Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 94: El Tren Maya

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

sorry this took a bit we had supply chain issues (podcast truck late) Eme's twitter: https://twitter.com/EmeAquiFlores Eme's podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/7s2xS70sAb3Ddj3C1E6s1W Sources: http://www.tramz.com/mx/yu/yu00.html https://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article/72/2/159/146261/All-in-the-Family-Railroads-and-Henequen Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

like three sentences in a while it's a it's a dreadful language we consider we better than the three of us trying to do Spanish or German donde esta la biblioteca beautiful yes you're a cultured man just a beautiful romantic language and even sound like dookie there's a funny scandal because uh I'm not doesn't know English like at all and refuses to learn it and it's like the first uh yeah like it's one of the first I love that conservatives in Mexico just make scandals for the only cool things that I love us it's not even like Obama stands to it it's just like every single time he does something cool which is one zero three months they make us a huge scandal about it and

it's like what I respect not learning English so much for for anyone really uh yeah it's um it it really it I think it I think the English language in and of itself is something that just affects people's thinking and gives them brain right listen I'm not gonna secure and say it's anything different from Spanish I actually listen I hate accents I absolutely hate accents I I write I write short stories in English because I refuse to use accents though I will admit it's an incredibly stupid language just all the exceptions melt my brain but both of them are better than French which combines the worst parts of both absolutely yeah please tack on a bunch of extra letters at the end of the word you don't say any of them

yes yes so all right all right um welcome to well there's your problem it's a podcast about engineering disasters with the slides I'm Justin Rosniak I'm the person who's talking right now my pronouns are he and him okay gof I am Alice Koldwell Kelly I'm the person who is talking now my pronouns are she and her yeah Liam yeah hi I'm Liam Anderson my pronouns are he and him we have a guest joining us yes yes introduce yourself hi I'm Emma Flores my pronouns are they them and I guess in Spanish you could use AJ or if you're feeling like especially Latinx you can use Ajax oh yeah oh that's like that's a fun debate the other pronunciation of that x but let's not get into that just use whatever you want and we brought you on to talk about

the train Maya uh seen here in a fun little map oh it's so cute how could anything with a map this cute look at the little seal and the little like orca and the guy in the jet ski up by Cancun it's like it's so nice how could this be a problem it's like the whole peninsula is a fun theme park for the whole family absolutely look it's a train and if I've learned anything from memes on the leftist twitter it's trains are always good that's right it's right train good uh and therefore it's fine so we're gonna we're gonna talk about train Maya uh but first but first I have to get the fucking drop in order because right now the drop that I have in the place of the the drop that I have in place of the news one is still only one race the human race what about NASCAR

which is only tangentially related actually yeah okay to record on Wednesdays now everything's very confusing that's right that's right I thought I was gonna get a James Von drop I was feeling so excited we've had to take him off the board so all right do you want the actual news theme now yeah yes all right all right Jesus Alice Caldwell Kelly well like Alice Caldwell smelly really there's no call for that kind of that kind of transfer so much sweet lady please stop please stop owning me there was a big volcano eruption huge tanga yes very very large uh about the size of France yeah it's a big ash cloud uh the good news is this is cancelled global warming we're gonna

have volcanic winter instead finally and it's not France that's true that's this has been the worst gender reveal for like a non-binary child just gray the non-binary color is just gray it wears like a ton of a layer of ash for something it's like it's a day and just like every one of the part that dies is smoking elation but the thing is we know so little about what's happening still which really reminds you that like even in this day and age you can have like geographical isolation because Tonga has one nowhere one undersea cable which was destroyed by this oops yeah and so it for a while there the only communications coming out of Tonga were one guy with a satellite phone

and they had to like physically like sweep the runway clear of ash with brooms and wheel barrows before before rescue flights could get in and the worst part about this is that Tonga is zero covid um estates which it probably will not retain just because some un motherfucker is gonna give everybody covid oh my god yeah it's gonna be some some like uh american anti-vaxx guy is just gonna come in i will save you and then uh yeah the guys who deliver Christmas presents for yeah yeah god damn i mean we still don't know how bad the the like total of this is um because like a lot of shit has just been like wiped off the map like the shape of Tonga has been changed by this it's it's real bad um i'm i'm interested to know how this scales in comparison to like

Mount Tambora because i know that was that was heard for like three thousand four thousand miles away but people heard this one in like Alaska yeah no i don't know i feel like Mount Tambora was like way more destructive in terms of like the initial death tolls but i mean tambora was the one that you know took out a whole summer um yeah that's why we have fragrance side right i read this one express and then how the distance uh sound like in the only measure uh worldwide that's accepted and that is uh la to new york that's the only measure and this fit so that's all i know about it i i don't like the idea of hearing something thousands of miles away happen just in general i i don't appreciate that that creeps me out a little bit

but what can we say other than that this is a mysterious act of god's love right yeah and uh if we're lucky snow storm on july 4th in new york city how am i without a summer baby yep nothing's gonna come here because mexico city is basically the valley surrounded by volcanoes so yeah plus you already have the like insulating thick layer of smog it's like exactly it's like the bong resin in the lungs that keeps the coronavirus off that's right it's not exactly off we're having a little bit of what i call uh uh uk or us event right now uh oh no yeah our numbers are not looking good um in other news there's there's packages on on the tracks failed state over calling it now los angeles time of death me seeing a package things off of trains outside the

los angeles transportation center in intermodal yard um and people are seeing this as a sign of the imminent fall of western civilization and i i do appreciate using train theft as a sort of like uh method of prophecy um did you see the most racist thing about this uh the one the lady was like i thought this was america not india yes and she and she was she was npr's india correspondent what uh look past the need for npr man yeah but like looking at a thing happening in your own country and being like what are we a bunch of foreigners is uh i thought the funny aspect of that was that india has freight trains that don't have to idle outside the yard for hours waiting for them to get in the india has a train system that works um i mean i feel like i feel

like being racist against indians on twitter is sort of a self-limiting factor because you will get subjected to right wing indian twitter who are absolute psychos and so yeah no that so this woman has been like justly punished for her crimes by uh you know 1500 like bjp guys were all doing crying laughing emotes we should ban the crying laughing emote that's true i thought what was very funny was union pacific issuing a statement that was like well organized groups are stopping these trains and i you know and they're robbing them and i'm like well yeah there there is an organized group stopping these trains it's named union pacific bold of you to call union pacific organized it's true it's true but yeah no all of these trains are being held up by dutch vandalin's

gang you know after after this episode you might get a combination of those indian guys with like boom checkmark live twitter uh yeah absolutely the the the moraine twitter is just delightful so it's way smaller don't worry about it you'll be able to handle it but just just warning you adding people to the list of like uh groups who have caused offense to um but uh yeah i people sometimes steal stuff off of park trains and you know that's just the cost of doing business the trends and losses baby yeah but you can you can put a block on it or something maybe people wouldn't have to steal stuff off of trains if they weren't desperate uh you should do something about that maybe if you want i don't know i'm not your boss don't talk to

me shut up maybe you can sell the trains to the army we'll get to that yeah we're gonna get to that in further news it's our first one with three yeah the rare three segment god damn news um there was a hostage situation i appreciate that you didn't spell out god as a not especially observant jewish man that'll make my mother happy my parents are really gonna like this joke it's um uh it there was a hostage situation in the synagogue and i forget where texas yeah i thought as well outside of dallas and uh the rabbi managed to uh throw a chair and i definitely went out the back damn quick time out yeah and he got everyone out himself but then the brave policeman came in and shot the gunman yes just executed them yeah we're we're

gonna uh well we've already seen a load of tweets of the sort of like girl bossification of the fbi here because it was the fbi who who like broken and shot the guy um and so i i saw this one lip that was like oh the the fucking badasses of the fbi hostage rescue team smoke checked this guy and i'm like you don't have to enjoy it that much dude that's a little uncomfortable this is a jewish person uh please don't use us as tokens to hate muslim people thank you also yes i mean the thing is right the the hostage shaker here was a member of an intolerant minority that is an existential threat to the west and i'm i'm speaking here of course of him being british um he was british yes yeah he had traveled from from bradford um in the midlands to new york to houston in order to

do this uh there had been some talk like in the uk of him having been in like a sort of a mental health crisis which yeah sure okay but when i'm in a mental health crisis i don't fucking go and you know hold up a synagogue um but you're so welcome um but the thing that he he allegedly wanted his demand was the um the release of afia sidiki uh who was this um pakistani neuroscientist who had tried to like do some al-qaeda shit uh convicted of terrorism but in some real weird circumstances yeah definitely some like uh funky business going on she tried to kill the like allegedly tried to shoot the soldier with his own m4 yeah while he while he was interrogating her it's like there's a lot going on there but my favorite detail of this was like if you if you're like

not familiar with muslims you might not know that it's a fairly common thing to say to speak of any other muslims like your your sibling right your brother your sister and so this guy went into the synagogue and he said he demanded the release of my sister afia sidiki and a shitload of us media went with holy shit that's her brother just incredible work just off the dome piece of like background knowledge reporting i i will say uh yeah i saw a bunch of tweets uh once again uh please just leave us alone uh speaking to the jewish people uh stop stop fucking boving and shooting us that'd be super nice uh i'm tired of worrying if my parents are going to be turned into marinara sauce when they go to synagogue uh fucking sucks man yeah uh and also don't again

don't use this as an excuse to hate muslim people no use it as an excuse to hate british people this is a guy who pretty clearly wasn't all there i will say sure is he also demanded to which again when i have a mental health crisis i don't hold up a mosque uh i do hold up churches though notably not a hostage thing i just like well let's let's let's merely say that um although it's there's only a couple of ways this could have gone better um let's say that the ideal consequence for a mental health crisis is not you get shot in the face a bunch of times by the fbi when the hostages have already are already escaped yes absolutely that's the thing you could just arrest the guy yeah and also like it pretty clearly seemed like uh he wanted to die so

congratulations you've given him what he wanted yeah absolutely job and he gets damn this has been yeah the the fbi and a lot of police units in united states have been gotten way more lethal in the past decades oh yeah absolutely i built the same with mexican army by the way they i think they've uh like they have like a nine to ten like execution rate jesus yeah they're fucking blood thirsty over here all right better than mexico let's hear it boys and girls yeah um that was the god damn news okay here we are we're here in the yucatan peninsula we're here in the yucatan peninsula how did we get here well there was a big meteor that hit somewhere around here

and it killed all the dinosaurs that's right yeah that's why there's cool caves everywhere yes we're we're here if you if you need to sort of brought a picture we're here on the southern border of mexico uh you can see belize on the south i think um is it guacamala that's that's nice guacamala you know what's funny yucatan is actually further to the north than mexico city huh i'll do it yeah um so this is the yucatan peninsula it's part of uh mexico of course well debate it we have here we have here a cool guy in a balaclava who hasn't got a pipe oh he does he does um so the geology in this area is something called karst right so karst is like you have a limestone you know sort of bedrock um and because of this it's all worn away by water over time

so you get huge network like caves and stuff right um you have like underground water courses underground rivers right like here's here's an example this is something called a uh a cenote is it a cenote yeah cenote okay okay i'm not going to know how to pronounce anything during this episode we're relying on you entirely oh like have the time uh Mexican people correct uh americans in pronunciation they're also lying like it's not montezuma it's montezuma it's neither of them you don't know now it's like shut the fuck up all right but a lot of places you know sometimes you'll hear about underground rivers and they're referring to a sort of movement of groundwater in a specific direction um and not like what you might imagine which is like a big

cave with a river running through it uh in the yucatan it is actually a big cave with a river running through it yeah uh ruins get the fast travel yes and as you can see there's a lot of like uh rainforest here right like yes less than they used to be but uh it's still quite a lot yes so you know it's also very flat um you don't have any rivers again because they're all underground you don't have any above ground rivers lots of underground rivers well it's also very flat until it's not yeah you can see the the the blue mountains here in chiapas on the bottom left here yes uh where it suddenly gets all like wrinkled up and this this becomes uh excellent territory to like hide from the mexican federal government and do an insurgency and yes so almost like uh the

apple agents you know i think i think subcomandante marcos would be flattered by that comparison but uh we'll get into this when we get into the history so uh first dinosaurs then dinosaurs killed uh dinosaurs killed the age of man is it begins yeah and yes we have the maya civilization a great agreement and a horrible mistake should be clearly you're talking about humanity there rather than the maya or banculture let's go full anti-soom let's let's let's let's reel it back in some of the earliest archaeological evidence of the maya starts about 2000 bc they you know they they were civilization up until around the 800s ad you know they got the big cities they got so many ac i what bce uh or cce cabanera no i'm i'm i'm i've decided to use the christian

terms because this is a christian oh no fucking father banardo de fucking rosniak here yeah well the gritosard douche bag if you will all i'm saying is if ever there was a place that would like have a justified objection to using anodomony it might be the yucatan so they got their big cities they got you know trade they got big stone monuments written language stuff like that around the 900s ad or ce if you prefer thank you right um you know there's sort of this uh decline in the civilization like this sort of events occur which i don't think we're fully i'm i'm not familiar with them no there's there's a lot of things like these and like most american civilizations where sometimes they

would just collapse and we're not sure why because there's no surviving records we're getting better at understanding that kind of stuff like uh i don't know the the there's the the the i'm sorry uh no architecture archaeology the archaeologists are molding historians are are piecing stuff together it helps that there's a lot more you know indigenous historians so people instead of going like oh the mayas disappeared because the aliens came and sucked them out in UFOs they're like oh no the mayans are studying themselves you're sort of like um you know white archaeologists kicking a bunch of spanish massacres under a carpet and going what what happened impossible to say or saying that the massacre they actually

deserved it like there's like this huge thing about the guerra that cast us it was like a popular revolt not only racially motivated but just like an actual like popular revolt because like yucca town is based as fuck and uh but a lot of the historians of the time just said oh it's just mayas versus white people and uh to brush under a rub because back then you could say we killed them because of racism and that was a good thing so so so yeah just another two levels of of historical provisionism and racism you need to understand to to get how yucca town got to where it is well i think a lot about the um because like

obviously uh just you know 600 years after this first big decline of the maya we have to talk about the spanish conquest right and like one of the things that really made a big difference to me was i i read this book myths of the spanish conquest one of one of which was uh the spanish conquest thank you what like the one that really struck me was the spanish conquest was a thing that like had a defined end point rather than uh it set off a bunch of historical processes which is still going and there were people who were like you know retained their autonomy from spanish rule much longer than anybody gives them credit for and that's especially true down here yeah like the looking at the our handsome fellow with a pipe like one of his points is uh amlo our president

andres mandel opus oralor apologized to the mayas for all the atrocities uh they've committed and the the esoterlene the the the esoterlene what kind of pronunciation okay so the sapatistas basically said uh how would you stop doing it like how would you end the conquest how would not because yeah like every time the jungle contracted so did the people so the people fleeing to the hills literally and uh escaping slavery and shit and that kept going just kept going like in the whole uh yucatan in Chiapas in Campeche to Vasco and uh yeah like it started with the spanish and like you can see uh like listen a bunch of people are surprised when they see pictures of our past presidents like in rica pañanito who's white as hell and uh and you might

notice that all of them have spanish names like yeah weird how that got there yeah that's no understanding of like the racial politics of mexico outside of mexico i think oh there's barely any inside of mexico so what are the effects of the the pre-contact collapse was a lot of maya civilization sort of moved up north right um to the yucatan right uh and then in 1511 of course uh first contact was made with the spaniards um and a local mayan lord who made contact with these spaniards i think they had been shipwrecked made the correct decision and decided to sacrifice all of them yeah good idea guys guys show up in the weird sort of like uh curvy helmets you just kick him into a sonata that's you know that's good policy oh shit these are spaniards i

know no the correct response yeah absolutely two of them got away though oh yeah mistake yeah yeah um and and so you know conquist the door is sort of come in they do the usual conquist the door thing right uh and you know all of modern mexico is under spanish control by like 1627 but the mayans don't really go away right as because it's so remote out here that there's no control and also if you're a spanish fail son who like wants uh you know to sort of live in a big fancy palace right you don't want to do governing you certainly don't want to go out into the fucking countryside to oppress people yourself and so it becomes sort of possible uh to like make deals with the with the spaniards like for

better or worse than yeah that's typically happened in yucatan because there's like a lot of different ways the conquista looked uh around the country and a lot of different interactions with groups like have the the the names uh that we use for indigenous groups in mexico are just slurs used by the the Aztecs and you can tell that they were in charge uh after they got like completely destroyed and after the plague and stuff a lot of them got put in charge got new christian names and like some shit like jose castillo the whatever the fuck and uh just got sent to okay go over to yucatan and yucatan was a tough nut to crack uh and when they did it they found out they could just they they would need to learn uh at least a version of of mayan and that continued

up until like a hundred years ago wow like uh the the the elite was talking maya that that's kind of unheard of in a lot of concrete uh concrete places and uh that's part of the the the guerrilla casters thing like they said oh it's just mayas versus non-mayas and like no just a lot of those quote-unquote mayas were just guys who learned maya and a lot of uh elites were like mayas who got appointed by the spanish who were like a safe pair of hands because they would like deliver the resources that the spanish wanted yeah and when the independence happened they just said okay now i'm mexican i guess okay yeah and so uh mexico becomes a country in like 1821 right after the the war of independence uh the state of yucatan sort of they flirt with

independence but they they they try and go to be the republic of yucatan and then they're forced back into mexico i think in 1848 yeah and that turned out extremely well for for the independence because they armed a lot of their uh people and taught them how to use weapons and that that never causes any social evil right yeah um and then you have uh you know you have your the mayans in the area um there's there's a sort of concerted effort to um do away with a terrifying concept which white people hate which is collective ownership of land um won't speak it all out again um and and and and so the the maya were pissed um they form a breakaway state with a capital that shan santa cruz it's like somewhere around here ish i want to say yeah we'll see it in the map soon

yeah um and that sort of kicks off something that we call the cased wars now it's like the simmering conflict that goes from about 1847 to 1902 uh yeah um british honduras which is now believes recognize their independence and would you know trade with them right uh but no one else does that and then british honduras is trying to improve relations with mexico as of as of 1893 so they stop recognizing them and stop trading with them oh yeah i know right well you can't trust the british that's true i'm almost like this um and this this sort of long simmering conflict sort of it's simmered down a bit um during and after the mexican revolution um that's where you have like differing ideas of what a what a united mexican states can be

right and like some people think that oh maybe the the problems that yucatan has had foisted upon it by uh by mexico can like be solved if mexico becomes more you know socialist maybe and then is the thing yes you have to realize that like we're approaching the time where the larger revolution happened like people were were looking and saying that looks kind of nice yes and they were sending representatives there's uh i'm not a spoiler i think in case we get there but like they were sending like hi lenin sent me and i mean this picture for no reason like um so um uh another an issue in the yucatan is they had a very monocrop economy she's gonna talk more about later but there's this thing called henneken which is this type of agave not so good

for tequila but very good for making rope um and that made a lot of people very very rich i assume that was all distributed equally oh no no because they were farmed on haciendas which are plantations right and they they don't have slaves but they do have workers in debt peonage which is you know very similar some of them had just slaves like haciendas are really very diverse uh yeah like yeah the depending on what you were planting a hacienda could be anywhere anything from like just a boss and a bunch of farmers to a plantation like that would exist in georgia to the latifundia style things that they had in rome to you know it's it was wild

so i'm not saying that these were the woke haciendas but they were not the usulubwors slavery ones but some of them did get uh pretty fucking bad and then okay i i i wrote down modern history here yeah what what happens is that history continues to occur yes i thought it would end no no no you you katanas like sort of held under the boost of of central government uh until after the coup sponsored by the us until we get to talk about our special boys our friends the zapatista army of national liberation uh one of whose guys subcommandante marcos is seen here and is as our friend with the pipe right actually he's uh it's super subcommandante galliano please do not dead name galliano excuse me he's been through a few

names when he was standing for election he was like delegato cerro uh he's like he keeps changing i fucking love the legato cerro so what is the zapatistas deal right like okay so the zapatistas were uh like they started as like a bunch of guys that had a little bit of contact with other leftist groups like with uh with fidel with uh uh some folks in colombia in a bunch of like the generalize garia vibe that was happening in latin america at that time and they were a bunch of them were malice they were like fully preparing to go full people's war and uh they decided to go to the jungle and they got they trained and stuff like that but uh they they had like to to to adapt more than they could just impose the review like they

they like if you want to keep them in the terms they probably used at that time they they had to actually use the mass line and like adapt and and slowly abandon some of the stuff they were using there's like a couple uh some of the original founders uh recently resurfaced and accused the zapatistas of not being marxist enough and it was like really some fucking shitty twitter discourse honestly yeah the reason they're not marxist is because they decided they needed indigenous leaders too like it just couldn't be this uh like yeah okay the guy with the pipe is handsome and all and he's like pretty good at writing but he's not from around here he came and that's that's why he's sort of commandante is because uh he's he's subordinate to like a governing council that's

indigenous right yeah who are actual commandantists and commandantists like uh the the another thing was they got they really pushed uh stuff like women's rights and LGBT rights like recently like the the the delegation they sent to europe was led by a trans person the uh one of the one of the actual like delegadas uh delegadas like they used like even i'm i'm i'm not sure if it's a neo pronoun because they've been using it since the 90s it's they have a really 90s vibe in there in there i love it it's it's it really shows when they came on the scene they try to influence on there they really like the cards uh they have really close ties to them and uh they also really like like chicano movements in the us and like if you meet any immigrant in the us you know half of

mexicans that immigrate there are queer by year three so there's a lot of of back and forth and it was a revolution that started at in the end of history like hmm it was the same as nafta was passed right yeah that then that's not a coincidence because the biggest effect of nafta in mexico was a big hit towards collective ownership of land the hido system yeah and i mean like i i i appreciate the uh the zephytes does not least because they have this sort of like internationalism where they get everywhere like and as we were talking about before we started recording uh like just reaching out to pretty much anybody who's who's like within that framework of like a sort of like a nationally oppressed people whether that's you know in northern

island whether that's in the basque country or a java or like wherever else on a sort of a socialist yeah they they're not uh that sectarian like they they are not fans of they're kind of sectarian sometimes here like if if you go there and say and try to convince them to become a banger party they're probably gonna give you a wedgie uh it has happened before i've been in those meetings and they do say get the fuck out there uh but they're not like gonna not talk to you like like they they launched this uprising right in chiapas in the 80s uh same day that nafta was founded they still control a bunch of the state right oh yeah and they expanded this recently uh that's why there's also conflict they expanded recently and uh founded new caracoles that's how

they call their their communities uh and so overnight like they had like a 40 percent territorial expansion uh i mean of course they they've been like uh fostering those communities for a while but the the government found out that day and that was uh that was a fun day yeah you you step outside of and like all of a sudden there's a big fucking shea gavara mural up everyone's wearing the malaclava yeah just like what the fuck but the other thing that we have to talk about here and the thing that i've put uh opposite on the opposite of the yucatan peninsula uh with no relation to geography is spring break in cancun because a huge driver of economy in the yucatan uh both in the form of we just go and party or alternatively we go and

we look at like archaeological sites and then we go and party uh whether you do that and like a lot more cancun you probably do both of those simultaneously absolutely you you too can drink a load of awful tequila fall off a Mayan step pyramid and find your soul being sacrificed to shark more right now i think uh the flow of cancun to one of the areas of interest which i think it's it's calakmul i think uh it's like there's 12 million people in cancun yearly and 40 000 of them go to to calakmul the the so the government came up with an interesting plan to increase that 35 hundred times what what if instead of drinking on the beach 20 20 percent of cancun visitors to visit uh barely under fun very underfunded archaeological site i mean i kind

of i i do sympathize to the extent that like you have uh you know thousands of years of history and culture and uh what people want to do instead is get drunk on the beach but like uh i'm not sure that like turn everything into as miserable an experience as the Vatican museums are you've been holding that grudge for so fucking long dude cancun is like an ecological disaster and like people who work there like people say oh where where did all the Mayans go well they they're your waiters at the at the hotel and they're forbidden to talking their native language like that's a that's a a strike in the hotel just happened like a month ago because they were they were fed up they they were being forced to speak spanish more or english

even worse yeah so that's that's a little like a sort of potted history of the yucatan now we've got to like uh hand over to the justin zone yeah i got two slides where i'm gonna nerd out for a second please please this is what yeah yeah okay so we have to uh for some context we got to talk about uh mexican railways the the railway system in mexico right um and here's some zapatistas on the front of a steam locomotive looking good as hell i know right i i couldn't quite figure out what the actual source of this image is because some people say poncho vias on here and some people say no he isn't um that's how you know that you're a successful revolutionary is that like people are still arguing whether or not you are info so it's doing something cool yeah exactly it was a

bit uh problematic but he's one of the few mexicans who invaded the us so i'm just saying i also has my favorite set of last words which are depending on whether you think them are the tragic comedic or tragic comic where uh he gets shot and he says uh i don't let it end like this tell them i said something so your your first railways in mexico were chartered in the 1830s under maxim million the first right he was sort of um emperor we have a hamster against i'm so glad we get to joining with the club but they didn't act they chartered it he chartered it back then but the construction didn't begin until 1864 you know three years from when he was going to be executed so not not very not very good there um that was a line from mexico city to varicruz uh most railroads

were funded by either european or american interests right some of them were straight up american railroads like uh the line on the west coast was the southern pacific de mexico right um not even put it not even putting the first part in spanish man yes um oh we'll get to that later or or later in the slide other others were segments of american railroads that passed through mexico like the san diego and arizona also known as the impossible railroad and future episode um so the uh the mexican railway system was pretty underdeveloped until the creation of uh nationala de mexico under uh profirio dias yeah we got to talk about profiriato because this is like uh you have a hapsburg right but then you also have a sort of like

i don't even know if i have a good comparison for dias i'm really curious what what you were this is the thing like you have someone who's like instinctively authoritarian um who has to be the like guy on the horse in the uniform but he was also going to like drag the economy kicking and screaming into modernity for better and for worse oh because he was a massive francophile he absolutely loved the french so you have to have like our deco this of him wow it's actually pretty cool like i i think it looks great like it's it's very it's this like this relentless commitment to like uh technological and economic and like total transformation of mexicans as a people uh it's like this huge project and he'd

like gets done a surprising amount of it oh yeah and he like he basically made the the whole has seen the thing way worse the the the Anakin stuff got way worse during his time that's why that's why it lasted a hundred years the guerra de castas or the guerra social maya because like people kept kept doing stuff like again how i mentioned that the the sabatista reminded them like this shit has been going on pretty much non-stop like america declaring war in the world kind of non-stop it's the forever war yeah it is called an indisputable the the internal colonialism i mean like it did for for both uh you know compliment and insult the ass is a liberal like this oh yeah oh yeah he was a massive fan of uh

benito juarez who was the one who shot uh maxi miliano in the in the head pretty cool in the heart i think so he actually rebelled against him like a couple times but uh he kind of pasted over that and elevated him to uh to to to national hero he'd like to talk about how he was the first indigenous president of mexico that thing that's not been repeated since and uh and juarez was the liberal like he he was the biggest liberal and uh portfolio like that but also like like a little bit of you know giant uh monopoly giant state formation you know the kind of he was really trying to be hit with times like he was not the habsburg but he probably like approached more the the current habsburg style like of holy roman empire type shit

like post prussia type shit but because he was a modernizer he loved railroads right this is true yeah he um he and that's why the railways were nationalized under um his administration and and you know so nationals de mexico de mexico was uh uh you know tasked with massively expanding the railway network in mexico um and also they they turning it into a sort of coherent railroad system and also providing social services by rail which is i i always thought was interesting all right yeah but down here we see this is a boxcar it says ferretienda uh kind of supo right what this is is a rolling grocery store if your community was too small to have a brick and mortar grocery store uh the train would drop off this boxcar once a week and there was a guy who

lived in there and he would sell you groceries see this is this is like uh priato toti right as you have like on the one hand you have progress in the form of the train car full of groceries comes to your town on the other hand you have order and it's like if you say anything bad about the train car that comes to your town we will shoot you in the fucking heads and let's get groceries yeah exactly and for video is like the the preferred avatar for like the outright weirdo in mexico like of course he fucking is just all over the place like well we have some guys who use classical statues like you it's so fucking cringe how can you be mexican and say and like quote sargon of a cat who in the fucking does that in 2022 they had some uh they had hospital trains as well

they had uh there was a very extensive passenger network um sorry was this idea designed by us like is that uh the social service you need put it on the train put it on the train it comes to you um and this nationalized network it sort of provides you know passenger and freight services for 50 years in the late 80s the government was sort of interested in modernizing and electrifying parts of the network and that started with a line from mexico city to guadalajara right and they put up electrical wires for electric trains as far as um santiago de caretaro how do i get it on caretaro okay and they started running electric freight trains this is the most modern freight system in yeah that's the thing he was serious about being modern like yeah he was producing his

own guns and they looked like modern guns like he he was on yeah yeah yeah sorry i'm just a brief brief gun diversion yeah okay so how often does this happen in this room exactly yeah the train nerds yeah the gun nerds so this was that you knew this was a good project because the world bank issued several very strongly worded letters against it hey don't hey guys don't don't do that hey stop hurting our feelings no electric trains in north america we only want trains that travel between slave has seen this please do not use electricity for this they had some signaling issues though just some teething issues which resulted in two head-on collisions in two months which destroyed six brand new locomotives and killed eight engineers and conductors

i'm i'm i'm gonna go fucking like operation gladio on this and go there's there's a world bank guy with a like a brick of plastic explosive behind gladio stuff started happening way later but there's a lot of guys that don't worry about it i i have wanted to do an episode on this one for a while unfortunately a lot of the information about it just disappeared from the internet recently which supports your gladio idea really coincidental so this is sort of coupled with 90s sentiment against you know government-owned enterprises prompted the government to privatize the uh nationalists the mexico meiko and they sold it off in portions to mostly two companies one was called feromex which was owned by Grupo mexico meiko and uh union pacific and the other company was

Kansas City southern de mexico which is obviously owned by Kansas City southern which is now being merged into canadian pacific so canadian pacific de mexico this is this is the 90s right so if this is the 90s this is just in time for for nafta right surely a time when uh since we're opening a shitload of mexican factories you want to have a shitload of mexican trains to bring mexican goods into the united states and you damn well don't want them to be run by the government this is also when you know the uh the rolling grocery stores stop all the passenger trains were were stopped there are no inner city passenger trains in mexico the the government instituted a policy of fuck you buy a car um and um yeah so

the private is and the first thing that Kansas City southern de mexico did when they inherited this new electric operation right takes down all the fucking wires down the wires yeah and put diesel locomotives on so they had clearance for double stack container trains i bet that also didn't have to deal with the fact that the the electricians union in mexico is way more left leaning than the than the pamex union the oil union i bet that didn't have anything to do with it yeah this brief history of uh uh nationality meiko but we also have to talk about railways in the yucatan um seen here in this nightmare map oh dear so this is this was something i went into a real research hole about um and i gotta this would be a good idea for an episode i mean i knew

you would do this yeah yeah so i got a credit here um a a tram website by alan morrison um which i'll link in the description and alan welles in the hispanic american historical review i will also link that in the description for a lot of this information and some of these pictures as well also some pictures i got from uh joseco yokes twitter i'm gonna i got permission and i'll link good twitter yeah pretty cool that we have uh uh so in in in the yucatan you have uh you know you have haciendas right as we mentioned before uh growing henneken which is the type of agave which you can distill but it was usually for rope um and you know rope for whatever you clarified that you could distill it oh yeah if you want tequila go to tequila like yeah it's in the

names you you can distill anything if you're brave enough i'm not sure if that's chemically true but psychologically yeah so you know this is rope for maritime and industrial applications and during the spanish-american war the price of henneken soared to 12 cents a pound that made a lot of people very very rich mostly hacienda owners oh how convenient you know because it is an extractive plantation system right mm-hmm a system of railroads and a use of railroads were very familiar with of you take the thing from the resource location and you put it on a railhead and you move it to a thing you move it to a warehouse yeah you have this sort of the extractive pattern of railway development which is like you go to the extractive industry to the port

you know and you pay no heed to communities or anything like that you know this is not like a railroad for you to go visit your grandmother this is a railroad to bring the shit to the port or bring your grandmother oh yeah oh grandma coal she burned sub right so a lot of these hacienda owners built these small tramways right um and that was to transport the henneken to ports or railheads of the narrow gauge railroad we'll talk about in a second um and because this stuff was so valuable all of a sudden there was a bunch of speculation and massive profiteering right and this resulted in the sort of comically overbuilt tramway network here um by the 1930s in the region around uh merida is it merida merida okay merida fine there's uh there this was the densest railway

network in the world yes 3000 kilometers 3600 kilometers excuse me of these small tramways which was more more tracked than the rest of mexico combined um that's what i can say dude yeah and so these little these little narrow gauge tramways you know they they carried all kinds of stuff you know they carry mostly you know you're uh you're henneken but also uh you know people to go work the fields they carry random goods you know uh most of the cars they ran were informal one-offs you know you just sort of had a platform with some wheels on it but hey throw a thing together like the local like blacksmith does something the kind of looney tunes thing where you just uh move the lower up and down i love my diy railroad yeah i most of them were like they were either powered by

like small gasoline engines or you had a a donkey pull it um but if you were a hacienda owner you also use these railways and you got something fancy so like down here in the corner we see uh this thing captured one of the really nifty street cards of the yucatan this was built at beautiful 6200 woodland avenue philadelphia pennsylvania ha yeah it's right down the street for me um read your your full address out on the air exactly no i'm just in just in question now what's your social security number i used to have the social security number and i don't anymore uh so anyway don't worry about that hacienda you know this is uh this is a hacienda economy is a you know it's a it's a monocrop economy so it's not very robust it's um so you can't even make good alcohol out of it

it's just a cash row you don't need to make good alcohol you just need to make alcohol so during a great depression demand for hennikin dropped significantly and before world war two there was a worse development which was synthetic violence right so um now you didn't need hennikin to make rope you needed plastic right uh so a lot of these haciendas started to fail and the tramways failed with them right you know there's no one there was no one there there's no reason for them anymore but they were not ripped up they were abandoned in place and since most of them used public rights away they sort of became informally in public ownership right yeah as you've already established it's easy to like build uh like a little tram car then

you know someone's gonna do that yeah so this became the world's largest anarchist railroad you you take a picnic table and you put some wheels on it and you put a little motor on it and you haul it around with the donkey and you you can go anywhere of rules yeah rules so some people ran these as like fixed route trams that charge fares other people used them as private vehicles you know if your house was next to the tramway you just lifted it off the tracks and parked it in front of your house if you met someone going the other way on a one-track railroad you just pulled the cart off the tracks and let them pass right and of course you know this is uh the tramway you have the miracle of steel wheels on

steel rails so very large weights could be carried with very little power right you know or strain on the donkey or whatever right you're telling me that didn't invent the Mayan hyperloop yeah it's like a shit load of donkeys there was a guy on Jeopardy the other day who worked for hyperloop and I did so there was there's also still a niche market for hennequin out there and yeah artisanal rope yeah artisanal rope or bad tequila um and like fashion stuff like that if you want to if you want to like really really do cultural appropriation right and by right i mean really wrong is uh just steal the the original design and then steal the original material oh there you go that's like that's like it's smarter not harder or working harder not smarter

god damn it working faster not so tired i'm tired we're hard to know to attempt to remember the friend sort of smarter not harder there we go yeah since there's still a niche market from the sources i had some of these tramways remained in use at least as late as 2002 um huh hope as far until they're closed in the aftermath of 9 11 never again is the door actually wrecked up sob a whole bunch of the area um there are nine eleven of hurricanes but i'm not sure um they also had narrow gauge steam railways right because you can't ship stuff over tramway by long distances um they're about a half a dozen companies that build half a dozen lines in the late uh 19th century white narrow gauge just because it's cheaper it was during the narrow gauge fad of the late

19th century where people were like well if you make the rail slightly closer together we can still go about the same speed but have tighter corners so it's cheaper right okay i mean i have nothing that's like the idea that you can build a railroad on a fad is very funny yes it was uh a narrow gauge is very much a late 19th century fad you would think it would be earlier but now it was later but um fucking railroad hipsters i'm honestly surprised that naya is not a monorail it could have easily been they like just absolute oil salesmen around here one of the weird things about it is that it was mostly financed by local yakutan businessmen as opposed to being financed by like american uh capitalists or european ones because yeah i'm

surprised there isn't like a white guy in a waistcoat who's got like hennigan monopoly you know yeah it's um it it's the narrow we think yeah the narrow gauge railways are mostly locally financed as opposed to the the normal way you finance a railroad is your brother's cousin's uncle's roommate is going on a trip to europe and you hang up hand them a briefcase full of bonds and you say hey yeah why are you over there can you try and sell these um i just like for americans at the time yakutan looked like underdeveloped and they didn't want to invest there and we didn't we didn't have like a giant chinese investing all over the place doing kind of these kinds of things yet

yeah i guess so yeah so you had you had this sort of whole three-foot narrow gauge railroad system on this map those are the ones in light uh gray um as opposed to the ones in a medium gray dark gray yeah the dark the dark lines are the tramways so it was mostly a three-foot narrow gauge system except a tramway from merida to progresso up here which was the port right hi this is just an post-production i meant to say standard gauge railroad here not a tramway it was a standard gauge railroad from merida to progresso okay back to the show um release all name yeah and these these lines were all combined in 1902 into the unit you know those the yakutan you know united yakutan railways you know and there was this cohesive railway system in the yakutan

finally you can see down here this is a picture from 1962 transloading uh goods from the tramway onto the narrow gauge train which still has a steam locomotive if it works why change it you know this is true um by 1950 the nationalist in mexico had completed a line to compete and the system was slowly converted to standard gauge but also they just pruned a lot of lines right they're just like i had it it's too expensive to convert these fuck them right um you start getting modern improved roads in the area in the 1960s you know they just start to get the bulldozers start run them through the jungle you know uh run over some pumas right uh in the 90s they put in the really modern like um you know two lane four lane highways right yeah that was like a big

national infrastructure project wasn't it it's like national route i don't even remember what a route it was 180 i want to say um like the one that goes end to end um you know and once the modern highways come in of course passenger trains are discontinued fuck you buy a car buy a car um um and the yucatan railroad has unironically said that to the average i do want to put that out let's see if you learn abba leaning out a window yeah he was he was leaving out a window wearing abba that's just true the real thing that happened today the yucatan railroad was never taken over by the nationalized railroad but it was in privatization it was sold off to the orange menace genesee in lioming okay um the hurricane i direct a whole bunch of track and

they filed to abandon the line in 2008 another company uh came and bought it and rescued it which currently operates it um another fun fact is that the original uh yucatan railways uh five of their steam locomotives after they were retired in the 60s uh Walt disney world was looking for steam locomotives no way the magic railway are they mad the the magic kingdom railway and so all five of those are from uh unidos the yucatan oh i did not know that and uh they are they're also all baldwin products made right here in philadelphia um justin once again proving your your value is the only one of us who does research yeah sometimes i do every every like fourth bonus episode i'm supposed to write

so that's sort of so the state of the railway today is um oof no not good is that what it says the shareholders tablet does uh i mean look at the pictures it's pretty oof so the line from marita to compete and then further south it goes to i forget what the port is there progressor or was no different it's like down in like the the very bottom of like sort of the bowl you know hey hold on there's um uh but uh but uh but google maps we could honestly just upload like an hour and a half of ross trying to find stuff noises we can play jill uh jill guesser kawakus kawakus Pennsylvania yeah right next to the wingo dam there's uh rail there there's uh connections to the rest of the mexican railway network

and a rail ferry that goes to mobile alabama um a nice little bar but they only have much light yes so this is sort of the the state of the railroad at the moment right which is uh yeah basically mexican railroad uh in the like collective consciousness of the country is for one thing and one thing only and it's to transport immigrants to the united states like in if you ever see someone mentioned trains it's because of that uh the the most famous there's a famous train called la vestia that just has like an unimaginable death count just horror uh so that sticks on the mind and uh until this pass couple decades yeah and and so you're you're looking at a railroad that maintains some of its narrow gauge

characteristics like here this is in campeche you can see it runs through people's front yards right um and then this is in hustle chacon over here uh you can see like there's your formal apology to oh i'm not even gonna try to pronounce that one like um like i said mexicans will lie to you here you can see a unique method of weed control which is to just run the train through the brush there you go this it looks abandoned but you can see the railhead is shiny which means they have run a train here uh several times recently um just put a put a mower blade on the front like a cowcatcher yeah um then there's this is uh in uman which i think is just south of marida i forget exactly uh you can see this is sort of uh you know that there's grass

everywhere um and then in marida proper again this is the main line and you can sort of see this is it's all overgrown this is not well maintained track the weird thing these these photos are mostly taken in 2020 2021 based on google street view um and all this track was renewed in 2015 or 2014 and they just did not do any maintenance on it in that interim time yeah because the original idea for the train was not uh from this government it came from the past more conservative uh governments yeah like in 2008 uh train speeds on this line this several hundred kilometer line we're down to five hundred five kilometers an hour down to a mere 500 kilometers an hour um all right so you have you you you have this very ill maintained rail system

you can't use it for shit because it's so slow it's mostly you can only like really ship bulk non-perishable commodities like i think in marida the biggest customer there's a cement plant there's a power plant somewhere near i forget the name of the town um yeah and they don't lead to places that white people care about like it's all ecstasy and thus uh all indigenous towns and like there's no they sometimes lead uh to to places that you know have pyramids and shit but most of them are not even excavated like yeah it's just a famous one you can go to a sissy but it's the coal plant area of it you know yeah like if if it's not like the name of a city that would show up in civilization six it's not going to have people are not going to care

yeah and of course there's no passenger trains right you know and this is you're not even using this for like uh any kind of perishable freight you can't ship um anything that is timely at all you can't ship you know they they just let this thing really go to shit um and of course you know that's bad because you got more trucks on highways it's more expensive to have various consumer goods if you don't have a railroad but luckily hi it's justin uh so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to people are annoyed by these so let me get to the point we have this thing called patreon right the deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month uh sometimes

it's a little inconsistent but you know it's two bucks you get what you pay for um it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns pickup trucks or pickup trucks with guns on them the money we raise through patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one anyway that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month uh join at patreon.com forward slash wtyp pod do it if you want or don't it's your decision and we respect that back to the show uh a man came to the rescue we an hour in and we begin the subject of this episode yes i don't have to leave the middle of this one yeah um this is andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

president of mexico and decided you know what we're gonna modernize this railroad yeah we can we can just call him amlo for short i think yeah everyone does that yeah well actually conservatives like to call him lopez because that sounds more uh lower class barak who's saying about oh yeah they do that they we got it's really funny kids it's not even his first last name but like i mean it is his first line they don't use obrador because that sounds cool they use lopez because that sounds i mean i gotta say it sounds more mexican and so that's how the the far right in mexico is just very exciting and and and i'm always like on the left but in a way that is like now perhaps fatally compromised he's always been all over the place but he's definitely gotten worse lately

like he if if if 2012 amlo had won the elections i it would have been way harder to complain about these kind of things but by the time he got there uh he by the time he got there he inherited a lot of the stuff that like neoliberalist neoliberalism had become inevitable and uh i think he bought in like he he stopped fighting against it kind of the other thing is that like mexican presidents lately really like to have a big sort of ribbon-cutting thing they love to have a big lot of that like when he was uh when he governed mexico city he made like a whole second uh like a second highway over the bloops thingy you know for traffic stuff but i think yeah i i actually don't know how to say that in english huh well yeah he he

inaugurated that and that was his big project and uh he was kind of it was kind of popular kind of the but yeah he's always like infrastructure projects that he can carry on and crucially his predecessor as as president and also sometime wife murderer enrique peña nieto his his deal was that he his big project was that he wanted to open a new airport for mexico city right oh yeah and uh instead of doing that you can like you can you can you know put two fingers up at him by doing this different thing instead yes oh of course he he that was one of the only campaign process uh regarding projects that he kept because he actually promised not to do the trend my year he for a while i think it changed me campaign uh and then there's a lot of other

projects that he outright promised not to do that he's actually doing uh but the the airport was the big one and the one that uh if he hadn't done there definitely would have been like huge fucking protest and uh but he he kept his promise and then moved the airport like five towns over right fantastic the other side of the lake so rather than do a simple rehabilitation of the existing line l train maya was uh going to be this long-distance electric rail that would go all the way around the peninsula and hit everywhere that was important which meant tourist stuff mostly um but and also uh one big thing was it was going to connect to the one uh the train lane that's also being built and it's also really

controversial that connects uh the both sides of the oceans like uh one between betta cruise and and the port of salinas cruise uh so it was going to be like uh for tourists and like a second panel canal and like all these kind of things um the other thing which is interesting about this is this is the first um what do you might call state-of-the-art long-distance mixed traffic railroad built in the americas since uh probably the milwaukee road pacific extension in 1909 jesus so you can see why he wanted to like that if you read that out loud that sounds cool yeah i have to train good that's what we know yes that train is good you'd have high speed electric trains you'd also have you'd have provisions for freight trains right um and

they don't really talk about the freight trains to to my knowledge that's not something that's something they're interested in despite the fact the freight trains are already there you know i yeah like because they're already there to also be in the waka the trans ismic train that's gonna be like just in the to the to the far side of the stranger there all right yeah there's that well there's already yeah there's the railroad down here which was very successful before the panama canal was built i don't know if they could revive that uh it's it's simple around yeah amla goes out on the balcony says listen it's simple we ask we order the mexican navy to blow up the panama good idea yeah fine oh but then wait actually we managed to level the whole thing now there's no

locks fuck i think he would more likely just settle the panama canal with mexican soldiers like just like a general point to get the panama canal all right get in yeah because he's already doing like some locks of the panama canal he's already doing some projects with other countries in the in central america and that have deep ties with the tenaya because like another selling point that some is sometimes said out loud depending on the audience is immigration control yeah because this this covers all of mexico's southern border more or less that's just true yeah and like if you just put a big fucking train across it that makes it a lot harder to you know cross the border and also as we'll get into he's just yeah he's just giving it all to the army

and like listen amla is like i've been in his mind he's way more leftist than he is and uh but he has always been he was great friends with trump they really got along together and he's not friends with biden he doesn't like biden at all well again because i generally think it's because he thought trump was funnier which is sometimes he's right like and but they did negotiate a lot of stuff with regards to like immigration and train maya was a big part of it so one of the issues with this project so this project um you know it's a big project that requires it's one of the biggest construction projects probably in the western hemisphere right now um it was of course democratically decided upon because it was well

it was it was unfair undemocratically decided then the un made them go no you have to you have to fucking let people vote on this shit and they didn't do it it's genius announced to much fanfare in september 2018 and put up to a referendum on december 15 2019 and before we have specs 92 percent of voters in chiapas tibasco yucatan campete in kintana ru all approved and nothing was bad and there was nothing bad about that election and and and it was completely the legitimate right yeah especially if you look at the the voting uh cards they look at the back of a serial card we'll see them we'll see them we'll put a picture of it later um now one of the issues of course is that only two percent of eligible voters voted Jesus Christ yeah and like of those

two percent they were all sort of amlos various party cronies oh no i wish well the thing about amlos he's not even that good at what he thinks he's doing uh with regards to like controlling the whole country like he his dream is that morina controls like uh everything in mexico right but his biggest project is ran almost entirely by conservative fail-sons like a local leader or like a governor from some of the conservative parties and you have a son that like you had enough money because you like did a lot of corruption so you have enough money to send your your kid to like i don't know an economics school in chicago yeah he starts calling himself like hank or something oh no they love to they fucking love that there's a shit lot of banks and

uh so you send them over you come back and that's how you trans you transform from the nationalistic corruption to neoliberal that uh you know you you you do the you do the finish ed you get the chicago boys and uh but chicago boys like they went to cool schools and they were like smart at economics and whatever like they they they try to kill people to get money these are the fail-sons and that's why they're in charge of like shitty little parts of the project and they are all conservatives like trying to pretend they're not uh they're because like morina is basically failed to the realm of with people from other parties uh that was his strategy to control the whole of mexico to just like just paint paint them uh paint them uh purple yeah do like a

pri too and they accept pri too except this time i'm the institution oh yeah and like it's really funny because he he uses the term the quarta transform on the fourth transformation and he's referring to the the you know first the independence then the revolution then the national nationalization and then uh we are the new the fourth version of this but it tracks more with the four times pri has rebranded so it's that's one of the most the hugest cell phones in history or maybe just an admission maybe he just didn't give a shit mr police i gave you all the clues yeah because i was from pri like he was in the pri he he then founded a pri then he became uh the founder of morina because he didn't get the nomination from pri

god well we also have a we have a photo if we go to the the next slide here of um your boy amla asking for asking for the mayan pantheon's permission to build the railway and i'm waiting for an answer no if i were in the mayan pantheon i would ask for some significant revisions to this project i would ask for specs at the very least yeah i would give me the specs yeah like you're seeing a like a chuck ball in like a hives uh with a clipboard like yeah you can't fucking read it for again dude this is very difficult to find specs on this project yeah it was hard it's like a strangely secretive yeah because like most of the specs we found were specs from the private companies uh that handled like 60 of the train the other 40

percent is owned by the army and they're not they're not getting the specs out oh no yeah and if you're like looking for like where are the tracks actually going to go that's under lock and key that's classified and you know until the bulldozers are knocking your house down yeah yeah yeah absolutely they they just released uh uh saying they they nationalized a huge swath of land they did not say which which part of it of course because that's they that's national security great so for your informed voters they did give a nice pamphlet with their well while you were voting which had this delightful map it's so it's so charming yes the the train is going to bring you every service that you need uh like end to end is used to do back in the day uh all of your

problems will be solved also um you have to like remember that this is a sort of a a vote that's being imposed upon people who may not always have good spanish and it's only in spanish of course and it was just like uh mostly voted by people who owned big parts of the land like uh right even the the the collective part of it like uh you know there's there's ups and downs in the in the hedosystem and uh so so if even in the most idealized let's say there's one town out of the hundreds towns that was had relatively good attendance and voting uh record even there the only people who were actually explain what the fuck was going to happen were the people who controlled land not the villagers not the townspeople

so the even even the most uh some some of some of the people were told this was just an informative visit like they were just gonna tell you how cool this train was gonna be the even though they had jackall information well i love i love that if you look on the top of the polling paper it says participative exercise which to me makes it sound like election it's a school project yeah i was allowed to say i would look at this and say yeah i support this in principle but you know i want some specifics it looks like when you want a school's vote for for presidents and just to like make an exercise and see if our school likes more uh playing them more than trump sorry the marketing who is this train for uh it turns out this is the first train developed

exclusively for instagram thoughts instagram thoughts need trains too i i you know i i agree with that obviously but like the marketing is kind of you know especially the english language marketing you know yeah i would say it's for tiktokers from up to mexico exactly it's like well you got a cancun now you can take this train you can go take a picture yourself on top of the pyramid you know yeah like trying to like find a way to to sell uh you know archaeological sites to people who would otherwise have no interest because you need their money yeah people who would usually just stay in cancun and get drunk and uh like drunk on a pyramid the people in charge of this marketing campaign it's been

like a succession of transphobic gay white dudes like i think they're they're in like their third or fourth right now they i don't know why they they exclusively hire gators and job qualifications uh must must be transphobic not sure why this is in here but we're not removing it maybe they think it's gonna attract attract british tourists i yeah the turf maya fuck i'm still a little for my podcast it's weird that you know you because there's there's definitely benefits to this project you know you you'd be able to bring in you know a whole bunch of goods very cheap and like even even tourism like there's there's there's a place for like ethical tourism probably but this isn't it it's definitely not it it's definitely not it you

know this is like i yeah we're we're we're gonna we're gonna allow you to take better selfies through our 1200 kilometer railroad and like they there are so many problems with tourism right now before this shit's going on like the the amount of ecological devastation that it has brought like some of the worst tourism like there's there's uh islands that used to be pristine that now glow in the dark because of the fucking oil and low and lotions that tourists put on themselves and i knew i knew i shouldn't have fucking emptied out a bunch of these glow sticks all over the beach but what are you gonna do eat them i gotta eat them and like there's it's that global warming are absolutely destroying the coral reef and that's that doesn't help with those hurricanes

and you got like a lot of this which is very explicitly oriented towards tourism like the locations of some of the stations oh yeah right so this is uh the chit chin it's a station right which is uh ancient line in the city i can't figure out where the trains are uh i go right through the the uh the city uh well yeah i guess if it went right through through the town i i don't understand i don't like it when i see a renderer the train station i don't know where the trains are you know this this kind of indicates to me that the trains are not the focus here you actually what they do is it's it's like a roller coaster they use chit chin it's uh and the temple they use it as a lift hill actually yeah the only cool parts of the train are

the designs by architects and they clearly don't give you a single shit about trains or or mayans like well well i think if you're if you're trying to like provide access to an archaeological site you might want the uh the modern infrastructure to be subtle you know i i kind of i kind of like the big serpent like um uh like overhang i kind of like this i think this is good i yeah i mean it fits the theme the the chit chin it's uh that's where the mayans imported kettlesquaddle and transforming them into kukulkan like but the thing i'm getting here is that you get these renders and you can't figure out where the station actually is or how it's oriented that's true what what are the uh where are the tracks going to go how is this going to impact the archaeological

site you know and it's certainly using a hell of a lot of land for you know a train station which should be fairly simple because that's the point of the project to a certain part uh the the real marketing uh beyond the you know immigration thing and the the freight train thing that they don't really talk about the other part that they always do mention and that's the one part that there's uh the un absolutely fucking loves is the development part the the making every single station a town uh just they really fucking hate the jungle they absolutely do and the the the amlos right hand man who he faded a little bit from the political scene recently but he was the big pusher for this uh was alfonso romo who's uh he's he's connected to monsanto

by the way uh and uh he the good folks over in monsanto yes yeah the the the the proper left and uh he one actual quote of his was we're gonna make this project to take the the the indians out of their teepees Jesus oh right yeah you said that earlier yeah alfonso romo was is straight up like for fear for fear of him like but from the left it's absolutely fucking nuts he's super fucking racist super fucking homophobic and he was a bit bankroller of amlos very of amlo for a long while and uh he's again he kind of retired from the project and instead they got like an army of white twins to run the product uh the marketing and uh so so yeah he he got him just give rich guys power that's fucking sick do whatever they fucking want because like

one of amlos big things was uh he was he the the modern is always scared of coups for some reason like they they listen i get it we we saw what happened to evo like but amlos not even close to that so he was really worth uh that's probably was the the first two years of his uh of his presidency was just obsessing over that kind of stuff and just uh assuring the united states that he was definitely not gonna do too many leftist things if any and that he was definitely gonna do the so yeah a big part of this is uh some like rearranging rearranging how the the the territory works getting rid of a lot of the heroes getting rid of privatizing a lot of shit and the parts that are not privatized are gonna go straight to the army because that's one of the

creepiest parts of of amlo and one of the most contradictory because if he's so fucking paranoid about who's god damn why would you give everything to the army because he's gonna be the first leftist in history to stop uh being couped by being nice to the army and then when the cia tells them what to do this general order will be like actually he's my best friend and like i really like him yeah and of course the army shot in the back by some cia i'm screaming i'm not gonna be praetorian guarded i'm not going to be praetorian guarded and every single x president is constantly in twitter trying to huan goi doh this shit like he he and he really makes it easy he constantly gives power to the military the the the airport that was canceled was gonna be private but now it's

run by the army the instant i was here what yeah it's a military airbase that's gonna be expanded for some commercial flights that's that was his response and uh like the the mexican army is massively corrupt and massively infiltrated by the cartels and uh so it's it's really worrying uh to see them get like they're gonna get the revenue from a lot of these stations straight up it's gonna go straight to the army and uh it's it's it's kind of the biggest betrayal of his campaign because he what he ran on getting the military out of the streets because that's one of the the the the past percent started the war on drugs in mexico and brought us like that was just a war level right yeah like hugs not bullets yeah hugs not bullets that was his catchphrase and then he militarized the police

he created the gordon national listen listen i need i need these level four plates so that i can hug you more effectively so yeah he uh he uh militarized the police created the gordon national which basically was made from elements from the police from the army the navy la la la la and uh that that is basically the the only thing that's gonna oh because he's also like for someone who hates neoliberalism he fucking loves austerity hmm and the only part that did not get austerity was the army but you can't you can't have the budget of of his special boys maybe he just like maybe he's like me maybe he'd like really wanted to be a soldier when he was a kid and he never quite got over it oh and his thing was the no his one was but he was the only politician that is not

corrupt in his mind and uh i i actually like that i don't think he personally is corrupt maybe his answer uh the the but the and definitely a fanzoramo but the he he's obsessed with corruption which has always worked for the left just as lula like fighting corruption is a sure way to not get anyone angry at you and definitely always works i especially being with the army corruption is always such an abstract term it seems like you can mean anything you want it to mean it's a way to to water down all your political beliefs and just blame corruption and say corruption instead of capitalism if you're feeling spicy you can say neoliberalism yes and like yeah making the army own the entire fucking country is not very neoliberal it's like really bad idea what's

what's the sort of like metal tortilla that someone has dropped on the ground here this is this is uh the station at to loom um and this is uh another one of these very fancy renders they produce with the project um which is getting some international attention once again i mean one of the things that's frustrating about a lot of the renderings here is that they are the only information about the design we have available you have no information about where is this station out as an interact with its surroundings where there's no choice for the NFT project yes you know you don't know you you know all this stuff is obfuscated right um and of course we have um i'm i'm deeply curious about this slide because the notes for this one just say

something something bat volcano oh okay so here's the thing with the bat volcano i'm gonna say here's the thing with the bat volcano like that's a normal thing i'm sorry yucca the peninsula has the best names like one of the stations is gonna go over a place called the temple of doom you can see in this screenshot on this slide is that the train right now the highway produces enough like noise that the bats in the volcano are not exactly happy and uh yeah so because when they build these highways with basically like uh really underpaid people and uh oh before so they could stop using the the tram tracks built with basically slate labor and uh they didn't give a single shit about the environment obviously but this one's supposed to because

they were announcing it was gonna be so fucking green and shit and uh but the train track is gonna cause so much fucking noise that it's gonna basically make this volcano filled with bats in habitat so it's just gonna bring that's gonna repeat itself over and over through the whole track system because it's it's so fucking gross one of the the the the guy that was in charge of the whole project before uh this year uh rocali pons had a quote that said uh we had too many fat jaguars we need uh we have uh we have uh four people and fat jaguars and we need to reverse it oh i i i fucking yeah i i put a thing about the fat jaguars or jaguars that's right yeah please don't come out whistle i don't have a fat guy but like it was really funny because like one of the one of

the promotional things that amblo put into twitter was uh they saw jaguar swimming away from them in one of the visits and and it was like oh look at the majesty of our territory but i was just imagining alfonso romo shooting the floor and going like dance dance like it's really fucking gonna devastate a lot of places with cool as names like the battle cano yeah absolutely anytime you try and find like specifics about where the tracks are going it's like holy shit you put it there yeah and like all the things we started talking about how the the floor was car stick and like there's a shit load of connected interconnected uh underground lakes and shit and most of them are tourist destinations because let me tell you another

sort of cool skill they are super cool to just go underground into a giant pool that has like like carvings and uh and and like there's some of them that have like buried treasure and shit like it's some of these can swim in apparently yeah you can go with uh with fucking scuba diving and see like all ceramics and coins and shit like it's and skulls like it's it is the the the most stereotypical uh tourist destination ever and but also it's giant underground caves that you're gonna put a train on top of and create giant vibrations on one of the fucking thinnest and like not specifically hard grounds yeah and yeah already highways are get completely fucked by this by this rain and you want to build a train that well i mean we don't even have fucking specs for what we have what we

do have for it is like oh yeah three pictures yeah we have we have some uh we do have some specs on the trains which i thought were generally a very odd choice uh for the folks who went out that was Alstom the uh french company they beat cif which is the spanish company uh really funny i wonder how it happened by the way did you know that Alstom was accused of corruption in Lithuania in 2018 that they bribed a lot of officials that sounds about right yeah awesome i bet that just happened in Lithuania they fucked up the asala expresses yes they did they made them four inches too wide and and as a result they couldn't use their tilting capability in the only area where that was needed i also do a bunch of stuff at the goal on heights if i should be doing oh but but but

the train has a first sonar it does god damn it you can see you can see yeah that's what is targeting the nineties kids that watched beast wars that's right that's right world's worst animorphs here lore from a puma to an Alstom extrapolus um and the extrapolus i thought was a very strange choice for this train because it's a very strange name for that train it's a commuter train right nobody's fucking commuting on this thing it's a tourist it's fucking wild if they were using this kind of train for like actual development run and consented by the people there it would make more sense but i think think like there are five fucking memos that no one saw like hey we're doing that calling at least i'm here yeah because it's uh you know your commuter train it's designed for

stop accelerate to a hundred miles an hour cruise for two minutes stop start again it's incredibly overpowered for sort of long distance cruising i don't know what the intention is here if they're gonna build you know because if they were stopping at every little town sure by this train but they're not they're not they're just you know sort of cruising right and we definitely don't have specs on the freight trains and we yeah i i suspect they're just gonna use well that's the other interesting thing is you have um they're using the european train control system as the signaling system here which no north american freight locomotives are compatible with as of yet i don't know if they're just gonna fit extra boxes into them or they come with chinese ones because

like i thought i saw that yeah uh comrade blackwork was very interested in investing in uh the train maya for a while well i i mean the issue is for for any freight service to be like viable on this line you would need something that's compatible with everything else in north america right you know so i i don't know what they're doing there if they might just you know run them under some kind of special i i'm not familiar with railroad operating rules in mexico um but they may need some kind of special how could you do that and also this doesn't look very green like where's the electric part what the fuck so they're all um so the long distance train is all diesel and then the short distance trains are um dual mode so they run under electric wires

in the electrified portion but there's also non electrified portions because they cut back the budget um i am yeah exactly that's such a classic british move like we will absolutely do like diesel electric trains because they're like part of a thing they're trying to do like brit two british things at once they want to make like the colonialist train and lonely let's try oh well no there's a lot of transphobia in in marina let me tell you and uh oh with connections to your guys by the way julie vindo has a bunch of friends in marina and uh yeah and uh the but the no they they want to do the the african trains at the same time that they do the the privatizing the train and making austerity they're doing british both in britain

and in the colony at the same time it's amazing astounding and uh what one of the weird things is like i can't there's there's something you do not see in any of the documentation which is what are the services going to be like because i could see like okay you have a frequent train that goes from marita to cancun that would make a lot of sense right um but you know and it came like every 30 minutes throughout the day that again this would make a lot of sense it'd be the best system rail system in north america period right uh but they don't say they're gonna do that they're only buying 17 train sets which what for yeah for and and like i don't know four or five of them for the long distance eight hour slow tourist cruise train right this is not actually uh

something which is going to provide you know a great like actual usable service for the people live there it's very very tourist oriented for the passenger segment the freight segment who knows um i think the freight center is still gonna be like in negotiations with like big big big companies like maybe they try to get into the belt and roadship like yeah but that's gonna again amblo wants to be make the u.s happy and maybe that doesn't make me happy uh they're also like again it's clear that the trains are not the point of this yeah the point is to get basically some uh cool architectural shit around tourist places so like set fail signs that probably sign this contract with allister can like just get rich of uh making your vmb's and uh and the the other part

is the part control by the army curiously is further south curiously getting closer to places controlled by the sapatistas that's gotta be a coincidence right i don't do it i think i think i just looked this up before we started the uh the podcast i think the whole thing will now be controlled by the army yeah but they'll make them be nice in the northern segment oh my god but it's even for tourists like that's kind of fucking weird like i don't know how much like good vibes for the kind of crowd that this circus duo leap had made a tiktok there uh for the kind of like breath uh front row and uh anti-masker uh lives into loom and and uh can goon i don't know if they were gonna like super fucking like getting into a train surrounded by

fucking guys with machine guns so it's okay they're americans they inherently trust the army okay but these are brown people with machine guns maybe oh maybe oh yeah yeah maybe i can sympathy with the wrong people but i do i do feel bad for the like 19 year old mexican private who has to have a bunch of like bros from cancun cough in his face all day oh my god jesus well they're also distributing the vaccines with the army so they're probably fine everything is the army around here yeah when when everything you have is the army everything looks like i don't know i'm fucking war i guess oh my god i i have no fucking clue what's gonna happen after i'm i'm gonna leave office with that so this is um this is this is another uh like

interesting uh thing so talking about the right-of-way um this is the Heschelchakan town we talked about earlier where you saw those weeds uh i took that on the photo before is from google street view right about here and you can see the right-of-way being driven through up here already because this is all already under construction um and the oh yeah the rail line they want to build through here goes right down a street oh right and they've decided what the kids rather than build a bypass which would be not difficult and you know you might have to take one or two houses no we'll just build straight through we're not even going to build them a train station um see see see is a street with a mural of shagovar on it

all right trains going through here at 120 miles an hour yeah they're just building straight through all these towns they're not even trying to like you know and they're not putting stations in these towns they're just going straight fucking through and they're not even trying to identify like maybe we could do a right-of-way that would have fewer you know house takings so on and so forth i this the only places where they are doing that is where they've been forced by lawyers like by townspeople coming together and getting some environmentalist lawyers to please save my fucking house i'd rather not have my house bulldozed with the train yeah and like this was always gonna happen which is part of why it's so fucking stupid to even even if these

what they were using like the cool trains and everyone like the train twitter could just absolutely fucking dig into this and love it even then like how the fuck are you gonna use high speed rail when you have to do these kind of turns like because you're bulldozing over towns and towns are one thing the other part is like all the archaeological sites that haven't been explored oh yeah they're tripping over with with uh do you want to know my favorite fact that i discovered from this oh for sure the the the national archaeological institute um they announced how many artifacts they've discovered so far in the course of building this but they will not say what they are where they found them or what they're worth which i i just i really appreciate that kind

of secrecy um one of my one of my theories about why they're using these commuter train type trains is that they they have decided they're just going to use the existing right of way so they're going to have to slow down and speed up a whole lot yeah that's probably what's going to end up happening gonna be erotizing a shit to drive oh my god yeah and and and if you're on a sleeper train that's like going because one of these is going to be a sleeper train and if you're like overnight it's just like you go from 99 miles an hour to 10 miles an hour to back up to 99 miles an hour i'm sure that'll be great literally the only the only way this could be worse if it was not the flattest place around yeah i that's the bizarre thing but that's the thing when you get

further south it does get kind of like mountainy all of these issues where they're doing all this eminote domain straight through towns they're just taking people's houses you could build a bypass really easily and not have these issues and they've simply chosen not to do that you simply want to have the issues right also if you think if you think back uh to the the the openings there only where am low like asked for asked for the god's permission to do this thing at the speech he gave after that he said that uh the railroad wouldn't uproot a single tree a single tree he said that even if they only use the right of ways they wouldn't have to do that because most of them have fucking trees if they if they use the existing right if they if they all the idea of keeping all

the trees but none of the people because the thing about am low is that he is a bosmer a wood elf and as such he like religiously rejects the prospect of harming a tree if you just brought the existing railroad up to a state of good repair to just run freight trains on you would have to tear down you would have to cut down like tens of thousands of trees just to get a good you know 20 feet on each side of the rail uh center just for basic rail operations that were relatively modest it's fucking not that he even started to say that because the entire point of this is to bulldoze the jungle like the the making new towns you can't they're not gonna build fucking tree houses we talk about the actual the actual process of making this railroad yes oh yeah so here we see

some of the progress which is already done on this railroad i it's remarkable how quickly this went from referendum to right of way acquisition to actually it's like a phone call press isn't that yes i i i i like to i i sort of compared to california high speed rail which um was actually approved by voters substantial portion of voters not two percent of them um and uh that was in 2009 and as of now in 2022 it is halfway through the first half of the first phase um uh well for instance cross rail is just gonna start running services i think this year so holy crap jeez yes but this is like they were just like once that once the fake referendum passed they were like go go go the whole fucking mother earth ceremony that literally no one like uh they have

the people attending had high visibility bests they were like the they had the keys in the fucking caterpillars like they were ready to bulldoze the jungle like immediately i'm surprised they didn't like break a bottle like of champagne against one of the caterpillars it's it's it's it's remarkable just like how because i would be bad optics wanted to get this done and um ammo has been like uh we got to get this done before 2024 i buy the thing yeah because he wasn't during his time oh exactly he wants to cut the ribbon while he's still uh still president yeah and that's practically impossible right yeah i well he's gonna fucking say he did it and inaugurate like one station to one station we're gonna have literally mary the tukankun

you have um you you you have uh uh like six or seven different construction companies working on this project simultaneously over various sections i didn't put the image on for for that unfortunately but i i you you have i think this is somewhere in the northern part of the peninsula this is one of the towns i think along the existing uh rail line which as you can see they just bulldoze straight through um this is actually a highway right of way being converted to a railroad right of way uh somewhere something which would ordinarily be good yet so this is this is the interesting thing because i i think if you're going if you have to build heavy infrastructure in a jungle a railroad is the best way to do it right i'd rather have an electric railroad than

a highway you know because it's it's it's gonna be quieter it can handle more people per like meet a square foot of uh jungle which has been destroyed but one of the issues with this project in particular is that actually especially on the east coast this is a highway project with the train in the middle but excuse me yeah yeah they don't they don't talk about this part oh my god this is well first of all this is like five different accidents waiting to happen which is very funny uh but like oh my god this is like fucking like one star reviewed uh city skyline's workshop mods right here yes if you could have like um another mod that added just animals constantly getting destroyed just like a red smear of jaguar blood like it only happens

like driving through yucatan is just committing butterfly genocide constantly just your your windshield is opaque by at the end of the drive so yeah this gee they they were just like went for higher targets like i think the train is gonna transform into his fursona when it like achieves certain killstreaks like it needs to consume jaguar blood tactical move tactical move oh i hate the train powered by jaguar blood yeah not it's not especially official i'll tell you that no you know you're really gonna squeeze those things i have to put a bit more jaguar juicer i don't think the jaguar is gonna make it to the tracks with the highway and that's a good point i don't know they're fussed right like especially once they're all on that diet

they're gonna be lean jaguars just gonna be able to hop over uh cars and they're gonna get pasted by the train that's right that's right this is a very funny render because the bridge back here doesn't connect to anything oh yeah just if you wanted to go like a like a wildlife thing i if the cars are the wildlife then yes oh there's cars there we just give the jaguar's cause especially on like the the cancun side of the project there's some really highway brain and torus brain plans like the station's gonna be at the airport as opposed to somewhere downtown right you know this is uh not clear messaging yeah that's something which is very um intended to have some kind of environmental benefit you know this is this kind of i don't know

the thing that like cancun politicians wanted and they snuck it in under the auspices of the trend my cancun politicians i assume have never taken a train before well like here's the thing even now tourism is really fucking things up like when the pandemic started i think the first places that got the virus were first cancun and then random villages in the middle of the jungle because that's where they live that's where the people who work at the hotels live oh that's fucking grim and now we're gonna have even faster delivery yes well you see now now we've come back to the porphyriato as a social service we deliver to your tiny village a rail car full of covid the trade request we give you like fake maya

tourist bullshit made in china uh they already signed that i think like they already made merch oh you can get like a trend maya t-shirt now if you are yeah like some fucking made with cheap plastic and that that it's funny because the again they said we're gonna develop the area and give like the maya's job so they stop living in tepees which they don't but if any of them were like artisans and they made like stuff that tourists actually buy they're gonna be displaced by some gift shop bullshit at every single station it's even more green that they're gonna benefit less from tourism this is literally just for the hotel guys or the airbnb guys yeah we got here some remember those underground rivers we were talking about yes this is oh there's a temple of the

zoom hold on where i think it's it's not under that name but uh this is a segment of the right of way from to loom and this goes north to cancun and you can see it it crosses all of these underground rivers and uh waterways they're playing connect four isn't cast really like a weak rock too so this is something which is it is a solved problem it's just difficult because there's there's a highway that already runs through here and the way they handled it was that anywhere it crosses an underground water ray or cave they just drove a big fucking pile through it right all the way to more solid you know bedrock that's that's a very subtle response did that fuck with the water table it's all i wonder uh well it certainly doesn't look very good if you like the natural beauty of the

cave systems or drinking water yeah because like all these new hotels are gonna need to get the water from somewhere oh man so enjoy it or sell it in a secret water and especially like a whole bunch of these uh a whole bunch of these towns are expected to um double their population because of this project um so they're gonna need a lot more water well mm-hmm back i'm gonna start a desalinator business oh my god well i mean you're gonna you're gonna need it after fucking climate change means that by the time they finish this the sea levels you know i'm two feet higher and i i put this slide towards the end uh but we talked about it a lot

already the army is gonna be in charge of this whole damn thing yes they're gonna own it they're gonna get all of the ticket revenues from it yeah um and basically there's gonna be a bunch of a bunch of uh military bases on Mexico's southern border which means that they can abuse migrants coming from Guatemala better it also means they can fuck with the zapatistas better should they choose to which of course they will also they're gonna resettle those uh those migrants that's why that's where the the twice uh the the two-fold increase in population is going to come from yeah instead of instead of like going north to the united states you are now conscripted to work in a hotel in cancun and you know everyone knows then if that if you live in a village and your promised progress

and more electricity and plumbing and suddenly you're inundated with uh people from another country that doesn't make any kind of social repercussions there's not there's not gonna be like five different new types of racism invented there like gonna have to invent new slurs for Salvadorans yeah they're already hard at work there so um but that's mostly just kind of like this is this is okay okay we gotta have an optimistic slide what what what are in a in a better world an ideal world better world in a better world we have to go up to uh of course newfoundland and labrador that looks like an actual train so like you know what's what's the alternative here like i i i if you if you think that like okay we should have better transportation alternatives but also

we shouldn't have this top-down situation what do you do i i and i always like to point out uh to shu it and rail transportation uh as you know the alternative this is uh 100% indigenous owned railroad in um oh in newfoundland and labrador where the tribes who were served by the train simply they bought the railroad and operated themselves now because the iron ore company that built it didn't want it anymore so now you have like 100% like indigenous owned railroad that which is operated by and owned by its customers you know it's it's the people who rely on it that's that that's that's your communist railroad that's one possibility the other is we simply go back we return if you will to the anarchist railroad and everybody gets one

of those fucking austin units and they can just pick it up off the tracks wherever they want uh and we just go we just go back to tramways i i can't lift something that heavy alice i guess you can't get a jack get a like a dolly or whatever i think i need i i i i will rely on scheduled services uh and like the the trains are good meme is there for a reason right and maybe like if if they wanted a train they could have said like i i really think that if they had made an actual uh like do you want a train i don't think it would have passed honestly because it would have gotten like replies like who the fuck asked for this like it's in the the only way they got a lot of yeses

on that uh children's card was promising that they're gonna they were gonna electrify and put plumbing and and shit and they and no one was allowed to ask what if we just get the infrastructure why do we need the fucking trainer right right because and because they would presumably in in have a little bit more control over that than if it's owned by the fucking army not only the army that's the only thing we can do this has to be the army oh my god this is depressed the absolute shit out of me that's it it's very it is very dumb it's it's it's so dumb it was about when i learned about it in 2018 i was not a fan and even even beyond like uh like yeah i'm i'm a supporter and they were not fans either because they smelled this shit from

a thousand miles away and uh but it's kind of progressively stupider as as it has gone on like it's there's no the when the electric and we were in the green part of it passed we had to like throw away all our fucking green flashes and memes we had to and just go back to well that's clearly a stupid fucking train but you don't even have to go into the next level of this person have to talk about internal colonialism and like eco fascism and shit like that we just got a point on him laugh because it's a terrible project it's a it's a it's a weird it's it's just a weird project in a weird location and yeah you know when i first heard of it it was probably i don't know 2019 and the first thing i thought oh this seems like a pretty good train and then like the more i've

learned about it i'm like wow this is really bad it's a really bad idea i'm just i wonder how it's gonna get worse because like when this is completed you know it's not gonna get better right no there's no fucking way well so i i think the the worst case scenario is they don't actually wind up running any trains which so it's just wind up being military bases shaped like train stations yeah with a bunch of like high rails with guys with m4s on them going back and forth so yeah basically they just make they let the austerity and the private companies break they keep the the army around and maybe in 2035 they were rescued with like chinese capital and make bigger free trains to compete with the panoramic right maybe right that sucks the fucking success i will go on

the record is saying i don't think any railroad can compete with the panama canal because they have tried many times in the past and it's been a disaster show every time uh no i mean that's that's no reason not to try it again this is true i mean we can't even do the classic sewers canal thing of just jamming something in there no one ever sat attached for video the s trains in yucatan they floored around the idea but they said now let's just cut the phone lines because we also use the the the the tram tracks for our anarchy's railroad shit right but who the fuck is gonna use this like two tourists and then i don't know

if you had good freight service uh one of the weird things about uh the railway to the yucatan is that there's no there's there's no container service for instance so if you if you ran something out of per at to progresso where there is a container terminal that would make a lot of sense to me and you know you would move a lot of freight that way but that's not part of the project which is one of the weirdest things to me um is that they're not even thinking about their freight seems to be an afterthought um which is weird because you know they're they're running so little passenger service for the amount of money they're investing and there's so much fucking money and some of them hasn't even been spent it was just in the budget from previous years and

no one knows what the fuck the budget is it's that's called anti-corruption yeah yeah exactly you know i well you know the project got delivered very quickly and it turned out it was useful for nobody oh boy it's such a fucking boner and the the the only other project that amlos also doing is a giant refinery uh called dos bocas great fantastic so you can see why they didn't like they didn't mind that much just eating the fucking electric part because in campé chequit which is next to the states that are gonna have the the train there's gonna be just a giant pumping station uh or we're gonna finally refine our own oil instead of which okay granted selling oil to the us and then buying it back is incredibly fucking stupid right yes but if you're if you were

the first like leftist candidate elected in billion years and your plan is like doing some fucking internal colonialism and then just fucking the environment a little bit more efficiently i guess it's just such a fucking downer i mean at least like at least we were spared seeing this happen with coban and with burning you know that's the thing that because it would have yeah like but i even i think bernie would have been a little bit harder like this is like if if you ever see that fucking uh image around thrown around uh getting go twitter uh leftists that's just high speed rails and people saying oh i'm coming just by looking at this and uh alfred twoo image yeah and i i i superimposed that image over the reservations and there's a couple ones but this is like if

you purposely try to just run through all of them just connect every single restoration and not put stations just demolish it right yeah so yeah i i think bernie would have had it a little bit harder fucking this up i don't know what would happen in the uk probably like somehow more transphobic yeah they would hire the same guy from here the trend bindle oh my fucking god no what have we learned be extremely depressed train bad i i would say i would say train better than car but not necessarily good consider maybe as part of a degrowth thing asking whether you should build the thing yeah that's a whole set of discourse right yeah which i'm just gonna just hash that out in the

comments yeah hash that out in the comments i'm not talking about degrowth right now okay i will say something that every single time so there's degrowth discourse they everyone is trying to like keep uh i don't know to find a compromise always say it says oh but we have to let like third world countries like keep growing and because this otherwise we're doing an imperialism and a green imperialism and just look at these kinds of things all over the place just yeah the the we're not we don't have like the the third world is not governed by a billion fiddles like no so and even like there's development uh critiques of of evo who's even the evos doing the way way clear things that i'm not gonna fucking do with this like at least

selling fucking lithium is gonna benefit someone like Jesus this doesn't seem to be useful at all there's no defensible way even from bad leftist positions to to just say this is cool it's just that and that's depressing so that notes you want to do safety third good evening wow i formally worked in a rides operations department you're gonna do the full and so row voice the whole time at an unnamed major american park until the end of the 2020 season

i spent most of my time during the summer operating a so-called water coaster where like a log yeah no water they're different okay where riders seated in yeah alice you don't idiot a water coaster alice at least uh what i would call one is a roller coaster that also has water features so you sort of get sprayed down okay i see okay now you can see they've done it very intelligently here because you can see at the top of the hill they go to a enclosed section just like in roller coaster tycoon too that means you don't fly off so where riders seated in linear rafts that can accommodate up to four people traverse a large scale slide with many turns and drops this ride had its fair share of safety issues and i've come

prepared to detail them to you thank you perfect as a preface to this story ride faults are a part of normal operations at amusement parks and usually the ride will fault to prevent a potentially unsafe situation from occurring rides have many redundancies to protect guests and ensure safe operation i choose not to believe this i won't go on a roller coaster because that shit's trying to kill me i agree with you you're fucking pathetic both of you listen just just and i will be down here at the fucking like bullshit rides thank you try to build them over the temple of doom that surely will help with security and safety yeah but this roller coaster is actually run by the army ask ask former podcast guest tom colletti about his coney island experience i was watching

so rides have many redundancies to protect guests and ensure safe operation just like any piece of heavy equipment you would find at the job site okay now i understand yeah just we don't use those yeah however this story involves incidents that cannot be detected through a mechanical safety system therefore increasing the risk of an unsafe environment overall though every ride that you would find an amusement park has been inspected and met rigorous safety standards i don't believe you now in fairness the one in coney island was not part of an amusement party it was a standalone roller coaster it's a guy it's just a guy with a roller coaster the entrance well the ticket holder strangely disappeared after you entered

in the case of this ride you can see in the slide that the raft traverses a gentle incline which i assume this is the lift hill right um then makes a turn into a rather steep drop before ascending another incline oh right yes the rafts make it up the incline by a magnetic propulsion system contained in the slide and the raft why even have water i i i appreciate the water maglev yes the propulsion system by itself was usually reliable and functioned the way it was intended to however the drops after the incline were not as fortunate the ride had four drops and in drops two and four the rafts would travel with enough speed that the front half of the raft became airborne for a split second before fully making contact with the slide again

nope don't like that don't want to do that don't want to do that Liam's just like yes perfect yeah let it be known that these rafts do not have seatbelts and instead riders are required to hold on to grab handles located to their left and up with Alice don't like they also have a ring of fire in one of those you guys are throwing major uh Schlitterbahn uh vibes out of this one oh absolutely yeah that's a future episode um we're gonna do action park stop fucking emailing us this proved effective in keeping riders securely inside the raft during the moment of airtime but when the raft hit the valley it would sometimes act as a trampoline and bounce the

rider seated in the back seat out of the boat and into the fiberglass slide yeah physics is so cool i have personally observed this happen but fortunately in my case the rider involved was unharmed next slide please you can't next slide please us on our podcast that's just a line dickhead it's okay i i i let them do it please say next slide please wait wait i haven't read this one unfortunately did you say next slide please i did say next slide please ross you control the putt boy that's that's what they wrote that's what they wrote and if anything anything you write justin will read sorry i'm trying to figure out i'm trying to figure out our taxes uh ross so it's not true i gave them the one next slide please but i'm not doing the next one because

i can put both of these into the same slide there are three next slides please in this particular safety place so i can do the next one but not okay not this one okay unfortunately not all guests involved in similar incidents got off so well shown as a lawsuit retrieved using publicly available information showing what happened with a guest to experience the trampoline effect did not leave unharmed which is redacted started operating at redacted honor about i'd love to operate redacted 2018 from the date redacted started operating until july 19th 2018 at least three patrons were thrown from the ride ross honor about july 19th 2018 the plaintiff with her family was on the redacted ride as she was riding she was cia themed rise

they call it the water border listen waterboarding sounds cool if you don't know what it is yeah so the two things that sound like summer camp activities waterboarding and free basing yeah waterboarding at guantanamo base sounds fucking great sign me up oh all part of the the reality tv series american gladio that is one thing i have failed to mention in the uh nationales the mexico slide was the massive station rebuilding program in the late seventies and early eighties which produced all these great mid-century modern train stations which were immediately abandoned after they were finished anyway embarrassing so honor about july 19 2018

the plaintiff with her family was on the redacted ride as she was riding she was thrown into the air then she was holding on she was violently pulled back into the raft when the plaintiff was pulled back into the raft she slammed her body and was in was an immediate was an immediate pain yeah she was really irritating the plaintiff was taken from the ride on a backboard and was taken to hospital by ambulance anyway several attempts were made to change operating procedures to prevent this from happening mostly by establishing seating guidelines which involved weight-based rider arrangements and closing off the backseat of the raft fast of people only yes thank you these were mostly successful but reverted to the beginning

of the next season for whatever reason they were filled with jammers yes they were term limited the ride continued operating without any mechanical safety modifications for another year but during the next season more trampoline effect incidents occurred and once the season was over the decision was made to modify drop 4 the more drawn out transition to the valley after being closed for a year this refurbishment after only being open for two seasons the ride reopened 2021 with new and improved seating guidelines in the safer draft 4 next slide please i'm not changing the slide because you put it on this one because i put it on this one as shown in slow motion on this slide which is the second half of this slide drop 2 still has its original

steep descents which provides the same level of airtime as it did previously but to my knowledge because of the new seating guidelines no further injuries have occurred okay am i say next slide please the next slide please gotcha we're gonna start letting the guests say next slide please my connection is not great right now so i i cannot read a single fucking word so i really depend on that instruction always thank you lastly one of the consequences the constant issues of this ride is that management required operators to stand on the platform next to each of the valleys of the ride right here oh the little like zipline thing yeah okay a little platform there uh these were referred to as the zones yeah the youtube zone the look i don't know

man it's we've recorded a long time each of the five zones was equipped with an emergency stop in a shade umbrella if you were signed to this ride you'd have the unfortunate task of standing at the zone and watching each raft pass through to make sure that it did so safely this was your sole duty however possibility exists for rafts that might not make it completely up the incline and come to rest in the valley in addition operators in the station have the potential to not correctly follow the seating guidelines and let the raft proceed into the ride course with improperly seated guests in case one of these issues occurred you would press the emergency stop button if the ride had not already faulted and stopped itself as unreliable as it was most days the ride

would not have any faults and render the task of operators to simply stand at the zone for up to one to three hours in up to 100 degree weather this has got to be Schlitterbahn with just an umbrella for shade the lack of seating is due to a belief by the audit department that sitting down reduces awareness that's not true they got a standing desk you can imagine how enjoyable a responsibility like this would be these conditions are part of the reason i left this job but it did create plenty of fun stories that i can now tell the pod and his listeners was this one of them well that's a very unsafe ride that's true that's true well thank you for sending in safety third where do i hit the fucking safety third thing our next episode is on the boston molasses

disaster oh i'm so hype thank you are you crushed does anyone have some yeah ma where if people want more ma where can they find you okay they can find me in my new twitter account uh ma aquí flores and uh they can listen to my podcast uh fresapatistas which means like it's kind of a mash of calling someone like bougie or plush and and sapatista it's it used to be an insult and uh we were taking it back we're reclaiming the floor uh so yeah it's a podcast about leftist uh mexican discourse you know we it's a pretty niche genre there's not a lot of competition and uh because we'll put a link to it in the description yes thank you so much for coming on and like lending your expertise it was my pleasure uh

when i i'm glad we we it's a long episode we're not nowhere close my favorite episode that's the hinder bar one uh but i i actually searched for the boston thing uh and i didn't find it i was kind of bummed i'm excited to hear it nobody tell him ma your podcast is in spanish right yeah and we're gonna probably like uh try to translate some of the cool parts uh we said here uh after we plug it because we we try to uh i am terminally uh online and incredibly getting go poisoned so listen i live in mexico city and i know about dsa drima what the fuck is wrong with me what the fuck is wrong with me why why can't i make a perfect mutation of cute kids starmer there's something wrong with me so uh we we have to consciously

looking brain disease oh listen yeah so you can if you want to get all the the spicy uh leftist memes uh and understand just the stupidest parts of mexican politics you can turn into fresaba distas con crema absolutely do that if you only speak english i recommend you don't a star your local biblioteca no what you should do is you should subscribe to the podcast and like do immersion learning there you go yeah there's a couple of people who said they do that and i'm like i'm so sorry we're we're constantly just using mexico city slang and that's you should not learn spanish by listening to mexico city slang it's just barely above learning spanish spanish like

so yeah listen to my podcast and uh listen to i'm hyped for the boston one thank you so much for having me oh no absolutely happy on all right i'm stuff in my luck going oh we're going to do shout outs no it's fine 10 000 losses killed james bond trash future of lions led by donkeys um subscribe to our patreon for when the nascar i'm also hyped for sky for for the the james one movie that's in mexico city oh yeah i'm looking forward to it all right did you you are gonna talk about how they invented

a tradition right oh yeah we're absolutely not talking about that all right all right hi everyone cast yeah bye off beat us in