Photo: Tren Maya

By KELIN DILLON

A car of Mexico’s controversial Tren Maya was reportedly derailed on Monday, March 25, less than a hundred days after Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) pet project was partially inaugurated.

Once quoted at 140 billion pesos, the Tren Maya’s contentious construction has been plagued by building delays, legal injunctions, environmental issues and pushback from local indigenous communities, ballooning its still-unfinished budget upwards of a reported 500 billion pesos. 

According to a statement released by the Tren Maya authorities, “the incident occurred at 9:30 a.m. when it entered the Tixkokob station, the first 3 cars of train D006 passed a track change at a speed of approximately 10 km/h, with the fourth car leaving the tracks.”

 “Given this situation, we evacuated our passengers to provide them with transfer care so they could continue their trip to Cancún. This incident did not affect the scheduled operation of the rest of the trains,” added the operator, noting that no one was injured during the derailment.

Following the incident, AMLO took to his daily morning press conference on Tuesday, March 26 to accuse the derailment of being caused by “intentional” actions.

“An investigation is being carried out, because it is strange,” said the federal executive at the time. “There was a human error at the station, there was no change of track, no change was made to a track device, and we are looking to see if it was intentional or if it was an error made by those responsible for managing the tracks.”

Environmental activists refuted AMLO’s claims of intentional sabotage, instead pointing to photographic evidence of the Tren Maya’s cracked sleepers and low-quality construction materials as responsible for the derailment.

“A military project in which they don’t know what happened? The mere suggestion should offend the train commanders. So many millions of pesos invested so that a simple change of track is not properly monitored” said speleologist and #SélvameDelTren movement member Guillermo D’Christy.

Monday’s derailment marks the second major controversy faced by the train this month after two Honduran men fell asleep on the Tren Maya tracks and were struck by a passing train on March 11, leaving one of the men dead.