Mexico’s Mayan Train is destroying ancient caves. Learn about the beautiful endangered ‘cenotes’

AKTUN TUYUL CAVE SYSTEM, Mexico (AP) — Mexico’s outgoing leader quickly built a rail system that encircles the southern Yucatan Peninsula in the country’s south.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised that the $30 billion-plus Maya Train project would link tourist centers like Cancún and Playa del Carmen with dense forests and remote archaeological sites, attracting money to long-neglected rural areas of the country.

But the crown jewel of the populist presidency also overlooks one of Mexico’s natural wonders: a fragile system of some 10,000 underground caves, rivers, lakes and freshwater wells.

As his term comes to an end, Associated Press journalists have traveled along a section of that cave network, documenting its destruction.

BUILT ON A ‘FRAGIL’ AND IMPORTANT ECOSYSTEM

The cave system contains one of the largest aquifers in Mexico and serves as the region’s main source of water, crucial at a time when the country faces an increasingly deep water crisis.

The region was once a reef lying beneath the Caribbean Sea, but changing sea levels pushed the southern peninsula of Mexico out of the ocean as a mass of limestone. Water carved the porous stone into caves over millions of years.

It produced open freshwater caves known as “cenotes” and underground rivers that are equal parts awe-inspiring and delicate, explained Emiliano Monroy-Ríos, a geologist at Northwestern University who studies the region.

“These ecosystems are very, very fragile,” said Monroy-Ríos. “They are building a terrain that looks like Gruyère cheese, full of caves and cavities of different sizes and depths.”

THE DESTRUCTION

The train drew criticism from environmentalists and scientists as its construction felled millions of trees, a chunk of the largest rainforest in the Americas after the Amazon.

But the caves have gained prominence in recent months when experts who have long worked in the caves published videos of government officials using huge metal drills to drill into the limestone, embedding some 15,000 steel pillars into the caves.

The pillars were made to raise the train line, something López Obrador said would protect the ancient underground world, already threatened by mass tourism.

Instead, what the AP documented was destruction.

Throughout the cave system, stalactites shattered by vibrations from the train’s construction litter the ground like rubble after an earthquake. In other caves, the concrete filling the pillars has spread and covered the limestone soil. The water showed traces of iron pollution from rust coming from the metal.

The destruction ripples through the rest of the ecosystem, AP concluded, as the freshwater aquifer connects to the Caribbean Sea.

A POLITICAL PROMISE, BUT ALSO A POLITICAL PROCESS

López Obrador, who presents himself as a defender of Mexico’s long-forgotten poor, declared the convoy “our legacy of development for southeastern Mexico.”

The populist accelerated the construction of the train to try to fulfill his promises of completing it before the June elections, something that seems almost impossible.

The government avoided oversight, ignored court orders, employed Mexican military personnel in its construction, and blocked the release of information in the name of “natural security.” In violation of Mexican law, the administration also failed to conduct a comprehensive study to assess potential environmental impacts before beginning construction.

The measures he has taken have only deepened his ongoing conflicts with the country’s judiciary, further fueling criticism that his government is undermining democratic institutions.