Mexico's president says much of the money gained by eliminating independent oversight and regulatory agencies will go to the army to fund a rise in soldiers’ pay.

Mexico’s president has inaugurated the first part of the pet project of his administration, a tourist train that runs in a rough loop around the Yucatan peninsula.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History says a prehistoric human skeleton found recently in a flooded cave system along the country’s Caribbean coast was actually discovered and registered by the institute in 2019 and will not be threatened by a nearby tourist train project.

Mexico’s ambitious Maya Train project along the country’s Caribbean coast it is threatening the indigenous Maya people it was named for and dividing communities it was meant to help.

MEXICO CITY – Experts in Mexico said Wednesday they have detected more than 2,000 pre-Hispanic ruins or clusters of artefacts along the proposed route of the president’s controversial “Maya Train” project on the Yucatan peninsula. Experts already knew about the existence of some of the sites, but some are new. Critics say López Obrador rammed through the project without adequate study of its effects on the environment, underground sinkhole caves known as cenotes, and ruin sites. Some stretches of the route already have tracks, and the institute said some artefacts had already been disturbed by railway construction decades ago. The Mayas formed a sprawling empire of city-states across the Yucatan and Central America between 2,000 B.C.