AMLO reveals Tesla’s interest in the Mayan Train

Cancún, QRoo.- President Andrés Manuel López Obrador revealed on the morning of this Wednesday, March 1, that the company Tesla could take charge of building a tunnel connecting the Cancun International Airport with the Mayan Train.

Referring to the call he had last Monday with the magnate Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, the president stated:

“We are talking about the Mayan Train, they have a very innovative tunnel construction system, an invention where they did something similar in Las Vegas. We need a tunnel to join the Cancun airport with the Cancun Mayan Train station and we want to pass under the current airport to give it connectivity.

“They have a fast tunnel construction system, like we need, where electric vehicles are used. Here not even that, it would be a band because below, we would be talking about a kilometer and a half”.

López Obrador added that he could even visit with Elon Musk the works of the Mayan Train because you are interested in investing in Mexico.

“The Mayan Train is the most important public work being built in the world, there is nowhere a train of a thousand miles, thousand 554 kilometers. So, that was what we talked about and the conversation was very good, on very good terms and they are interested in continuing to invest,” the president stated.

Despite what the president said, the environmental impact authorizations granted to the Mayan Train, both for section 4, which goes from Mérida to Cancún, and for section 5, from Cancún to Playa del Carmen, do not mention anything about any tunnel or any another underground work to communicate the Mayan Train with the Cancun airport.

The environmental organizations that oppose the Mayan Train have already denounced that in section 5, the piles that will support the Mayan Train track to avoid collapses in that karstic area, are not provided for in the environmental impact authorizations granted by the Ministry of Environment. Environment and Natural Resources, which is a flagrant violation of the Law The General Law of Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection (LGEEPA), which establishes that nothing can be built that is not provided for in the project entered for evaluation before said instance.

In the same case, there is the cable-stayed bridge that will rise more than eight meters to clear the Garra del Jaguar cave, which was found right at the passage of the track corresponding to section 5 south of the railway project.

Many of the injunctions that have been rejected by the judges have pointed out this irregularity, arguing that proceeding in this way violates the preventive principle of the LGEEPA, according to which the absence of information regarding a certain work prevents the evaluation of the risk that it entails for the environment, before which its execution cannot be authorized.