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Paper short abstract

This paper follows a series of land grabs that unfolded around the construction of the Mayan Train in Mexico. Examining instances of corruption as business-as-usual, I ask how environmentalists, Mayan landholders, and elite property owners become complicit in the destruction of pristine rainforest.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a series of land grabs that have unfolded around the construction of the touristic Mayan Train in Mexico's southeast. Examining instances in which the corruption of state officials is taken as "business-as-usual," I ask how environmentalists, Mayan landholders, and elite property owners become willing and unwilling accomplices in the destruction of pristine rainforest. Taking the Mayan Train as an instance of left-wing monumentalized infrastructural politics, I review the ethical conundrum created when a left-wing populist government promises to deliver "wellbeing" through precarious arrangements for large-scale urbanization. While I follow environmentalists’ continuous attempts to document the impacts of the Mayan Train, I center on the ideal world that they envision beyond corrupt politics—a term that they associate to their status as global-south citizens and to the spectrum of Latin American failed states. Imagining that there is a “better” world beyond their reach, these environmental activists participate in an ethical projection that may insufficiently account for the way in which they are part of the processes of state corruption and environmental degradation. Following Mayan landholders' similar participation in the undoing of a natural frontier, I focus on particularly key moments of cynicism and complicity in which people project images of their non-involvement precisely at the times in which they are most involved in the processes that they condemn. With the purchase and sale of pristine rainforest being orchestrated by corrupt government officials, I focus away from "them" and center on the Indigenous and Mestizo landholders who (un)willingly assist them.