Chasing tourist dollars, a ‘new and improved’ Yucatan is boxing out its own people 

The edge of a tropical jungle is probably the last place — apart from a theme park ride — to find a sleek high-speed rail line. And yet El Tren Maya is just the latest example of how government-sponsored tourism has fundamentally transformed Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. 

On one side of the tracks is dense, green foliage; on the other, not far from view, aqua blue Caribbean breakers gently roll in. As the train accelerates from the station in Cancun on a day trip to the colonial city of Valladolid, the scrub jungle passes in a blur. The ride is quiet and smooth, and on this weekday the train is largely empty. There is no Wi-Fi. Some trains have dining and sleeping cars and floor-to-ceiling windows. Station and train signage is in Spanish, English, and the Maya language.. 

Over the last 40 years, I have chronicled Cancun’s development into a glitzy resort on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. Millions of tourists travel there to enjoy cool, white, sandy beaches, snorkel at the many reefs and crawl the nightclubs, while staying at all-inclusive resorts. More serious visitors go inland to tour spectacular Maya ruins. To accommodate them, ruins have been cleaned and reconstructed. Nearby, rustic natural wonders like Xcaret have been Disneyfied into clean, almost antiseptic attractions. 

Nowhere is this boom more evident than in the peninsula’s transportation infrastructure. In 1994, an eight-lane tollway — the Supercarretera — was built in part to shovel Cancun’s tourists to the Chichen Itza Mayan ruins in less than two-and-a-half hours, shaving an hour off the pokey but endearing old highway meandering through interior Maya villages. At opening, the........

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