When the flashlight goes out in the cave, everyone freezes.
The silence is sepulchral.
You feel the humidity, which makes you perspire, although it hasn't rained outside for months.
We are five kilometers into the jungle after a 4x4 drive along a dirt road, another stretch in a kind of golf cart along a narrower path and a long walk to reach the cave system known as Jaguar's Claw.
The name resonates in the head those seconds in which the flashlight remains off.
The great American feline appears here to hunt in the dry months, taking advantage of the fact that its prey come to drink water.
When she turns on the light again, Tania Ramírez's face draws one of those smiles that speak: "Do you see that the trip was worth it?"
The speleologist does not lose heart even when she reaches the place she was looking for: a huge opening in the ceiling of the cave through which the Mayan Train tracks are planned to pass.
The idea of her seems like a bad joke.
"They told us that they are going to put piles in the cave so that it can support the train," he says, and he doesn't know whether to make fun of the construction company's ingenuity or burst into tears.
Concrete columns along this underground labyrinth that she herself discovered in 2014. An ejidatario told her that she had found a cenote on her land, near Playa del Carmen, in Quintana Roo.
She went over to see him and, as she entered, she realized that there might be something else.
She returned later with her husband, also a speleologist, with camping equipment and a lifeline, that rope that warns that a path has been explored.
It took four years to map the entire cave system, which is now visited by groups limited to 10 tourists each day to preserve the site.
That a passenger and freight train is going to pass over this fragile terrain seems hard to believe.
The ceiling of the cave, made of porous limestone, is full of holes that let you see the sky and through which the roots of the trees slip in, looking for the water that houses the cavern.
Tania Ramírez guides a group of visitors through the Garra de Jaguar cave, near Playa del Carmen, in Quintana Roo, on March 3.Teresa de Miguel
The concrete pillars in the cave will be symbols of presidential power in Mexico: Andrés Manuel López Obrador's flagship megaproject will be built here without prior consultation with the communities or environmental impact studies, shielded by a decree that designated the great works of the Government as "national security" issues.
"To speed up bureaucratic procedures," the president said then.
The section connecting Cancun and Tulum was originally planned alongside the highway connecting those two cities.
But, after almost a year of work, the authorities realized that the pharaonic work – which involved raising the train above Playa del Carmen – would cost too much money and time to complete.
And the president has made it clear that he wants to see his star project filming at the end of next year.
So in January
the layout was changed to the jungle, where there would not be so many interests affected by the passage of the tracks.
Or so they thought.
Citizen rejection has been growing since then: on March 6, dozens of people demonstrated in the virgin forest recently cut by heavy machinery.
Next to a "No to the Mayan Train" sign, a hole in the ground could be seen, warning of what lies below this land.
From the Government, the dance of logging figures associated with the train has been as dizzying as a night of reggaeton.
From 'not a single tree will be felled' intoned by the president at the beginning of his mandate, to the 800 hectares declared in the Environmental Impact Statement for the first three sections (of a total of seven), to the total absence of numbers for the new line of section 5, the one that goes from Cancun to Tulum.
For not being, that section is not even official, although the progress of the work can already be seen through the eye of a drone.
The environmental organization MOCE Yax Cuxtal has an estimate: in the 120 kilometers between those two cities, at least 8 million trees would be felled.
Maybe it's less.
But the authorities do not know.
Whatever the number, the gap represents a new scar in the Selva Maya, the second largest tropical forest in America after the Amazon.
Patricia Godínez, from MOCE Yax Cuxtal, cried when she visited the works.
Her organization is dedicated to environmental education and on weekends they gather small teams to plant trees in Playa del Carmen.
When they have had an "extraordinary" day, they plant 50. "And when you see that in a few hours they can cut 8,000, 16,000, 24,000."
Does not finish the sentence.
Godínez knows that the train is just one more threat, “perhaps the most pressing”, for this jungle hit for years by unstoppable development.
What she is most concerned about is not the deforestation of the roads.
On the sides there are four lanes of cars and the adjoining land, mostly owned by ejidatarios with limited resources,
they will see an opportunity to open new hotels or restaurants.
Godínez believes that it would be much better to invest in sustainable tourism, like the one that takes thousands of tourists to snorkel in the cenotes, dive in the caves or walk through Jaguar's Claw.
Aerial view of the deforestation in the jungle to build the tracks of section 5 of the Mayan Train at the height of Playa del Carmen, on March 2. Teresa de Miguel
“Look, an owl!” Raúl Padilla exclaims with an almost childlike joy when he sees the bird of prey in a nook of the cave.
She doesn't come looking for wildlife, but her trained eye catches it almost unintentionally.
Along the way he also points out a Yucatecan barking frog, a turnip-tailed gecko and a double-lined bat.
He of all he thus recites scientific names, as a pupil who has done the task well.
No one would say that he makes this same journey once a week, every week of his life.
The rest of the days he leads night walks to spot reptiles and amphibians and monitors wildlife with the association he founded, Jaguar Wildlife Center.
His love for the feline shows it on his chest: on his shirt a jaguar roars;
on his leather collar hangs a medallion with the animal's head.
He explains that, in addition to the jaguar,
He is a guide and it shows, he likes to tell.
"The karstic landscape of these caves has its origin in coral reefs and marine sediments, which became limestone when the Yucatan peninsula emerged from the sea."
As the water permeates the ceiling of the cave, the rock dissolves and "decorates" it with all kinds of formations: long stalactites hang like swords from the ceiling, others unite to create large umbrellas or curtains, and from the ground emerge stalagmites that seem to have been sculpted by Yayoi Kusama.
About a hundred kilometers to the south, at the height of Tulum, you can find those same formations, but submerged under water, in the Nicte Ha cenote. It looks like a postcard hanging in a souvenir shop: the sunset sun creates a perfect contrast between the turquoise water,
The diver straps the oxygen tank to his back, turns on a flashlight in one hand and a 6,000-lumen lamp in the other so he can record with the GoPro.
He enters the postcard releasing the air from his vest, plunging into that subterranean world, that European tourists who bathe on the surface can't even imagine.
The feeling, at first, is claustrophobic.
There are areas where the cavern is so narrow that barely one person passes at a time.
The buoyancy is different from that of the sea: if you are not careful you end up glued to the ceiling of the cave, full of stalactites.
Claustrophobia is forgotten at each entry of natural light from the cenotes, which crosses the water like a curtain of laser beams.
This place is part of Sac Actún, the largest system of flooded caves in the world with more than 300 kilometers explored.
The Nicte Ha cenote, which gives access to the largest submerged cave system in the world, Sac Actún.Teresa de Miguel
Last Sunday, President López Obrador described as “pseudo-environmentalists” those who demonstrated against the project.
They are responding with a flood of complaints before the Environmental Protection Agency and amparos before the courts for the deforestation caused.
But it does not seem that the president cares too much about the judicial decisions: a federal court has confirmed this week the suspension of the works of the first three sections of the train, which go from Palenque (Chiapas) to Izamal (Yucatán), agreeing with a group of indigenous organizations that alleged that the works violated their right to a healthy environment.
The president has responded that the works will continue.
Beneath the cave she discovered, Tania Ramírez looks around her with anticipatory nostalgia.
She doesn't think tourists will continue to visit Jaguar Claw if the train runs over them.
“People come to see our natural wealth.
In their countries they have trains, we have cenotes”.
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