Governments across the Americas are expanding their military capabilities to secure capital accumulation and infrastructure development. Despite the violence, people continue to defend captured territories in order to protect their communities and the environment. Alke Jenss examines the case of Mexico.
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The Mesoamerican Project is decades old. It is a massive infrastructure project that aims to close infrastructure ‘gaps’ between Mexico and Central America, accelerate transit from Panama northward, activate the potential of Central American ports, improve roads, and connect electricity lines across countries. In short, it is a fever dream of accelerated trade and the development of new logistics platforms in a region that, in the eyes of economists, was stuck between assembly-line production that added no value in-country and the provision of cheap agricultural products, but could actually export abundant energy and services.
Documents of the time – 1990s and early 2000s – are full of expectations of shortened overland trade duration, the potential of electricity exports northwards, and regional integration promises. Actors such as Latin American governments of the 1990s and early 2000s, the Interamerican Development Bank, and institutions in Spain, the US, and EU pushed for the plan. There were plans to ‘accelerate the Pacific Corridor,’ modernizing infrastructure and facilities at border crossings, improving border control systems for freight and passengers, but also rebuilding or extending an international Mesoamerican road network (RICAM) as well as establishing an ‘information highway’ through a transnational fiber-optic grid.
In the different axes of the project, multiple governments would work together to channel investment into highways, energy platforms, dams, but also, as a result, facilitate plantations for bio-fuels. The Carbon Offset market would serve as a mechanism that easily made the projects climate-neutral – by paying a set price.
Down to earth
Today, only parts of these actual infrastructures have been built, but the idea of making trade ‘better’ and faster still prevails. The López Obrador government in Mexico prioritized infrastructure-led development, resulting in a flurry of new projects related to logistics, energy, and industry. These projects are concentrated around the Interoceanic Corridor between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The government also promoted tourism in the Yucatán Peninsula and connected Chiapas to Central American trade flows.
The Sheinbaum government’s ‘Plan Mexico’ includes industrial parks, an additional 3,000 km of freight train tracks, and 100 projects to extend and modernize the national grid.
The plans for this massive infrastructure overhaul did not anticipate the criticism they would generate, nor the protests that many of the projects – be they a new highway, port expansion, or transmission line – would spark. These protests were accompanied by forced displacements and violence in several countries. In Southern Costa Rica, indigenous activists organized themselves against the Diquís hydroelectric dam that would have flooded parts of their territories, and eventually the construction was halted. In Panama, protests against mineral extraction can be traced back to the incentives which the Mesoamerican Project provided for extraction.
And in Mexico, activists have called the disregard for environmental regulations and the damage done in terms of expropriations and irreversible ecological damage in the construction of the former López Obrador government’s flagship projects, the Tren Maya and the Interoceanic Train, cases of ‘death projects’ and ecocide.
“Projects of death”
Clearly, much of the infrastructure development in Central America over the past 20 years has not primarily aimed to provide essential goods (water, electricity, and transportation) to those living in construction areas. Rather, renewed interest and government investment efforts are based on these countries’ long-term bet on competing for investment, the recent overhaul of North American supply chains – particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic – and the materialization of global geoeconomic competition in infrastructures. National corporations are interested in securing a piece of the pie through their knowledge and unique access, with states and international development banks shouldering the upfront costs.
Moreover, the expansion of infrastructure has been violent. While the term infrastructural violence has been in use since around 2012, its use to describe the violence and conflict brought about by large-scale infrastructure projects has increased significantly in recent years. Scholars and activists now use terms such as infrastructure conflicts, “infrastructural harm,” and “projects of death.”
Often, the quest to enable capitalist accumulation by providing its underpinnings results in physical violence. This violence may take the form of states evicting people without consultation or armed groups acting as ‘door openers’ for infrastructure investment by convincing land defenders that intervention is dangerous. Beyond physical violence, large-scale infrastructure projects can be realized through authoritarian practices. These include no consultation, deliberately flawed consultations, or transnational deliberations, as in the Mesoamerican Project, where governments may deny accountability.
Logistical nightmares
The discussion of infrastructural violence relates to what Black activists in the US call sacrifice zones when denouncing the toxicity and dramatic health issues in industrial areas and mining regions in North America. In Mexico, slow violence refers to the impact on karst landscapes and groundwater sources, such as cenotes and caves, which are essential to regional biodiversity and community-based tourism.
This violence affects specific locations. The infrastructures transform social spaces, they transform how people relate to their environment, sometimes the everyday, as new highways separate communities or enlarged, automated port terminals transform labor relations, or people are displaced from land now used for train tracks or area-intensive renewable energy.
What threatens these infrastructures of acceleration? In debates about supply chains and logistics, Deborah Cowen has long demonstrated that corporations that depend on the rapid shipment of goods view disruption as one of their primary concerns. Some interpret any initiative striving for autonomy as an obstacle to accumulation and a disruption to the smooth flow of goods.
Militarization and resistance
Today, what is taking place is not the large-scale privatization of infrastructures that were formerly state-owned. Many of these corporations have been private since the 1980s or 1990s. In Mexico, there are numerous joint ventures between state-owned enterprises, such as the Comisión Federal de Electricidad, and transnational corporations. State enterprises also undertake internationally backed investments to prepare the groundwork and attract private corporations once roads, electricity pipelines, and multimodal carrier terminals (i.e. train-to-ship, or ship-to-truck) are in place.
In Mexico, the state’s role is peculiar because infrastructure investment has coincided with a strong trend of deepening militarization. Even though the military was already performing a wide variety of functions and was highly visible on Mexico’s streets, the López Obrador government handed over the Tren Maya (and partially its construction) to the military and the Interoceanic Train to the Marines.
The Sheinbaum government furthered this military ownership of infrastructure by awarding 11 development ‘poles’ to the Marines in 2025. Sheinbaum hopes to stimulate growth by designating so-called ‘poles of wellbeing,’ which are intended to become hotspots of economic growth. These areas have reduced taxes and special regulations to attract corporations, much like special economic zones. Although the Sheinbaum government reduced the state budget for the two flagship train projects, the same expansion policies apply. Trains, ‘development poles,’ and gas pipelines are interconnected, forming a web of energy and transportation infrastructures that are intended to establish Mexico’s presence on the global trade map.
The most vulnerable pay the enormous costs
The military’s and Marines’ role as economic actors is a significant concern. With their own economic interests at stake, soldiers and generals alike are incentivized to ensure infrastructure expansion and industrial hubs move forward. Protesting them or participating in the planning process becomes almost impossible and is brutally suppressed. The slow violence of such projects is linked to the very real threat of the arbitrary detention and disappearance of activists, where the perpetrators remain obscure.
The pressure to finish construction also seemingly led to irregularities and the use of subpar materials. In December 2025, the Interoceanic Corridor train, operated by the Marines, derailed in Oaxaca, leaving 14 people dead. Criticism of the planning process and hasty construction, as well as the lack of participation of those affected by the train line, was common during the process. The Tren Maya has also derailed several times due to technical issues, though there have been no fatalities.
All along, activists have continued to protest and resist such projects. This has meant years of activism and setbacks, as well as construction in the face of criticism. This is evident in the following 2022 letter: “The train is really just a real estate project under the banner of responsible tourism. This development model has been tried in Yucatán and has led to environmental impoverishment. The most vulnerable pay the enormous costs of environmental degradation without receiving anything in return but precarious jobs.”
More pressure on the authorities
Some of these efforts have led to success. In February of this year, for example, a panel of judges ordered the permanent suspension of Tren Maya construction along the fifth section of the train line in Yucatán, on the condition that the Environmental Protection Agency (Profepa) regularly inspects and verifies the situation along the line, which runs through the ‘ecological heart’ of Quintana Roo and contains many freshwater caves and subterranean rivers. The Sélvame del Tren initiative said, “This is not just a legal success. It’s a clear message: nature has rights, and organized civil society has leverage.” While this does not stop the train from operating, it puts more pressure on the authorities to abide by their environmental protection laws.
Further north in Mexico, resistance to gas terminals has led to a positive development. The state had planned to build up to five large liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals on Mexico’s Pacific coast in joint ventures with pipeline investors from Canada and the U.S., such as Sempra. The terminals were intended to export Texas-extracted fracking gas, which has been surprisingly cheap or even sold at negative prices, to Asia. This gas is different from the gas available in Europe. Now, however, at least one of these projects has been canceled. In March 2026, initiatives such as Conexiones Climáticas celebrated the cancellation of the Vista Pacífico terminal project, saying it was a moment to ‘step up the fight’ and ‘be committed.’
In sum, while states in the Americas are increasingly militarizing to facilitate and guarantee capital accumulation and infrastructure expansion across the continent, the flow of goods and energy will not be smooth. Despite the violence, the defense of territory in terms of social relations and ecological protection still exists.