Visiting the states of Yucatan and Campeche last week to review progress on the construction of the cross-isthmus “Mayan Train,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was asked by a reporter about the contradiction between a recent poll which found 87% of the people of the region support the rail project and opponents’ claim that the “indigenous people” are against it. His answer drove the head of Soros’s Human Rights Watch-Americas, Jose Miguel Vivanco, into conniptions.
To answer, AMLO suggested people look to “those who devised the neoliberal policy for their benefit” for the answer to who from outside the region is leading the opposition.
“One of the things which they [the neoliberals] promoted in the world, in order to loot at ease, was the creation or promotion of the so-called new rights. So, feminism, ecologism, the defense of human rights, the protection of animals was much promoted, including by them. All these causes are very noble, but the intent was to create or boost all these new causes so that we don’t remedy—so that we don’t turn around and see that they were looting the world, so the subject of economic and social inequality would be kept out of the center of debate….
“The international agencies which supported the neoliberal model, which is a model of pillage where corporations grab national property, the property of the people—these same corporations financed, and continue to finance, environmental groups, defenders of `liberty.’”
He reiterated that the U.S. government has yet to respond to Mexico’s official protest over U.S. Embassy funding of specific environmentalist groups caught opposing the Tren Maya, in violation of Mexican sovereignty.
There are some who argue such matters who do not have “perverse” intentions, he also noted, but the way to end threats to the environment, to human rights, etc., is “to transform this … reality of oppression, injustices, privileges.” Most of those “who sign below” on manifestos against the rail project know absolutely nothing about how this region was so abandoned, that people did not even have access to clean water, he pointed out.
The week before, AMLO had blasted the IMF and its “freedom of the market” policies—neoliberalism—as the old story of the fox in the chicken coop, in response to the IMF’s “recommendation” to Mexico during its annual meetings, that it stop construction of its Dos Bocas refinery, because importing gasoline is more “profitable"!
The first phase of construction of the Mayan Train is proceeding, albeit behind schedule, despite unending lawsuits filed by environmentalist and “indigenous rights” groups against it. The project is designed primarily to be an intercity rail line to promote tourism in the five Mexican states where the ancient Mayan civilization developed, but to also carry some freight and facilitate regional travel by residents of the area.
