The sacred cenote, a huge pool of crystal clear water surrounded by jungle, is one of the most visited attractions in Chichen Itza, the city of the ancient Mayans in the north of the Yucatan peninsula. Although there are archaeological remains with more tourist curiosity in this spectacular metropolis built more than a thousand years ago, such as the Pok ta Pok ball court, with its friezes of decapitated players. Or the Tzompantli, adorned with dozens of smiling skulls. However, the cenote has its own gory history too: hundreds of skeletons found in the depths, sacrificed to the rain god who inhabited the bottom of the well.
They are macabre spectacles for the three million annual tourists who will soon tour the ruins again after the pandemic. But they probably were not for the inhabitants of Chichen Itza. After all, death was another life in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The cenotes and caves through which the deceased descended to the underworld were more coveted than the surface. In the nearby Balamku cave of the jaguar god, three kilometers from the great pyramid, the Maya celebrated their underground encounters with the gods and the dead.
Chichén Itzá –mouth of a well, in Mayan- will be one of the busiest of the twenty stations of the new Mayan train that will travel 1,500 kilometers of the poor Mexican southeast, crossing the low jungle of the Yucatan Peninsula and linking the megalopolis of tourism " all inclusive”, Cancun, with the spectacular lost cities.
This new railway is expected to transport even more tourists to Chichen Itza, and attract thousands more to less visited sites, most notably Palenque, in Chiapas, 650 kilometers to the south, one of the most splendid cities of the classical era that collapsed due to the lack of water. The train will give access to 46 archaeological zones and six places classified as world heritage.
The works of the lines of the train to Chichén Itzá and Ek Balam in Yucatán and Palenque, in Chiapas are already advanced and will surely be finished, as the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, intends, before the end of his six-year term in 2024. Calakmul, the most mysterious ruins of all, located in the pristine jungle of the biosphere reserve, was in the original plans but the train will not arrive on time.
Many passengers will go to the sacred cenote from the Chichén Itzá station, already designed in the sketches as a Mayan-inspired construction. Hence the irony. The new train has provoked a wave of protests in recent months from environmental activists and Mayan groups, precisely because of the danger that the weight of the railway structure will cause damage to the subsoil and its ecological and archaeological wonders.
There are thousands of cenotes and caves in the lands of the Mayans, located in a limestone hive perforated 66 million years ago by a meteorite eight kilometers in diameter that fell precisely here, causing a change in the planetary climate that extinguished the dinosaurs. .
In forty caves already explored, pre-Columbian constructions, altars, oratories, temples have been found and, according to the archaeologists and speleologists who crawl or dive through the underground hive, much remains to be discovered.
The underworld in the subsoil of Yucatan not only guaranteed spiritual eternity. The great underground aquifer supported a population of up to ten million in the 9th century before a series of catastrophic droughts –already proven by the study of stalactites in the caves– caused the collapse of spectacular metropolises such as Tikal (Guatemala) Palenque, Cobal , Calakmul in the south of the Mayan land, now Campeche. Further north, Chichen Itza, nearby Ek Balam, Uxmal, and other cities avoided catastrophe. But the risk of a water crisis remains in Yucatan. "Without the aquifer there is no life on the peninsula," summed up an archaeologist critical of the Mayan train who did not want his name to be published for fear of reprisals.
Concern is growing like foam since a change in the train route was announced on the section from Cancun to Tulum, the yoga and rave resort with its own ruins on the beach. Under pressure from private hotel interests in the Riviera Maya, the line moved from the coast to the interior. The works already make a straight cut in the jungle, a barrier to fauna – from jaguars to iguanas or spider monkeys – and pose a danger to the underground structure.
“The Mayan train is going to cause sinkholes and destroy cenotes,” said Pedro Uc Be, an activist from a Mayan assembly in the Buctzotz commune, near Mérida. A judge ordered the suspension of work on this section in May citing the danger to Mayan heritage and the environment. But last week the environment ministry gave the green light to the work, which, being classified as "national security", cannot be stopped by the judges.
Grupo Visenta, owner of luxury hotels such as the Mayan Palace with its Jack Nicklaus golf course, described the train as "an extraordinary tool" and "engine of development." But many Mayan communities disagree. “More tourists will come to the ruins, but who will benefit? Only the big hotel groups and organized crime”, explains Uc Be. The Spanish construction company Acciona is part of the group awarded for the construction of the Tulum-Cancún section.
Worrying as its impact is, the Mayan train may be a lesser evil compared to the havoc already wrought by an uncontrolled expansion of tourism along the coast now heading inland.
The Xcaret theme parks, for example, owned by Mexican-American billionaire businessman Miquel Quintana Pali, have privatized dozens of cenotes to build underground tourist circuits with turquoise water.
In Xibalbá, another theme park of the group near Chichén Itzá, a local judge has just ordered the suspension of excavation works in the cenotes and the construction of an underground aquatic tourism circuit. "On the route of the cenotes here there is so much tourist construction that the water we drink is being contaminated," said Sebastian Perdigon, a water expert at the Autonomous University of Mexico and a resident of Puerto Morelos, near Cancun.
The contamination of the Mayan culture goes further. Xibalbá is the Mayan term that refers precisely to the sacred underworld, which "they turn into a thematic product," says Samuel Jouault, a sociologist specializing in tourism at the University of Mérida. Xcaret – which has six other theme parks in the region – even houses an authentic Mayan ruin within its first complex.
It is just an example. Thousands of couples from the five continents come to the Riveira Maya each year to get married according to Mayan rites, reinvented by theme designers. “Xcaret offers a spectacular recreation of the Mayan culture in a papier-mâché town”, explains Martín Checa Artasu.
At least the Mayan train “is one hundred percent public,” said Lila González, former manager of the Tulum-Chetumal stretch on the border with Belize. “We are going to incorporate real Mayan communities.” Xcaret "is worse than Disney because the fantasies here are displacing real cultural practices," she added.
Jouault fears that the train, Xcaret and tourism and real estate promotions are part of the same process. "Tourism companies like Xcaret are acquiring land very close to the highway in Yucatan and the Mayan train is going to boost the theme parks," he says.
Tourism "is ambivalent" says Jouault. In the ruins of Ek Balam, some young Mayans paint themselves, dress in feathers and stage Pok ta Pok matches. "The inspiration is Xcaret and the movie Apocalypto," she explains. “This can be shocking but they charge to be photographed – up to 1,000 pesos [45 euros] a day in high season – and that allows them to stay in the community without being forced to migrate to Cancún,” he explains.
This is a matter of life or death. Many young migrant Mayans from the interior who work in hotel construction have been disappeared by drug traffickers after refusing to pay the "right of flat", the extortion charge. Some of them enter an undoubtedly macabre Mayan underworld. Remains of their corpses have been found under the new temples of mass luxury tourism.
But the reopening of the border will have other consequences: more gasoline smuggling and more freedom of movement for the criminal groups - paramilitaries, dissident guerrillas and drug traffickers - who roam the border area, from Cúcuta to La Guajira. “Venezuela has always been a drug trafficking route to the Caribbean and Europe,” explained researchers from the 360-degree medium in Barranquilla. "With the opening of the border there will be a change in dynamics."
In this sense, a priority measure for the new Caracas-Bogotá collaboration axis will be to prevent Monómeros from becoming a target of financial operations by "dark groups linked to drug trafficking," said José Luis Pirela, another Venezuelan opposition deputy, resident of Barranquilla "They want to buy it to be a money laundering instrument and the camouflaged obtaining of chemical precursors for the manufacture of cocaine such as hydrochloride."
