Three environmental groups asked federal authorities on June 23 to halt a 16-kilometer army road across the Sac Actun cave system in Tulum, warning it threatens the region's water.
The Centro Mexicano de Derecho Ambiental (Cemda), Greenpeace México and Sélvame MX filed legal complaints over the project and called for an immediate suspension of clearing and construction. Their argument reaches beyond one road. The aquifer, they say, runs beneath the route and supplies drinking water to Tulum, surrounding communities, and the tourism corridor that drives the local economy.
A road the army links to the Tren Maya land deals
According to the organizations, the road is being built by the Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (Sedena) as a commitment made to ejidatarios during negotiations over land for Section 5 of the Maya Train. The groups describe it as a 16-kilometer stretch over the so-called Jacinto Pat road, in an area of standing jungle.
The route is not new to local activists. Sélvame del Tren reported earlier this year that a roughly 26-kilometer bypass, once planned to keep heavy Cancún to Chetumal traffic out of central Tulum, had been suspended for lacking environmental permits, and that the army later resumed work on a redrawn path running from Ejido Jacinto Pat toward the Tulum to Cobá highway. Cemda, Greenpeace, and Sélvame MX now argue that what is advancing serves no through-traffic purpose at all.
Activists say the route serves developers, not drivers
José Urbina, the cave diver and Sélvame del Tren founder known as Pepe Tiburón, said the road does no work of public connectivity. It is not a bypass, he argued, and it does not shorten trips toward Chetumal or Tulum, nor does it answer any community's needs for mobility, health, or education. He called it a project of real estate speculation paid for with public money.
The organization ties that concern to a familiar pattern in Tulum. A paved line cut through fragile jungle, they warn, opens the door to disorderly urban growth and land speculation in one of the most sensitive zones in the Riviera Maya.
The three risks Cemda warns of are irreversible
Gustavo Alanís Ortega, founder and executive director of Cemda, told reporters that heavy machinery and paving over this ground carry three consequences he described as catastrophic and irreversible.
The first is collapse. The thin limestone shelf covering the cenotes and caverns is extremely fragile, and the groups warn of sinkholes and ground failure. The second is hydrological. Paving and construction could cut the underground flows that move naturally toward the Caribbean. The third is contamination, as fuels, waste, and other pollutants filter directly into the fresh water that reaches local residents, the tourism sector, and the wider region.
Alanís said the work also reshapes habitat for as many as 78 species at risk of extinction, and pointed to the area's importance for the spider monkey. Sac Actun, which the organizations describe as the largest underground river system in the world with 368 kilometers mapped, sits at the center of that warning. The groups note that the route also abuts the Holbox Fault, the geological fracture they call the main water corridor of the Yucatán Peninsula.
How Sac Actun was exempted from an impact study
The legal heart of the dispute is a permit. The groups say Semarnat exempted the work from filing a Manifestación de Impacto Ambiental, the environmental impact assessment Mexican law requires, by treating it as the rehabilitation of an existing rural road of about 15,360 meters. In their account, that classification does not hold because the project is, in fact, a new road, and the clearing has felled part of the jungle illegally.
Alanís also raised the road's width. He said the regulation governing impact assessments excludes only roads that do not exceed six meters, while this one measures seven. On June 8, he said, the affected community filed a recurso de revisión, an administrative appeal, before Semarnat's environmental impact directorate. No response had come, and Alanís did not rule out seeking an amparo, a court injunction, to stop construction.
The complaint, the groups added, points to conflicts with the Cancún to Tulum Ecological Ordinance Program, the Ley General de Desarrollo Forestal Sustentable, and the Ley General de Vida Silvestre.
A pattern across the Yucatán Peninsula
Pedro Uc, a founding member of the Maya territory defense assembly Múuch' Xíinbal, placed the road in a longer story. Over two decades, he said, the peninsula has absorbed large-scale monocultures, pig farms, and tourism and real estate megaprojects, and families have at times been displaced from where they were born.
José Luis Perlasca Ruz, of Greenpeace México, made the same point about scale. Sac Actun is not an isolated case, he said, but part of an alarming, simultaneous accumulation of damage across a territory already pushed to its limit. The three organizations summed up the stakes in a single warning: if Sac Actun collapses, life in the Caribbean collapses with it.
Semarnat stays silent as an injunction looms
Reporters who requested information from Semarnat about the project had received no reply by the time the organizations spoke. For now, the work continues while the appeal sits unanswered, and the groups have signaled they are prepared to escalate to the courts. The decision on whether to suspend the road, and whether Sac Actun is studied before more jungle falls, rests with the federal authorities the three organizations are pressing.
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