The First District Court of Yucatan granted on Monday the provisional suspension of the works of Section 5 South of the Mayan Train, so the machines that have been cutting trees to make way for the work in the area that goes from Playa del Carmen to Tulum must stop immediately until the amparo is resolved in the background.
Specifically, the court based in Mérida ordered that any act that has to do with the continuation of the construction of Section 5 South be “suspended or paralyzed”, “so that the execution of works related to its construction, infrastructure, removal or destruction of the biodiversity of the land or any other activity that implies its material execution is not allowed”.
According to the judge’s decision, to which Animal Político had access, this provisional measure to stop the works in Section 5 South is based on the fact that, as stated in the lawsuit filed by a group of cave and cenote divers, the works of Section 5 South can cause “imminent and irreparable damage to the area (…) for not having prior environmental impact authorizations”.
Read: “Where were they when the real devastation began?”: Semarnat questions critics of the Mayan Train
On this, it should be remembered that the request for amparo was filed by speleologists and divers residing in Playa del Carmen, and legally accompanied by the civil organization Defending the Right to a Healthy Environment A.C. (DMAS).
Last March, speleologists denounced that the builders of Section 5 of the Mayan Train plan to build the train passing over cenotes, underground rivers and millenary cave systems, putting at risk the ecological balance of the entire area.
“They told us to get used to diving between piles,” denounced diver Luis Leal in a report published by this media on March 3.
A day before that publication, the civil environmental organization of Quintana Roo, Moce Yax Cuxtal, denounced that the works of clearing and deforestation of trees in the virgin jungle of Playa del Carmen had already started to make way for the new line of Section 5 of the Mayan Train, despite the fact that there was no Environmental Impact Statement or the necessary permits to start the works.
Therefore, shortly after, on March 6, speleobuzos, biologists, activists and environmentalists, announced that they would file amparos to stop the works of Section 5 of the Mayan Train.
So far, on Monday a court in Yucatan already granted the first amparo provisionally, although only for Section 5 South, which goes from Playa del Carmen to Tulum; situation regretted by the organization DMAS.
“We are going for the whole section 5, but they only gave suspension of section 5 South. The reality is that the entire project must be canceled,” the organization said on its Facebook profile.
For its part, the citizen collective Voces Unidas de Puertos Morelos also stressed the need for the suspension to be for the entire Section 5, that is, for the route that goes from Cancun to Tulum, and not only for a part of it.
“We hope that the judge will give a ruling in favor of citizenship. Any affectation in any area without studies, without permits, without the MIA, is an attack on our right to a healthy environment, since the aquifer is a system that connects everything from north to south. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that what happens in the south will sooner or later affect the north, and vice versa,” the organization said in a letter it sent to Animal Político.
On March 31, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that the Mayan Train already has “all the environmental impact permits.” However, as explained in El Sabueso, his statement is false, because so far neither the Fund for the Promotion of Tourism (Fonatur), nor the Navy, nor the Semarnat, have presented the Environmental Impact Statement of Section 5.
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