Homeless at home: Inside Mexico's neglected displacement crisis
25 August 2020
‘People are completely afraid for their lives.’
MEXICO CITY
Since the United States severely restricted immigration in March, Mexico has seen an uptick in asylum claims from people fleeing gang violence in Central America, but a far greater number of its own citizens have been forced from their homes by similar brutality and are flying under the humanitarian radar.
The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, has registered nearly 50,000 refugees in Mexico, but this is only a fraction of the 345,000 Mexicans internally displaced by conflict, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
With no government support and authorities sometimes complicit in criminal activities, many Mexicans have decided to follow migrants and asylum seekers from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala on their route north to the US border, with increasingly uncertain outcomes.
Fighting between myriad armed groups has intensified since March, with criminals taking advantage of a COVID-19 lockdown to force hundreds more people from their villages.
The day after the lockdown, “violence displaced around 800 people, increasing the risk to the community from COVID-19, in addition to the impacts in terms of access to food, adequate housing, drinking water, and health services,” Brenda Pérez, advocate on internal displacement for Mexico’s Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, said In a message to the UN Human Rights Council in July.
. . .
A recent report by the International Crisis Group identifies Guerrero as “the epicentre of organised crime in Mexico”, with at least 40 armed groups involved in the fighting.
The groups use military-grade weapons, most smuggled from the United States, to wage a low-intensity war fuelling what the ICG calls “a portfolio of criminal ventures”: growing marijuana and opium poppy, cooking heroin for the US market, controlling the trade of avocados and limes, illegal logging, and people-trafficking and extortion on the transport routes used by foreign mining companies that extract gold, silver, zinc, and lead.
Ongoing warfare stokes “a continuing wave of assassinations, disappearances, enforced disappearances and internal displacements (that) shows how criminal violence has morphed into local armed conflicts of which civilians are the main victims”, the report says.
More:
https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2020/08/25/Mexico-internal-displacement-crisis-conflict