Mexican Climate Activists’ Ambitions Are Crumbling

In the summer of 2020, representatives from Indigenous Maya communities on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula filed an amparo with Mexico’s Supreme Court. An amparo is a legal tool that exists in some Spanish-speaking countries; literally meaning “protection,” it allows citizens to suspend or halt a state-initiated law or project if a judge finds it unconstitutional. Similar to an injunction or habeas corpus, amparos are a way for citizens to stop the government from breaking its own rules.

The Maya groups argued that the construction of the Tren Maya, a state-funded tourist train, had violated key constitutional rights—Article 4’s “right to a healthy environment” and Article 2’s protection of “indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination”—because it destroyed forests, lakes, and aquifers. They also claimed that the consultation process, meant to take local Indigenous communities’ concerns into account before construction began, had been a sham. In 2020 and 2023, judges sided with their argument and granted the amparo, calling for the government to suspend multiple sections of the train line.

The Tren Maya was one of former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s hallmark initiatives. After he left office last fall, many international onlookers wondered whether his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, would continue or disrupt his mixed environmental legacy. Although both are members of the Morena party, which López Obrador founded a decade ago, Sheinbaum previously worked as a climate engineer.

Mexico’s Supreme Court defines the amparo as “a medium of defense that the people have to protect … the rights that our Constitution recognizes when we consider that an authority is violating them.” Until 2013, the amparo applied primarily to personal injury, used in cases of censorship or wrongful conviction. That year, a reform allowed it to also apply to cases of “legitimate collective interest.”

Since then, it has become one of the most commonly used legal tools in the country, with a trajectory of case law built by environmental and human rights activists.

“The heart of Mexico’s judicial system is the amparo,” said Juan Jesús Garza Onofre of the Institute for Juridical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Amparos have brought about a long list of legal achievements, including the country’s 2021 decriminalization of abortion.

Observers did not expect that Sheinbaum would suddenly and substantially compromise Mexicans’ ability to bring about change—and to fight for their environmental rights. But in October, on the heels of sweeping judicial reforms last year, the Mexican government passed legislation aimed at the amparo. The move was a blow to activists’ hopes for climate progress under Sheinbaum. And it stands to further consolidate power in Morena’s hands.

When Sheinbaum handily won Mexico’s presidency in June 2024, onlookers in the United States approved of her environmental bona fides. Time magazine included the leader, who holds a doctorate in energy engineering and contributed to the 2007 and 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, among the “titans” of its Time100 Climate list. The Washington Post wrote that her election had “given hope to environmentalists and diplomats.”

In Mexico, however, environmentalists’ responses to Sheinbaum’s election were more restrained. Both on the campaign trail and in the first year of her presidency, Sheinbaum committed to continuing López Obrador’s signature infrastructure projects. In addition to the Tren Maya, these include the construction of the country’s largest oil refinery and the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (CIIT), a logistics complex intended to compete with the Panama Canal.

López Obrador framed these projects as state-led economic development necessary for “guaranteeing national sovereignty.” Yet they carried an environmental cost—and were roundly opposed by local communities, which had hoped to see change under Sheinbaum.

The Tren Maya “is an excessive development that keeps accelerating, affecting communities and exacerbating problems like lack of access to water,” said Alberto Velázquez of Maya community organization Utsil Kuxtal. He noted that some local communities’ water sources had become saline due to the construction’s impact on the aquifer. “They keep promoting the peninsula [for tourism development], and meanwhile, we’re at an environmental limit.”

Under Sheinbaum, Velázquez said, he has not seen a change in approach to the environment but rather “a continuation of Morena’s politics.”

In the far southern tail of the country, Indigenous communities affected by the CIIT construction feel similarly. Carlos Beas Torres, the head of the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Section of the Isthmus, which has opposed the project since its start, said that the port expansion had destroyed mountains in order to mine rock, and that the human-made jetties had affected fishers’ livelihoods. In February, three members of the union  were killed after receiving threats related to their opposition to the project.

Like the Yucatán land defenders, Beas Torres said that he hoped for a change under Sheinbaum but hasn’t seen one. “We’d like the new secretary [of the environment] to have greater openness to our cause. But we haven’t perceived a change. The environment isn’t the priority for these governments,” he said.

Sergio Madrid, who works in the Yucatán programs of the Mexican Civil Advisory on Silviculture, a community forestry nongovernmental organization, said that he had initially been glad to see that many of the bureaucrats whom Sheinbaum tapped to lead environmental agencies had experience with environmental protection. “There’s a long list of people who have good experience, which wasn’t true” under López Obrador, he said.

But Madrid’s hopes were quickly dashed by the significant budget cuts to the Secretariat of Natural Resources and the Environment as well as the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas—a drop of 36 percent between 2024 and 2025. For 2026, the latter organization’s budget dropped even further, representing a 60 percent decrease since 2016, the first year of López Obrador’s presidency. (Sheinbaum has sought to balance Mexico’s budget after high spending at the end of López Obrador’s administration.)

“The presence of those institutions in these regions is important because there’s tourism that wants to take over everything, and someone needs to put the brakes on it,” Madrid said.

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Mexican Secretary of Natural Resources and the Environment Alicia Bárcena said that the country’s budget deficit put her agency in a complicated position, especially given the need for adequate staffing of protected areas. She added that the government was working to make up the difference with funds from international organizations and the creation of an “environmental fund” using the revenue from fines and fees.

Of the Tren Maya, Bárcena said, “The train is already there; we’re not going to get rid of it. So what we need to do is to see how we can undertake compensatory and restoration actions across its seven sections.” With regard to the CIIT, she said that her agency was working closely with the Marines, who oversee the complex, but added that the area was “already quite impacted” before the project.

When Sheinbaum pledged to finish both the Tren Maya and the Corredor Interoceánico, local communities and environmental organizations put their hope into amparos to stop the projects. Since construction began in 2019, more than 50 amparos have been filed against the Tren Maya. Both there and at the CIIT, judges called for the definitive suspension of elements of the projects due to their violations of Mexicans’ constitutional right to a healthy environment.

But this fall, Mexico’s Morena-dominated legislature approved an amparo reform that went into effect on Oct. 17. Nominally intended to bring the tool in line with the judicial overhaul, it also turns back the clock on the application of amparos developed since 2013. Now, the amparo can only be applied in cases of direct and immediate personal injury—not to eventual impacts to broad constitutional rights, such as the right to a healthy environment. Additionally, when suspensions are granted, they cannot not be applied generally but only apply to the individual who filed the complaint.

Now, “the judge will say, ‘you’re right, but I can’t give you an amparo for general effects,’” said Úrsula Garzón Aragón, an attorney with the Mexican Center for Environmental Law, which routinely uses amparos to prevent destructive projects and to prevent government agencies from shirking established ecosystem protections. “The reforms in the bill are serious,” she continued. “They are looking to close doors and put up hurdles.”

The impacts of these changes will quickly begin to play out. For example, since the reform, the Supreme Court awarded an amparo to an environmental organization that argued that the air quality laws in their state were not strict enough. Following the Supreme Court decision, the case was remanded to a district court for implementation, as is customary. In the past, that judge would have ordered the state to rewrite the laws. But with the new reform, the amparo can only apply to the organization making the complaint—essentially, the judge can only order the complainants to not drive their own cars on certain days.

Legal scholars see the amparo reform as another way that Sheinbaum is continuing to consolidate power in the hands of Morena. Some observers have called the party “authoritarian” and argued that it is attempting to recreate the sustained one-party rule that Mexico experienced for most of the 20th century. The amparo reform followed a suite of judicial reforms approved in the last weeks of López Obrador’s presidency that weakened judges’ abilities to act as a check on the executive and legislative branches.

“It’s a pro-government reform, not a pro-citizenry one, and one very much in line with the judicial reforms—the control and consolidation of one of the powers of government and its tools,” Garza Onofre said of the amparo reform.

In a press release, Arturo Zaldívar—a former Supreme Court justice and the Sheinbaum cabinet’s general coordinator of politics and governance—rebuffed claims that the reform was a step back, stating that it offered “a more modern, intimate, and accessible justice.” He added, “the amparo must protect the human rights of all people, but not be an instrument for damaging society in the hands of delinquents.”

Although Garza Onofre referred to the reform as “retrograde and serious,” he also tempered his concerns. He described himself as a “skeptic” of the tool because of the history of lack of oversight for its enforcement. Even when judges have granted suspensions, he said, the government has often neglected to apply them.

That’s exactly what has happened both in the Tren Maya region and in the isthmus. By the time that the 2023 decision came down, “the trees had already been cut,” as one activist put it. Without the amparo available as a citizens’ check on the government, however, the party behind those actions is only more empowered.