A decolonial approach to ecological distribution conflicts and the Maya Train in Mexico

The Ecological Context In The Yucatan Peninsula

As observed elsewhere, the environmental conservation state of the Yucatan Peninsula is related to a predominance of indigenous resource management, grounded in the local Mayan biocultural heritage. The Biosphere Reserves, Calakmul (established in 1993 in the state of Campeche) and Sian Ka’an (established in 1986 in the state of Quintana Roo) have contributed to mitigate habitat degradation from an increasing number of threats such as urbanization, mass tourism, highways, wind, photovoltaic parks, and contaminating industries like pig and poultry megafarms (García Quintanilla et al., 2022; see Figure 1). These reserves also contribute to protect the extensive karst aquifer (Bauer-Gottwein et al., 2011) that houses important endemic fauna and has a sacred meaning to the Maya (Lopez-Maldonado et al., 2017). Water pollution constitutes a relevant threat to the wellbeing of the local population (Metcalfe et al., 2011), raising tensions between communities and developers. Also, the low quality and depth of the water table in the southern part of the peninsula hinders access to clean water.

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Figure 1.

Ecological distribution conflicts around the path of the Maya Train (2000-2023).

Mayan communities in the region have practiced the milpa, a subsistence agroecological system that consists of diversified crop land where many species are sown, encouraged, and tolerated (Toledo et al., 2003). The milpa system, recently recognized as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) (FAO, 2023), is closely connected with the home gardens, bee keeping spaces, and surrounding forests, k’áax in Maya, where useful flora and fauna are extracted (García Quintanilla, 2000; López-Barreto, 2021). These spaces are full of meaning, where traditional beliefs, knowledge, and practices interact with nature. In the milpa and among beekeepers, for example, ceremonial rituals to ask for permission and protection are common.

Nutrients for the milpa are obtained through pruning and burning the forest, rotating small extensions of cropland after a few years, and promoting forest regeneration (González-Cruz et al., 2015). Thus, land rotation entails collective use of the land, which is maintained through the ejido ¹ system. Despite external threats, this collective land ownership has contributed to the continuation of the milpa (Martín-Castillo, 2016).

Ecological Distribution Conflicts And Public Policy

In Mexico, social movements attributed to EDCs have played an active role in shaping public policy, primarily in response to neoliberal policies in the agrarian sector. For example, in 2003, the Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) was introduced as an attempt to address environmental degradation promoted by the World Bank and other transnational institutions through the monetization of the natural resources. Through negotiations with the federal government, representatives of the social movement ¡Movimiento El Campo no Aguanta Más! (MECNAM) ² advanced a conception of Ecosystem Services (ES) values centered on campesino environmental stewardship and the contributions of rural eco-social systems to national and local wellbeing, rather than market-driven incentives for conservation (McAfee and Shapiro, 2010).

In the Yucatan Peninsula in 2017, the threat from the contamination of honey production by the industrial use of glyphosate and deforestation by Monsanto resulted in the draft of a joint agenda by more than thirty Mayan communities associated with the alliance of beekeepers Kaab Na’alon in the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán. This agenda proposes a collective life plan that respects local forms of sustainable living in their territory and considers younger generations in planning for a collective future. By late 2018, the alliance carried out a series of deliberations and concrete agreements with representatives of the federal government. The alliance claimed that its members were not looking for government assistance, but rather for recognition, equality, and justice: “We don’t seek subsidies but rather a true political will, which will make it possible to face the threats and [. . .] the effort to form a beekeeping alliance that seeks equality and justice and dignifies the activity and does not seek economic resources or partisan ends, but rather that proposes a fundamental change” (Colectivo Maya de los Chenes, 2018).

The alliance also sought to obtain greater representation, through the four key strategies summarized as follows: Territorial coordination of policies and effective participation of the beekeepers; a reduction of threats derived from the increase of conventional and industrial agriculture (particularly the use of pesticides and deforestation); training, technological innovation, and research according to their needs; and marketing of honey and bee products, with access to the national market. In 2018, Plan de Ayala Siglo XXI 2.0, ³ a country-wide alliance of 25,000 rural committees constituted by campesinos that self-identifies as an Indigenous and Afro-Mexican movement, declared their unequivocal support for a battery of federal programs, such as Sembrando Vida (Planting Life, SV) and Producción para el Bienestar (Production for Welfare), which purported to strongly oppose neoliberal policies and lead the country towards an agroecological transition, holding previous decades of neoliberal public policies accountable for having destroyed the countryside (Maldonado, 2019; Navarro, 2018). ⁴ These programs also emphatically address the issue of food sovereignty ⁵ and are grounded in a notion of universal rights. ⁶ The movement has also been vocal about the need for an alternative to the current development model in the face of neoliberal threats, and for strengthening the traditional governance system of the ejido, which provides mechanisms for collective action, self-determination, and territory defense (Movimiento Campesino Plan de Ayala Siglo XXI, 2022).

Nevertheless, these programs have been heavily criticized by several academics, as discussed later, and by other groups, such as, the Zapatistas and Congreso Nacional Indígena (National Indigenous Congress, CNI), constituted by several indigenous organizations that call for the constitutional recognition of their collective rights and autonomy, as per the San Andres Accords, signed in 1996 between Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army, EZLN) and representatives of the federal government. In this context, autonomy is a way of exercising self-determination. Its practice implies the real transfer to indigenous peoples of the functions and competencies that today are the responsibility of government entities (Hernández Navarro, 2021), particularly with regards to decision-making within a specific territory. Two and a half decades later, however, the Mexican state continues its failure to comply. It is noteworthy that the Accord also gave way to the founding of CNI.

The Tren Maya megaproject has also triggered environmental justice movements among local Mayan indigenous groups and other grassroots organizations. Officially, the megaproject seeks to foster social and economic wellbeing for residents through employment generation in services and the expansion of infrastructure, such as internet, water, and electricity services, mainly to fulfill the needs of the growing demand of the tourism industry. However, as one of several national strategic megaprojects currently underway in Mexico, it’s likely to have a profound socio-ecological impact in the region.

EDCs in the Tren Maya’s area of influence are represented in Figure 1, where most of the construction conflicts are linked to the project’s infrastructure development. Many recreational tourism conflicts may also be indirectly attributed to the project, as the promise of further connectivity has enticed land speculation and therefore, the rapid urbanization of previously small coastal towns in the Yucatan Peninsula.

On January 6, 2020, a lawsuit was filed by the Consejo Regional Indígena y Popular de Xpujil (Peoples regional indigenous council of Xpujil, CRIPX) ⁷ against the federal government for violating Article 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and other international standards related to indigenous communities’ right to freedom and self-determination in the context of the Tren Maya. The lawsuit was filed by indigenous Mayan Tzotziles, Tzeltales, and Choles associated with CRIPX in a circuit court in the state of Campeche (Cruz Rueda, 2020). ⁸ CRIPX is also politically aligned with the CNI, along with other associations in pursuit of autonomy like the Zapatistas.

For Scheidel et al. (2018), the EDCs highlighted above exemplify how social movements can contribute to the advancement of environmental justice, ontologically diverse political representation, and self-determination in the face of policies that favor the transnational capitalist class. In this context, this study characterizes the reliance on the local habitat of two Mayan communities impacted by the Tren Maya, and the perceived threats and resistance strategies through social movements from those groups opposed to the project.

Methods

Preliminary fieldwork was carried out between October 2022 and January 2023, with the purpose of elaborating a baseline according to the participants’ perceived impact of the Tren Maya on the local communities’ biocultural heritage. The approach was qualitative, and applied the use of ethnographic methods in two rural communities: Conhuas, in the municipality of Calakmul, Campeche and Felipe Carrillo Puerto, in Quintana Roo. The locations were selected due to their proximity to the natural protected areas of Sian Ka’an and Calakmul (Figure 1), whose conservation status represents the biocultural heritage of the local communities.

The main source of the ethnographic work was in-depth and structured interviews with local informants, participant observation, and review of documented data including press articles and online interviews with environmental activists of The Assembly of Defenders of the Mayan Territory Múuch Ximbal. Interview informants are quoted anonymously. Informants for in-depth interviews were selected for their relevant background and engagement with the communities in the region. Key informants included a representative of CRIPX, an official of the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, two forest engineers (independent consultants), and two small landholders and rural teachers with over three decades of experience associated with a rural productive enterprise Chun Kulché in Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Informants for structured interviews consisted mainly of small-scale local Mayan ejido and community members, who were selected through consultations with the authorities of X-Hazil, located in Felipe Carrillo Puerto municipality and Conhuas, in Calakmul municipality (Figure 1), as well as snowball sampling. Most informants have diverse occupations besides farming, such as tour guides, small store owners, or construction workers. Eight women were also included in the structured interviews, four in each of the two localities, including a traditional Mayan partera (midwife), housewives, a restaurant owner and tourist services provider, and small-scale peasants. A total of twenty-five interviews were recorded: six in-depth and nineteen structured, with the purpose of balancing the perspectives of participants from multiple positions within the community, including “expert” key informants and general community members (McKenna and Main, 2013). At the same time, participant observation allowed for on-site corroboration of traditional agroecological productive systems, such as milpa, home gardens, and beekeeping, among other traditional systems, and the possible effects on these from the megaproject at hand.

For Dacks et al. (2019), because perception indicators are subjective, they measure important dimensions of how well-being, for example, is understood by informants. Perception indicators also allow for assessing individual or community responses to policy, management, or governance related to changing environmental or ecological states, with an eye toward enhancing resilience and sustainability in precarious and rapidly changing contexts. Consequently, preliminary results of the analysis of perceptions of local interview participants through a decolonial approach to the EDC framework revealed the categories outlined in the results below, using Atlas Ti software.

Theoretical Framework: Edcs And Decoloniality

In contrast with “economic distribution conflicts” over salaries, prices, profits, or rents, EDCs cannot necessarily be resolved through economic measures like monetary compensation or “correct price” schemes, such as in PES schemes, since these conflicts frequently express themselves as onto-epistemological struggles over the values deemed relevant for decision making in particular projects, such as market and monetary values, livelihood values, indigenous territorial right, or ecological values in their own units of account (Scheidel et al., 2018). Decolonial authors, mainly those from Latin America associated with the academic group modernity/coloniality (Lander, 2000; Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2008; Dussel, 2000; Escobar, 2015), have argued that agrarian, territorial, ethnic, and cultural conflicts that imply capitalist exploitation and dispossession of indigenous communities can be traced to the experience of colonization. The intersubjective relationships that resulted from colonialism and coloniality were merged with the needs of capitalism and configured as a new universe of intersubjective relations of domination under a neocolonial and Eurocentric hegemony, which was imposed and admitted as the only valid rationality and an emblem of modernity.

As a product of capitalism, neoliberal rationality allows for the expansion of market-driven incentives through deregulation or the scaling back of governments or treaties and their regulation capacity. Consequently, previously untradable things become tradable commodities. Markets deregulation favors powerful transnational corporate actors and international organizations, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, among others, frequently at the expense of local communities and their natural resources. These unjust power dynamics towards different ontologies have been normalized through the neocolonial hegemonic capitalist economic development discourse (Wainwright, 2008).

For Escobar (2011), the concept of “development” emerges from a European modernity, as an economic and cultural project whose purpose is to subordinate other cultures, with their respective systems of knowledge and production, and transform them according to the following principles, which erode mental and natural diversity: the rational individual, not rooted to a place or community; the separation of culture from nature; the separation of the economy from nature and society; and “expert knowledge” above all other forms of knowledge, therefore, promoting a homogeneous global rationality. The expansion and superposition of the global legal pluralism that characterizes late capitalism and is integral to its domination through law at different scales (local, national, and international), and which now characterizes “development,” may ultimately disempower the subjects of development initiatives (Sieder, 2020). Further, Indigenous worldviews based on a relational ontology in which humans and nonhumans co-habit the world, profoundly contrast Western realist ontologies based on a human-nature dichotomy (García Quintanilla and Reyes-García, 2023). From a decolonial perspective, Indigenous philosophies of human-nature relationships are also sources of resistance against extractive projects that reflect a “politics of place” and place related identities of Indigenous communities (Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2019). The EDC of Kaab Na’alon, detailed above, exemplifies this point, since many beekeepers in the region hold sacred relationships with native bees and their habitat (López-Barreto, 2021), as well as with other flora and fauna. However, this relational ontology and values are being displaced by Western ones.

Alternatively, for Rozzi (2018) the conservation and protection of Indigenous groups’ biocultural heritage, including their traditional knowledge, practices, and beliefs, is an ethical imperative that requires a global paradigm shift toward fostering a bioculture that effectively integrates ontological, ecosocial, and ethical foundations into education, policies, and governance as a matter of socio-environmental justice. For this purpose, Rozzi (2018: 304) suggests:

Finally, the framework presented above allows for critical questioning and demystification of the hegemonic economic development discourse, in the context of the Tren Maya and perceived threats and resistance strategies, according to interview participants.

Preliminary Results

The categories detailed in this section are from a preliminary analysis of the data collected to develop a qualitative baseline of the possible effects of the Tren Maya on the local biocultural heritage, based on the participants’ perceptions.

Discussion

Public policies grounded in a neoliberal rationality like the Tren Maya have frequently been at odds with groups who defend and promote traditional ontologies, giving way to internal and external power struggles within communities. While these internal conflicts between different rationalities have been historically present within Mayan communities, the increasing number of imposed public policies points to a deteriorating situation regarding Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination, autonomy, and worldviews.

For example, since the modification of Article 27 of the Mexican constitution in 1992, many ejidos transitioned to a private property model. Prior to this reform, ejido land could not be legally privatized. The reform established the legal bases for the neoliberal development of the countryside, with aid programs to maximize field production output, consequently reducing the traditional diversified production systems to monocrops and peasant families to “specialized and dependent production units” (Durand-Smith et al., 2011). As a result, internal conflicts between ejidatarios have increased (Gómez Durán, 2020). Territorialization in this context can be read as a new type of state-making, which is producing new types of neoliberalized state forms (Igoe and Brockington, 2007), contributing to the conversion of large swaths of land by transnational corporations like Monsanto that develop profit-driven megaprojects to maximize production, contributing to the region’s ecological degradation and the erosion of traditional modes of production.

The neoliberal model for biodiversity conservation promoted by international agreements including the Kyoto Protocol, the Reduction of Emissions, Deforestation, and Forest Degradation (REDD), and PES have been implemented through policies at all levels of government (Du Bray et al., 2019). The Ecosystems Services (ES) framework, which is recognized by scientific initiatives and international regulations like The Economy of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), among others, encourages the measurement and valuation of ecosystem benefits, mainly in monetary terms and for inclusion in the market (Hirons et al., 2016; Du Bray et al., 2019). Moreover, conservation policies are frequently implemented in an imposed and exclusive manner, restricting the use of resources to rural communities for commercial and subsistence purposes (Gavin et al., 2015; Guèze et al., 2015). Interviews also evidence that the ES framework served to facilitate the economic valuation of natural resources for negotiations with FONATUR in the context the Tren Maya, given the ejidatarios familiarity with the framework and due to environmental projects in the proximity of the protected areas.

The Nagoya protocol, which came into force in 2014, is an initiative to patent and share the benefits generated by the privatization of genetic resources and its associated knowledge, or bioprospecting (CDI, 2015; Fredriksson, 2017). Authors have suggested that bioprospecting is another way of alienating, expropriating, and commodifying biodiversity and the common knowledge associated with it—elements that provide local communities part of their subsistence needs—through privatization and patenting (Shiva, 2006; Otros Mundos A.C., 2019). UN-Habitat publications on the Tren Maya also reveal a hegemonic neocolonial neoliberal rationality. For example, UN-Habitat argues that without the train, the local economic impact (the total value of the production and transformation of goods carried out in the region) would grow 0.84% (1.5 billion Mexican pesos). With the train, however, economic growth is projected to almost double at 1.59% (2.1 billion Mexican pesos), substantially contributing to the nation’s GDP (UN-Habitat, 2020). UN Habitat omits, however, that GDP is rather an excellent indicator of biodiversity loss, pollution, ecological footprint, and other aspects of environmental impacts on traditional livelihoods, given that the increase in the quantity of money reflected in the GDP is a negative indicator of sustainability (Czech, 2019), which, from a decolonial perspective, is at odds with a relational ontology.

Despite local supporters who claim that the project will bring development and opportunities, as per the interviews, the Tren Maya’s potentially adverse impacts have also met considerable backlash from civil society, including Mayan resistance groups, academics, and environmental activists. This is evidenced in the claims from grassroots groups like CRIPX and Muúch Ximbal, who have voiced criticism of the project, which they claim will enrich the Mexican military and large transnational corporations. In addition, Muúch Ximbal denounced that “many communities in the train’s path will be absorbed [culturally and consciously] by an unsolicited development” (Pebá Ocampo, 2022). Fieldwork also revealed a relational value system associated with the territory, through the use and beliefs associated with elements including the mounds in the forest as ancient tombs of their ancestors, knowledge and practices related with the use of natural resources like local wild flora species, and the water quality from natural sources. These perceptions and meanings have allowed for an ecologically balanced life within these localities. From a decolonial lens, however, the Tren Maya’s neoliberal nature poses a significant threat to the relational values attributed to the territory, promising to replace them with neoliberal ones. CRIPX’s assessment of the threat of structural violence linked to neoliberal development projects is also corroborated by Gasparello (2021: 200):

[. . .] investment projects, such as the Maya Train, imposed in unequal social contexts and in which fundamental human rights are not guaranteed, increase conflict and deepen the gaps of marginalization and inequality. [. . .] the promotion and expansion of that tourist model will go hand in hand with the spread of illegal activities –and their correlate of criminal violence- to new territories.

CRIPX also claimed that the negotiation dynamics between rural communities and the federal government hasn’t changed from previous neoliberal administrations, since the project promoters continue to divulge biased and incomplete information regarding the social and environmental impacts by only presenting positive economic impacts with short-sighted objectives, undermining the self-determination efforts of indigenous communities. The counterhegemonic and decolonial discourses that these groups deploy deconstruct and demystify that neocolonial/neoliberal logic.

Interviews also reveal that the participants largely embrace policies like SV that provide a more culturally appropriate agroecological model, against the neoliberal rationality of growth and maximization (Hernández Chontal et al., 2021; CEDRSSA, 2020; Czech, 2019). This appropriation, as well as the relational values regarding the forest, is also evidenced among beneficiaries who hold ceremonies traditionally performed for the milpa in the context of the program. While the transition towards agroecology is worthy of celebration, through a decolonial lens, authors have highlighted critical shortcomings with the program, including its incompatibilities with local customs, including its top-down design, which is reminiscent of prior neoliberal assistance programs, imposing external values and practices on local communities.

Direct transfers from the federal government to project participants also promote individualization and the parcellation of communal territories by bypassing traditional local assemblies and undermining local collective systems of governance, such as the ejido, which provide certain degree of autonomy to these communities. Deforestation associated with SV has also been a source of criticism (De Ita, 2021; IIS-UNAM, 2022).

Although social movements have positively influenced neoliberal policy initiatives like PES schemes (McAfee and Shapiro, 2010), from a decolonial perspective, the relentless pressure of neoliberal programs have profound ontological impacts on local perceptions, including in the loss of the Mayan language, affecting how residents conceive their relationship with nature. This leads, for example, to traditional beekeepers replacing native bees, despite their revered traditional and ceremonial significance, with higher yielding European bees (López-Barreto, 2021). Furthermore, local campesinos are increasingly converting to Christian Protestant denominations, many which openly reject traditional beliefs and practices, further replacing relational ontologies with a Western one. In this context, a Protestant work ethic aimed at maximizing production, championed by Mennonite settlers in the region, has resulted in the unsustainable exploitation of the territory, where large swaths of forest have been converted to privately-owned monocrop agriculture fields (Magaña et al., 2022), with adverse environmental implications. This is also corroborated in Max Weber’s (1930) classical thesis, which states that the Protestant work ethic was an important force behind the unplanned and uncoordinated emergence of modern capitalism.

On the other hand, recent Mexican environmental initiatives reflect a postcolonial discourse, which also strengthens institutional support for social rights, particularly in the face of megaprojects. For example, legislation passed in Congress on December 2020 promotes the defense of the biocultural heritage of indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities, and emphasizes respect for indigenous peoples’ rights (Cámara de Diputados, 2020) within the framework of the nation’s Ley General del Equilibrio Ecológico y Protección al Ambiente (General Law for Ecological Equilibrium and Environmental Protection, LGEEPA). Likewise, the Escazu agreement (UNICEF, 2023), a tool used for the protection of the environment and human rights that seeks to guarantee access to information, public participation, and access to justice regarding environmental matters in Latin America, was adopted by the Mexican government in 2018.

From a decolonial perspective, support for these legislative initiatives and programs from some Indigenous and campesino movements may be grounded in the counterhegemonic strategy of use-and-refuse: finding ways to occupy the spaces opened by multicultural rights and to advance struggles to transform the system from within.

The components of struggle from within the system to defend space, contest oppressions, and advance transformative objectives, together with the active imagining of an alternative political horizon, are present in all counterhegemonic projects, always in at least mild tension with one other. Nonetheless, counterhegemonic uses of the law by Indigenous peoples are on the decline and subject to deepening skepticism (Hale, 2020). Further, while Indigenous peoples are now defined as collective subjects of rights within international law and numerous state constitutions, affording them new possibilities for political claims for autonomy, sovereignty, difference, and recognition, Sieder (2020) suggests that a dilemma of the judicialization of politics is that the legal framework frequently favors the hegemonic neoliberal development models and the transnational capitalist class. For example, some of the actors profiting from the Tren Maya Train are among the largest transnational corporate capitalists, including BlackRock, JP Morgan, Carlos Slim, in coordination with the Secretaría de Defensa (Ministry of Defense, Sedena) (OHCHR, 2022), with few liabilities. In this context, if left unmitigated, the implications of the Tren Maya are predictable: the erosion of relational values and worldview, the commodification and dispossession of land and life, marginalization, structural racism and violence, as well as increased economic dependence on external factors and further government interventions in favor of transnational corporate interests at the expense of economic, political, and ontological autonomy.

In contrast, other responses to external policies grounded in a neoliberal rationality and valuation criteria can be found in ejidos and Indigenous communities around the country who opt to develop autonomous, comprehensive, and diversified strategies and alternative economies whose rationality is not defined by maximizing profit, but rather by objectives of communal wellbeing or “buen vivir” (Moguel, 2022), thus engaging in decolonization. For Escobar (2015), many indigenous, afro-descendant, and peasant communities who engage in these ontological struggles interrupt the globalizing and homogenizing project of constructing one-world (capitalist, liberal, secular). These decolonial struggles are important contributions to ecological and cultural transitions towards a pluriverse, or a world where many worlds or worldviews, fit. ⁹

Conclusions

Through a decolonial lens, the actors involved in the social movements presented above emerged largely in resistance to a rationality grounded in neocolonialism and neoliberalism that contributes to systemically dispossessing local communities of their biocultural heritage, which is grounded in a relational ontology. This is enacted in favor of the transnational capitalist class, which includes corporate investors and international institutions, through government policies. In the context of the Tren Maya, while the current Mexican government’s discourse proclaims the intention of a postcolonial/decolonial national project, it prioritizes development and modernization, while continuing to merge state and corporate powers at the expense of a pluri-cultural reality and the environment. The material presented in this study suggests that while historically EDCs have played a central role in adapting policies to address social and environmental viability and make social movement demands visible, these measures may be insufficient to achieve a much-needed radical paradigm shift towards a pluriverse where different ontologies and forms of valuation are respected and supported institutionally, in the face of a hegemonic neoliberal rationality.

As concerned academics, therefore, it is important to actively support and contribute to Indigenous groups’ efforts to defend their territories and ontologies Specifically, it is necessary to give a voice to decolonial counterhegemonic initiatives through community engaged research, promoting spaces for dialogue, critical analysis, and demystification of neoliberal policies, and contributing to the elaboration of bottom-up decolonial alternatives to development. This can be achieved through appropriate methodologies to advance public policies that reflect the pluri-cultural reality and, at the same time, imagining alternative political horizons grounded in the pursuit of true autonomy and self-determination.