Bacalar, Q.R. — A group of Ejidos stopped the felling of trees on a section of their land Friday. The trees were being knocked down by heavy machinery for an upcoming section of the Maya Train.
The assembly of the Aarón Merino Fernández ejidos said they stopped the work since they and the government are still in negations. Edmundo Gómez Trejo, representative of the Aaron Merino Fernández ejido, said the government has already removed trees on around three hectares of land, but that land is still in negotiations.
For that reason, a group of ejidos stopped the logging and removed the workers from the property, which is located just north of the town of Bacalar.
Trejo says that since 2006, there has been an agrarian legal process derived from a decree, created in 2004, expropriating the land where the National Institute of Agricultural and Livestock Forestry Research (Inifap) is located.
Until this legal process is resolved, we agreed on talks to expedite section 6 of the Maya Train, but authorities did not respect the agreement and began to fell trees, he explained.
He clarified that the ejidos finished negotiations to move forward with the train project “but the area corresponding to the area where the Inifap is located is still in dispute.”
He said during recent talks, agreements were reach regarding approximately 10 kilometers of train track and for the area where the Bacalar train station will be built, but approximately 3.5 kilometers of land is still pending negotiations.
