Jerónima López Hernández (R), 34, a bee-keeper, and her husband, Germán Bartolo Barrios (L), 52, attend to their hives deep in the forest outside the village of Nueva Vida in the UNESCO-protected Calakmul Biosphere Reserve (in Spanish Reserva de la Biósfera de Calakmul) in the Yucatán Peninsula, Calakmul Municipality, state of Campeche, Mexico on March 2, 2021. López Hernández says she is in the process of obtaining organic certification for her honey and fears the Maya Train project “will cause a lot of pollution, a lot”. The Maya Train project is one of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s flagship development projects. Its 1,554-km route will run through five states, linking Maya temples like Palenque, Chichen Itzá and Calakmul, the colonial city of Mérida, beach resorts of Cancún, Playa del Carmen and Tulum and protected Sian Ka’an and Calakmul nature reserves. The government says it will create more than 1m jobs in 10 years but local residents whose homes and shops lie on the path of the train, and activists in rural communities say it will destroy pristine tropical rainforest that is home to the endangered jaguars. Existing tracks on 40 per cent of the route have to be removed and upgraded; the remainder is new construction that has been awarded to private construction companies and the Mexican army. Photograph by Bénédicte Desrus