Maya Train wildlife tender fails again over outsourcing rules

Mexico — As 2025 concludes, the Maya Train, which operates under the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), remains without a contracted company to safeguard wild fauna around its seven operational segments, particularly endangered species such as the jaguar, spider monkey, and howler monkey.

This marks the third failed tender by the Maya Train administration for animal protection along the more than 1,500 kilometers of track traversing five southeastern Mexican states. As reported by El Sol de México, the two previous tenders failed because no company met the technical requirements or their economic proposals exceeded the train’s available resources.

In July of this year, the train administration published the first call for specialized animal management companies to provide their services.

Three tenders later, the procurement management still cannot find a qualified company for the service, this time because no company submitted its Registry of Specialized Service Providers or Specialized Works (REPSE). This requirement was established in the anti-outsourcing reform to prevent companies from subcontracting personnel who work on-site, in this case, in the vicinity of the train.

The service required by the Maya Train places special emphasis on monitoring and protecting jaguars in the seven train segments, requiring telemetry tracking of at least two jaguar specimens using GPS collars. This equipment, along with 50 percent of the cameras used, will become the property of the train at the end of the service. For this purpose, the installation of at least 30 monitoring stations per segment equipped with high-resolution cameras to record the activity of these felines was requested.

The Sedena company also required a monitoring program for birds, bats, and fauna protected under NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2010, such as the tapir, white-lipped peccary, tayra, grison, kinkajou, anteater, porcupine, among others.

Deterrence and sampling methods include acoustic surveys, the use of mist nets for bats, and transects or sighting walks for censusing troops of monkeys and birds. These activities must be carried out bimonthly with field operations ranging from 20 to 40 effective days per period, which will be recorded in weekly logs and georeferenced photographs.

Bernabeu México and Iktan Strategies were the companies that accumulated the highest number of points needed in the Maya Train’s technical evaluation to provide the service; however, neither of the two submitted their company’s REPSE. Consequently, the Maya Train administration did not even consider the economic evaluation of their proposal, according to the ruling that declared the third tender for this service deserted, published on December 29 of this year.