.”
-Six years have passed since the announcement of the Mayan Train. What are the results of this project a few weeks before the end of the six-year term?
-Six years ago Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced the construction of the mis-named Tren Maya (Mayan Train). We learned that at the end of November 2018 there would be information about this mega project and we went to see what it was about. According to a consultation was held a month later, on December 15, when there was a vote on whether or not the Mayan Train was wanted. It was a rigged consultation and therefore generated a serious concern for all of us in the Council.
We are against this mega project because of all the impacts it is causing. At that time we said that it was going to affect us or that it would harm us, that we had not been consulted. We went to the communities and talked to them about the environmental problems. We talked to them about the social, economic, political, cultural impacts. Many people still said yes. There was already the “Sembrando Vida” program, which gives them money, six thousand pesos, and then they said “no government gave us money before, how can you be against the person who feeds you?”
Since then we filed an injunction on the consultation and won the definitive suspension, but the mega project continues, almost all the infrastructure is already in place. It has been a constant struggle. With other organizations we tried not to be alone, we filed amparos on the peninsula with the support of the Mexican Center for Environmental Law (Cemda) and won one on the environmental impacts, but they gave us the resolution after all the work had already been done. They were sections 2, 3 and 4, which include Campeche and part of Yucatan, and when we won it the works were already done, they had already deforested and destroyed archaeological zones.
Another injunction on consent was filed but that one has not been won. When the first injunction was won in Xpujil, in 2020, we held a press conference in Mérida with Cemda and other comrades. Later, in the morning conference, López Obrador’s attacks came, saying that we were environmentalists and PRI and PAN supporters. A tremendous defamation of the Civil Council, CRIPX, Cemda, Indignación. He said that we received money to do work against the train.
We responded that we have existed for years in the communities, that CRIPX has been working for more than 25 years and that he had just become president, that we have always been defenders of the territory and of life, that we were not what he said we were.
-How was the presidential disparagement experienced in the territory?
-After his disparagement, unfortunately, came the criminalization on the part of the Morena people in the communities. They say, “Oh, you are from CRIPX? We don’t accept you, you are against López Obrador.” Morena was singling us out in all the spaces where we could be, they said that we were the ones who are against the president and against development.
In the case of Candelaria, some people who had been living for 15, 20, 30 years on the stretch of the road sought us out. The ejido gave them title to that land. So when they announced the reconstruction of the tracks it was logical that they were going to evict them and that is when we filed an injunction on the eviction and relocation of the tracks. There were two injunctions and we began to do the work on more than 300 houses that were there.
People got together and filed injunctions. It was logical, it is their patrimony, their home. If they did not succeed, at least they should be relocated to decent housing. When the heavy work on the Mayan Train began, they could not do anything because these injunctions were in process, even though we had not won them yet.
Then they began to work house to house threatening people, telling them that if they did not drop the injunction they were going to lose their house and they were not going to relocate them. In the city of Campeche it was UNO Habitat, in Candelaria it was directly Morena, because the people of Morena know us perfectly well. The people of the party asked the people and the people told them who we were. In the end, most of them withdrew the appeal, there were few left and they remained firm. They were able to negotiate and they were paid more or less for their houses. In all this process there were threats, as in my case, and co-optation, in the case of Candelaria.
-In 2023, a presidential decree was issued so that the construction and operation of projects such as the Mayan Train and the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec would be considered of national security and of public interest. How did you experience this decree?
-It was total chaos. In the case of Xpujil the injunction was granted and we have the definitive suspension. In response to this was the presidential decree on the projects, but the injunction continued. That injunction is now in the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation because they are not respecting it. In fact a judge from Merida came to deliver the document to the army, but it seems they did not receive it.
This appeal was filed because the rights of the indigenous peoples to consultation were violated and it was expanded with the environmental impacts. The experts have done the work on the damages caused by the train. That is why they issued the definitive suspension.
-The work has been going on for more than five years now. What is the outlook?
-It’s all screwed up now. What we said would happen five years ago is what happened. And we were too small because the impacts it is causing are enormous. Now we no longer say “it’s going to happen”, but we already have the impacts. The total devastation of millions of trees makes us impotent, it makes us angry to see how they destroyed the trees, how they throw away the water. How is it that there is water to level, to irrigate in all the stretches, but Calakmul has no water? They built an aqueduct, but the water still does not arrive.
In December of six years ago, in the meetings the people said that they wanted the Mayan Train, but first they had great needs for health, water, school. The government institutions said that the water would arrive and that all would be fulfilled, but everything was shelved. They have not given an answer, they only wanted consent. They said they would make the aqueduct, they ravaged the territory to make it with some huge pipes, but it did not work because the water has not arrived. They didn’t finish, so it’s not coming.
There is no water for us but there is still water for the Train. Here in Calakmul and in various parts of the Peninsula the number of people coming from outside has increased, crime, at night you can’t go out because of the insecurity. There are many bad people who came to work on the aqueduct and the Tren Maya, you hardly see people from the communities, indigenous people, only people from outside.
-Has the face of the region changed?
Of course. It changed the face of every community. There is a lot of drug addiction, alcoholism, family disintegration. Those who come from outside take our compañeras, they fall in love with them. Prices have increased in all aspects, in rents, in the staple food basket, an empanada that used to cost 17 pesos now costs 40 pesos, because these are prices for train workers. A rent goes from three, six and up to 15 thousand pesos.
Xpujil is chaos. There is a lot of land for sale, people come from outside to buy and, as people do not have money, they accept. This has happened all over the area where the train passes, especially where there are stations and stops.
Almost six years after construction began, there is no water. There were forced evictions where the train tracks were, from Palenque to Campeche. In Campeche we managed to get them to relocate the railroad tracks, the compañeras got very tough, they said “they are going to kill us first but we are not going to let them pass.” They laid down on the tracks, and they were relocated. It was an achievement in the sense that they did not destroy the houses of the compañeros and compañeras, who were already older.
-On the road from Escarcega to Calakmul we see thousands of workers and machinery all day and night. It is August 2024 and they assure that they will finish. What has triggered the urgency to finish?
-Obrador wanted to finish his train when he left, but there are many brakes. There are campesinos who have stopped him in this and other parts of the country because they are not paid well for their land. From the beginning it was very difficult for López Obrador to finish his train. And he is not going to finish it, that is a fact. I still have the hope that the train will not pass from Playa del Carmen to here, through the cenotes. The whole peninsula is porous land, it is karstic land, so it will sink under the weight.
There is bad flooding, now that there have been heavy rains in Campeche, on the highway, between Champotón and Miguel Colorado. All of that flooded horribly because of the train backfills. In Candelaria it has also flooded because of the same reason. In Candelaria the train is already passing over the top. Last year they blocked half of the river, collapsed the bridge that was already there and built another one. We were very upset because they covered it up and filled in the wetlands. That is also why there is flooding. Before reaching Chetumal, through Juan Sarabia, the community was flooded because the train plugged it up.
The technicians, the engineers, did everything on the fly, they did not carry out studies, they did it on the spur of the moment. It was rushed by the government and that is why there are many failures. That is why the train bridges collapse. In some parts of Quintana Roo it collapsed and there were deaths, the haste caused all this.
-Tell us about the impacts on the Mayan culture.
-It is sad because the young girls who speak Ch’ol and speak Tseltal come to work and go around with the people from outside and get super drunk. You see them and it makes you sad. They no longer speak their language, it is a social phenomenon. They are the indigenous workers who come here and hook up with the workers, who who knows where they come from, and they lose their language, their dress, everything.
They put in a university, but as far as we know there is no recovery of the language of the young people. We are worried that if the train passes, canned food will arrive, we will forget to eat and plant beans, make tortillas, plant corn. We feel that this will be lost little by little.
We as a collective are trying to recover the native seed, so that we do not forget that we have to sow and cultivate the milpa without chemicals, but this megaproject is a devastating monster in all aspects of life. It worries us, but it is Lopez Obrador’s dream.
-What has happened within the communities, how have they experienced the construction and implementation of the train?
-There is, of course, the fragmentation of the community. It is a fragmentation of ideas, because there are those who support the project and those who do not, and there are quarrels between campesinos and indigenous people, even within the same families. In several places the train passes through the middle of the community and passes right next to it. On one side is the clinic, the school, but on the other is the house, the family, the park, the church.
The railroad fragmented the towns and kilometers away they built an elevated bridge, but the people say ‘how is my elderly mother going to get up there if she is in a wheelchair, how is my child going to get up there?’ People are passing through the culverts so that the water will go away. Where were these engineers’ heads?
Many ejidos were arguing that they did not want that bridge, and in Candelaria, for example, two compas ended up in jail because they planted themselves on the tracks and said they would not let them pass, because they had first handed in a list of needs. They were evicted in a remote ejido, they thought no one would find out, and they were jailed. And then there was a struggle to get the compas out of jail.
-Given that the army is responsible for the work, its presence is overwhelming along the entire route. What has militarization brought to the communities?
There is the military, the National Guard, there are army barracks. They are present in the communities and it is the very army that is doing the construction. In Conhuas it is full of soldiers and there is another barracks there. In the community of Nuevo Paraíso de Candelaria the army and the National Guard arrived and settled in the park. The compañeras said that they no longer had a peaceful life because their sons and daughters would go out to the park at night and they would get caught. Nobody went out anymore, but from there the military left.
The main impact of militarization is fear and terror. The army is there to control you, so that you don’t do anything. The opponents of the train can no longer do blockades or anything else because the military is there. We did a blockade this year because there have been many accidents and Fonatur and the companies have not responded. A dump truck from a company that works for the Mayan Train ran over a high school student and there was no justice.
The people organized themselves, there had already been meetings with the authorities and the army so that the dump trucks would not enter the community and so that they could do their work. It is sad because the one with whom we talked and dialogued was with a lieutenant, when before we talked with the governor, with the municipal president, that is, with civil authorities, but now it is with the army. Dialoguing with people who come armed is very courageous.
In last April’s demonstration, it was the army that arrived to take action. All civilian life is militarized. That makes you feel very angry and impotent, because in the end everything stays that way and nothing comes of it. The blockades have been by the people of the town, but they are not organized.
-A hotel is being built in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, ten kilometers from the main complex.
That’s right, and it is also a project of the army. It is about ten kilometers from the archaeological zone. They devastated more than ten hectares. For us they are constructions of destruction. They could cut trees while the campesinos could not even cut for firewood.
It is a fact that the government supports the businessmen and the companies that come to invade us. It is an invasion, the damage is already there, it is irreversible damage to the environment and culture. And for the work that will be there, they will not hire indigenous people or people from the communities.
With so much destruction of the trees, the bees have been greatly affected. It is a vulnerability for the bees because they are deprived of their habitat, their food. Everything goes hand in hand. They damage the land, they take away your land, there are the floods, the fragmentation, the bees, everything is chaos. You can’t even finish describing all the damage.
-What is the message to other organizations a few weeks before the end of the current federal administration?
I have always said that we must coordinate ourselves, join forces. We have to defend ourselves. The motto we have always had is that if they touch one of us, they touch us all. The new administration is coming the same or worse. They say that we women are awesome, but she is coming to continue López Obrador’s work. And it is clear that she is coming with an iron fist.
Obrador did several things against the organizations, he does not accept them, he hates them. And she is taking that line. We do not have any expectations.
We are looking for a way to organize ourselves in various spaces, such as El Sur Resiste. We are in this struggle to see what comes next, as the compas say. In September we will do something in parallel to question López Obrador about what he is inaugurating in section 7, to tell him that he cannot ignore what is happening, the damages of the project.
Estamos preparando la despedida de López Obrador. Invitaremos a seguirnos articulando y a sumarnos, porque entre más seamos más fuertes seremos. Para él no importa si la obra está terminada o no para inaugurarla, el sólo quiere decir que cumplió, tomarse la foto y que miles de personas le crean.
A pesar de que es monstruoso el proyecto, los colectivos seguiremos resistiendo, vamos a seguir persistiendo ante todo. Seguiremos con los amparos, porque la batalla legal va de la mano con el proceso y el trabajo político y organizativo.
-In addition to the legal battle and mobilization, how do you resist?
We also do several community organizational works, such as the recovery of native seeds, every year we have a seed festival to make exchanges, we do workshops for women, and we recover traditional medicine. That is to resist, that is to say that this other way of living exists. We try to work the plots, to bring a plate of healthy food, without chemists.
We have community centers for communication, so that the young people have spaces with internet, but what we need is work with the children in the community. These are community works that we do and that we also use to make an analysis of the reality, because in the communities people do not realize it and if we give them a flyer they do not read it. We want to strengthen the work of women and men.
The government never told us about the negative impacts, everything was painted beautifully. Today there are many people who are not organized, but who are already against the Mayan Train and started out being in favor. Many families have been victims of accidents. They are now realizing everything we said before, like the devastation, and they tell us that we were right. It is already a gain, because they say they no longer want the train. They are not organized, but at least they no longer agree.
-You have been criminalized and even imprisoned for your participation in struggles such as the opposition to high electricity rates. How do women defenders of the territory feel today?
We defenders are afraid because we raise our voices. With drones they take pictures of us, they record us, they have us well identified. The government is not interested in our struggle. And there are the disappeared and the murdered. Several of us defenders have managed to prevent the installation of surveillance equipment in our homes, such as cameras. It is not easy.
Original text by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez published in Desinformémonos on September 10th, 2024.
Photos by Noé Piñeda/Flores en el Desierto
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.