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Mexico will on Friday open the first part of a $30bn train line, a signature project of populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador built with limited transparency and run by the army.
The 1,500km Maya Train line is one of the largest infrastructure projects under way in the Americas and will run in a loop around the Yucatán peninsula and neighbouring states.
It aims to spur economic development in Mexico’s poorer south by connecting Cancún’s beach resorts with other areas but has been criticised for a lack of transparency, environmental damage and soaring costs — the total expenditure of more than 515mn pesos ($30mn) is more than three times over the project’s initial budget.
On Friday the first part of the route will open from Campeche to Cancún, with tickets costing 1,166 pesos for a 480km, six-hour journey, a similar time to making the trip by car.
“No study has been presented that justifies spending so much money,” said Jesús Carrillo, head of sustainable economics at Mexican think-tank IMCO. He said the country’s south had many more urgent infrastructure needs that would garner fewer headlines. “A train is clearly showier than a transmission line . . . It’s clearly another effort to leave a legacy.”
The train is a cornerstone of López Obrador’s broader vision to prioritise the poorer south and reassert the state’s role in the economy with a series of mega projects. The leftist leader says “neoliberal” policies under former administrations increased corruption and inequality.
“During the entire neoliberal period the whole south-east was abandoned,” López Obrador said in October. “The train will help reactivate the economy, bring jobs and wellbeing, and people can live off this for a long time.”
Named after the largest indigenous group in the region, the Maya Train has met significant resistance from environmental groups over the culling of at least 3mn trees and fears the line will contaminate water in thousands of cenote limestone sinkholes.
“The only Mayan thing about the train is its name,” said Pedro Uc, a Mayan poet and activist. “It’s a shot through the heart of the peninsular Mayan culture.”
José Urbina Bravo, another activist, said: “There is no way to defend this project, it doesn’t protect the environment, the environment is an obstacle to them.”
The president has relied on the military, one of the country’s most trusted institutions, to push through his political promises.
A state company under army control called Olmeca-Maya-Mexica will run the train as well as hotels and national parks, a national airline and a dozen airports. Activists have warned the economic and political power given to the military risks corruption and rights abuses.
After the project ran into legal obstacles that forced multiple stoppages and route alterations, López Obrador issued a presidential decree to make it a “national security” priority, allowing the administration to sidestep transparency requirements.
The government has not published a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis for the project.
“The transparency issue is very important and very worrying because . . . we can’t identify if the money spent is really going to impact or benefit people,” said Leslie Areli Badillo, researcher at the Centre of Economic and Budgetary Investigations think-tank.
López Obrador is working to a tight deadline. He is pushing to finish multiple train lines, airports and an oil refinery before the country’s presidential election in June, to show that his party has delivered on pledges to boost economic development. Polls show his chosen successor Claudia Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor and climate scientist, holds a more than 20-point lead.
States that host the broader project have seen a rise in public investment as contractors race to finish work. The track was divided into sections being built by Mexican companies such as billionaire Carlos Slim’s Grupo Carso as well as Portuguese group Mota-Engil.
French trainmaker Alstom and Canada’s Bombardier led the consortium that won a $1bn contract to provide the mostly hybrid diesel-electric passenger trains that will run along the route. López Obrador said the train line should be finished by February.
