Maya Train Brings Military, Not Tourists, to Quintana Roo

Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo — The athletes of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, in Quintana Roo, no longer have a place to train: for months, the Secretariat of the Navy (Semar) has been installed on the field of the Chan Santa Cruz sports unit, while nearby, on a plot of land called Expo Maya, the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) is building military housing units and recently remodeled the city's historical museum in the central park.

The military presence in the municipality of Felipe Carrillo Puerto is not limited to the town center: in the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve, the Sedena is building the Puerta al Mar mega-tourism project, and extraction sites for stone material, which the agency exploits for its works, are multiplying.

This year alone, the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) authorized the Army to open eleven new large "sascaberas"—open-pit excavations to extract sascab, a material from the limestone subsoil—in the municipality.

Two Maya Train stations operate in Felipe Carrillo Puerto. One is located within the Tulum International Airport, which is administered by the Army. Its premises contain a hotel managed by the same Sedena and the No. 20 military air base. Furthermore, at every exit from the town there are National Guard barracks, and a military camp was installed for the construction of the railway, which was never taken down.

Consequences of the Maya Train in Felipe Carrillo Puerto

The Felipe Carrillo Puerto Maya Train station appears empty, and there are no tourists on the town's streets. So far, the railway has not brought visitors or development to this Mayan town in central Quintana Roo, but rather soldiers.

In March 2022, a few months after the Tourism Security Battalion began patrolling the beaches of the Mexican Caribbean, the Sedena arrived in Felipe Carrillo Puerto to build the Tulum airport and the Maya Train, and never left.

In the following years, the Sedena's projects multiplied, and once they became operational, the military stayed: they began patrolling the main avenues, flying over the town in helicopters, and it became commonplace to find them armed in stores, gas stations, or the central park. Cameras filled the street corners and high-ranking officers became neighbors.

Surveillance of the population became constant, with implications for their daily life and human rights. "There are cases of young women being harassed and young men beaten by elements of the National Guard. Children and youth no longer grow up in the same way," says Wilma Esquivel Pat, a resident of Felipe Carrillo Puerto who is part of the National Indigenous Congress.

The Military Irruption Expands

The civil organization Community Cohesion and Social Innovation A.C. (CCIS) warns that in Felipe Carrillo Puerto—as in the municipalities of Calakmul and Othon P. Blanco—a process it calls "military irruption" is developing, which could also occur in other territories where the Sedena is building its civil works.

In its investigation ¿A qué vinieron? (Why Did They Come?), Militares en contexto de megaproyectos y sus implicaciones para la vida cotidiana y los Derechos Humanos (Military in the Context of Megaprojects and Their Implications for Daily Life and Human Rights), CCIS defines "military irruption" as something that goes beyond militarization (which involves the delegation of public security functions to the armed forces) and consists of the surveillance of people and nature, not out of national security interest, but as part of a commercial strategy of corporatization and military integration.

"With military corporatization we understand the holding strategy that first consisted of separately forming state-majority-owned companies attached to the Sedena, which were later merged into GAFSACOMM, now called Grupo Mundo Maya," explains Suhayla Bazbaz Kuri, director of CCIS. "When we talk about military integration we refer to the concentration and monopolization of the links in a supply chain: now you can buy your ticket with Grupo Mundo Maya, fly with them, land at their airport, sleep in their hotel, and go to their tourist park."

It is within the framework of this commercial strategy, Bazbaz Kuri points out, that the military irruption occurs.

Felipe Carrillo Puerto Has a Strategic Position

A good portion of the inhabitants of Felipe Carrillo Puerto have normalized the military irruption in their territory, but there are also critical voices. Two hundred and fifty families of ejidatarios (communal landowners), for example, reject the presence of the military, especially after the conflict that arose with the Sedena following the occupation of the Expo Maya in November 2024, where the agency is building apartments for military personnel.

The consulted ejidatarios are not clear on the Army's interest in this municipality, which had already been militarized during the Caste War, when it was the cradle of Mayan resistance.

According to Ángel Sulub Santos, from the U kúuchil k Ch’i’ibalo’on Community Center, Felipe Carrillo Puerto holds a strategic position for the military and economic control of the Yucatán Peninsula. "We always say that we are close to everything here, to Cancún, Chetumal, Mérida, to Valladolid, and now close to Puerta del Mar and the Tulum airport, which is a military base," says Sulub Santos.

Mass Tourism and Insecurity

The government often justifies the military presence by citing the fight against insecurity, which in Felipe Carrillo Puerto has grown exponentially, although it is low compared to the national average. For example, reports of disappearances, according to the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System, increased from 1 in 2015 to 7 in 2024.

"The justifications given by the federal Executive Power for the deployment of the armed forces in Mexico do not correspond with the reality in the irrupted territories," states CCIS in the cited research.

On the other hand, the U kúuchil k Ch’i’ibalo’on Community Center affirms that insecurity is driven precisely by the mass tourism that the Maya Train aims to promote. As an example, it points to the evolution of crime rates in Caribbean municipalities that significantly increased their flow of visitors in the last decade, even before the construction project.

In Solidaridad, whose main town is Playa del Carmen, intentional homicides increased from 20 in 2015 to 76 in 2024; in the same period, in Tulum they increased from 9 to 62.

In her article ¿Por qué los destinos turísticos son atractivos para la delincuencia transnacional? El caso de la Riviera Maya (Why are Tourist Destinations Attractive to Transnational Crime? The Case of the Riviera Maya), Elisa Norio, from George Mason University, states that the high economic flows existing in Quintana Roo facilitate money laundering. Norio writes that, furthermore, fugitives from justice may consider the Mexican Caribbean an attractive place because there is a high turnover of tourists, workers, and businesspeople that guarantees a high level of anonymity.

According to Mexican authorities, in 2019 there were criminal cells in Quintana Roo that had links to 10 transnational criminal organizations.

Cultural Resistance

Marcelo Jiménez, an artist and former director of the Felipe Carrillo Puerto historical museum, prefers not to visit the space after the remodeling done by the Army, because someone told him he would cry if he saw how it turned out.

Jiménez found out that the Sedena was going to carry out the works around September 20, 2023, when in a meeting the military informed him of the rehabilitation project, planned for the Puerta al Mar mega-tourism project. They told him he had just over a month to remove the exhibited pieces, which partly belonged to him.

With them, the artist decided to install a gallery in his home's patio, inspired by the initiative of an acquaintance who opened an autonomous museum in her community. "These spaces represent a form of cultural resistance for us as Maya, in the same way that preparing our traditional food, organizing our festivals and ceremonies, or speaking our language does," says Marcelo Jiménez.

"As Maya we don't have a concept of a museum, but we do have a concept of how we should transmit our historical memory. It is based on this criterion that in our time we built the museum in the central park of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, and we received recognition precisely for that," says the artist.

After the Sedena's remodeling, the space became foreign: a museum with which the community no longer feels represented.