With the projection of a short documentary and results of her field research, teacher Sandra Gayou Soto will present on Tuesday, March 11, at the Peninsular Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (Cephcis), the problems that ejidatarios (shareholders of common land) face in the face of large development projects in Yucatan.
She will participate at noon in the Seminar “Socio-territorial and urban-environmental processes in the Mexican Southeast” with the presentation “Defense of the Mayan territory in Yucatan in the face of renewable Energy megaprojects and the Mayan Train” where she will present real cases of ejidatarios from Ixil, from the town of San José Tipceh (Muna) and Halachó who organized to defend their lands and managed to stop and suspend processes that aimed at the dispossession of the heritage of their lands.
The documentary, entitled “Donde asoma el venado” (Where the deer appears), lasts 23 minutes and is a solid narrative source of real characters from the conflict that complements the information that teacher Gayou Soto collected during her research.
The documentary was recorded in 2023 in Yucatán and was released in November 2024 in the cinemas of the 21st Century. The film has already won, according to its author, some awards and will be screened at some festivals in the country, at the “Local de Chuburná” Cultural Center in the city, and in Telchaquillo, a town that maintains a legal and social struggle against the INAH for the lands occupied by the archaeological zone of Mayapán.
In an interview, the speaker highlighted the importance of organizing people to demand their agrarian rights, to be taken into account in projects, to be consulted on community participation, to receive the benefits, to have a fair payment for communal lands, to have their customs and the environment respected.
The organization of people in defense of their lands, she said, prevented the expropriation and dispossession of large plots of land for the construction of wind and solar parks in Chicxulub Pueblo and in Muna (Ticul 1 and Ticul 2 plants). In Halachó, the corruption that occurred in the expropriation of land for the construction of the Mayan Train was revealed because there were differentiated prices for the land to the detriment of the ejidatarios. The town gave up much of the Ejido for the railway project.
“In the large projects, the rights of the Mayan communities are not taken into account. It is not that they are against the projects or the development; they are simply projects that are outside the law. They are processes of land dispossession that began with the planting of transgenic crops and with mega-farms and extended to renewable energy parks.”
“In the case of the Mayan Train, there were irregularities in the payment of communal lands. The federal government gave smaller amounts, and in the case of Halachó, it paid much less than what was paid in other municipalities where the Mayan Train affected communal land,” he said.
For the moment, the documentary on the defense of the Mayan territory is only being shown in person, but next June, it will be available on the YouTube digital platform for consultation.
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