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The crashing blows from the giant piledriver reverberate above the jungle canopy, scaring away jaguars, spider monkeys, and other wildlife.
Beneath the forest floor, in a partially submerged cavern – part of the extensive but fragile system of aquifers on which the arid Yucatan peninsula relies for water – the noise is muffled but now comes from directly overhead.
Rust from the huge concrete and iron pillars forced into the ground leaches into the water, turning it from a pure crystalline to dark brown, hiding the once-white sand beneath.
“The damage this train is doing to this extremely delicate ecosystem is incalculable,” says biologist Roberto Rojo. “They’re destroying everything that makes this zone unique, a tourist magnet.”
Mr Rojo is referring to the Maya Train, the flagship infrastructure project of Mexico’s outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, universally known by his initials AMLO.
Running some 1,000 miles through southern Mexico’s Maya Forest, Latin America’s second-largest jungle after the Amazon, the £20 billion train will, AMLO promises, create one million jobs and drive development in some of the poorest regions of the country.
It will do so, in part, by connecting the crowded beaches and throbbing nightclubs of Cancun and the surrounding “Riviera Maya” – the jewel in the crown of Mexico’s tourism industry – with Palenque, a breathtaking Maya ruin in the jungles of troubled Chiapas, home of the Zapatista rebellion.
The hope is that the train will make it easier for the roughly 30 million foreigners who visit the Mexican Caribbean each year to travel into the underdeveloped Maya heartland, spending much-needed tourism dollars there.
But critics say the train has ridden roughshod over not just the environment but also the law and the very rural communities the Left-wing populist claims to be empowering. Officially managed by the army, it is emblematic, they say, of the president’s authoritarianism and mendacity, as well as his militarisation of the country – even while tiptoeing around the growing power of the trigger-happy drug cartels.
With only cursory environmental impact studies and flouting dozens of injunctions, the railway passes through nature reserves and indigenous land. AMLO initially promised that not a single tree would be cut down. Yet CONAFOR, the official forestry agency, now calculates 10 million have been felled.
That is ecocide, environmentalists claim, in a region famous for both its forests and cave system, whose cenotes or turquoise sink pools are central to Maya mythology and a significant tourist attraction.
The impact has included cenotes filled with cement and the driving of 17,000 pillars into the porous limestone subsoil, too weak to bear the weight of the train on its own.
AMLO has claimed the pillars have a special paint to prevent pollution – a paint missing from those witnessed by The Telegraph.
Perhaps the only thing AMLO and his opponents agree on is that the train will form a major part of his legacy, a legacy that must also include his push to dismantle Mexico’s internationally respected electoral agency and his frequent disdain for the victims of the drug war.
When the US Department of State recently published its annual human rights review of Mexico, detailing once again the torture and extrajudicial executions carried out by security forces, AMLO responded haughtily. Instead of engaging with the allegations, he warned Washington not to meddle with Mexican “sovereignty”.
Although AMLO is not running – Mexican presidents get a single six-year term – this Sunday’s presidential election will be a referendum on his government.
His protégé, Claudia Sheinbaum, is running 20 points clear of her nearest rival. That makes her an apparent certainty to become the first woman leader of a society notorious for its machismo, visceral sexism whose effects range from stark pay disparities to soaring levels of femicide.
The 61-year-old PhD engineer and former mayor of Mexico City is widely viewed as well qualified. But she is also seen as lacking charisma and owing her huge lead to Mexicans’ desire for AMLO’s lavish social spending to continue.
In a country where 40 per cent of the population of 128 million live below the poverty line, the president has introduced cash transfers to some 25 million people, buying popularity and helping persuade many – despite the statistics – that he has transformed Mexico into a less violent and more affluent society.
One of them is Demetrio Maldonado, 66, an indigenous farmer now cut off from his five-acre plot in the village of Uh May by the Maya Train.
He is bitter about the inadequate 20,000 Pesos (£950) compensation paid by the government over his loss of access to the land where he grows hardwood trees as a long-term investment and corn and other subsistence crops.
But he is also an AMLO supporter, thanks to the 6,250 Pesos (£300) he now receives each month under the Sowing Life programme aimed at reducing rural poverty.
“He’s the first president who’s actually done something for us. The others, all we got from them was breadcrumbs,” says Mr Maldonado in his ramshackle home as lorries supplying the train construction rumble by.
That exasperates Maya activists like Angel Sulub, who object to even the train’s name as well as the development model, already manifested in nearby Cancun, it represents.
The city was built from scratch on barely inhabited beaches after technocrats chose them in the 1970s as the perfect spot for a mass tourism resort. Since then, Cancun has filled government coffers with foreign currency – in a country where public funds are routinely pilfered – but marginalises locals.
Maya leaders also complain that the railway has sparked a rush of land speculation. Among others, the cartels, keen to launder proceeds through real estate, are now causing yet more deforestation as they build hotels and vacation apartments – and unleash a wave of bloodshed.
Mr Sulub says he personally knows 20 people murdered or disappeared from this once relatively peaceful zone during 2023 and 2024. Their remains have often been found bound and gagged, with signs of torture.
Yet when Maya communities have complained about the train, they have had army posts installed in their villages.
“AMLO has constructed this narrative about how he’s helping indigenous communities but the truth is exactly the opposite,” says Mr Sulub. “He’s abandoned us. It’s so cynical.”
The president has responded to criticism of the Maya Train as he usually does – by shooting the messenger. When Mr Rojo called on AMLO to stop destroying the forest, the president called him a “pseudo-environmentalist” and “traitor”.
“It’s a smear,” says Mr Rojo, who studies the Yucatan’s cave system. “It’s how AMLO operates, belittling his critics instead of listening to them. Anyone who questions him is from ‘the right’.”
He is in good company. Not just has AMLO denigrated journalists, judges and some of Mexico’s most prominent public intellectuals, he has even accused parents protesting shortages of cancer medicines for their children of being “hired”.
Dr Sheinbaum’s low-key style is the antithesis of AMLO’s personality cult. That may be, in part, because, with such a big lead, she is running a cautious campaign. But it could signal a more democratic approach.
“She’s more moderate, more thoughtful. She deals well with tough questions and can engage respectfully,” says Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández, a professor at Pennsylvania’s Villanova University.
But, if elected on Sunday, whatever course Dr Sheinbaum takes, it will be too late to reverse the impacts on this stunning ecosystem that enchants visitors from around the world.
Whether he acknowledges it or not, trampling a large swathe of the Maya Forest will unavoidably be part of AMLO’s complicated legacy.