We are Mayans who inhabit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, people who love our land, our culture and our identity as indigenous people; we carry within us the memory of a people with great wisdom. Our ancestors taught us respect for Mother Earth, gratitude for life and reciprocity with nature. We are the sons and daughters of sacred corn.
We view with concern the unstoppable advance of touristification in our territory. Since the creation of the Cancún project in 1970, the life of the Mayan people has been severely transformed. We have gone from being an autonomous and self-sufficient people to being a people dependent on the tourism industry. The Mayan milpas, our ancestral form of agriculture, are disappearing. Migration from rural communities to tourist centres is accelerating due to educational and economic policies that incentivise industry and disregard traditional forms of economy. The Mayan language and all our sacred cultural elements are at risk from the discrimination and structural racism imposed on us by the global economic system.
Mass tourism has also ushered in the presence of criminal groups involved in drug trafficking, human trafficking, and all kinds of mafias that, allied with political power, have created a huge criminal economy that adds to the corporate economies dispossessing the Mayan peoples of their land.
Executions, femicides, extortion, disappearances and all kinds of human rights violations have been normalised in this natural paradise, which is now a haven for crime and impunity.
State policies promote mass tourism through mega-infrastructure projects such as the Tulum International Airport, which has established itself as the second busiest airport in the state of Quintana Roo, behind only Cancun Airport. Last December, Quintana Roo announced a new record of 766 flights in a single day, representing the success of aviation and airport expansion but with a serious environmental impact that contributes to the global climate crisis, as pointed out by the Stay Grounded network.
Another example is the wrongly named Mayan Train, which, in addition to carrying passengers, will be a freight transport that will connect with the interoceanic corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and thus with the global economy, serving the interests of big capital and never the people. In our territories, it leaves behind irreparable damage to nature, the fragmentation of the social fabric, the dispossession and destruction of sacred sites, and a scenario ripe for the arrival of more energy, tourism, agro-industrial, and real estate corporations, with the protection of the state and its laws, and under the watchful eye of the army and the militarisation policies undertaken in recent years, which are increasing day by day.
In this context, and with the official narrative that promotes tourism as the ideal of sustainable development and social justice for the people, Mexico participates in international tourism fairs, such as FITUR in Madrid and the Berlin Tourism Fair. These are spaces where corporations from the tourism industry, travel agencies, airlines, hotels, and all companies in the sector converge. These are key global fairs for capitalism and its goals of exploitation and dispossession.
From the Mayan territory and the indigenous territories of Mexico, we want to say that the capitalist tourism industry dispossesses, commodifies, gentrifies, destroys, and discriminates against our peoples. That tourism fairs are a space for exploitation, precariousness, market negotiation, and criminal economies. Touristification is death to our cultures.
We demand respect for our territories and popular autonomies, an end to the destruction of Mother Earth and the dispossession of our peoples, an end to megaprojects that deeply damage our identity and indigenous cultures.
We want freedom to decide on our economies and our dignified life. Our struggle is for life,
