Pérez’s team — employees of the Mexican government — was here only because the country’s president is building a 950-mile railway through the jungle, over thousands of pre-Hispanic sites like the one on which they were standing.The Tren Maya — the signature infrastructure project of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — is causing unspeakable destruction to one of the Western Hemisphere’s largest remaining rainforests.By 2024, trains carrying tourists will rumble over hundreds of buried settlements, caves and underground rivers, raising the risk of collapse and contamination.“It’s so rich in archaeology that the only way to preserve everything would be to construct an upper story for the whole population,” said archaeologist Ivan Šprajc, a scholar of Maya civilization.It feels at times like boiling down a philosophical question — the importance of heritage versus the benefits of development — to a crudely practical one, like trying to decide between a cave painting and a supercomputer."