“Since the war against drug trafficking and against drugs was declared in the government of Felipe Calderón, we see an upturn in displacement because there is an upturn in violence in the country,” he says.
According to the CMDPDH, internal forced displacement is a human rights violation that occurs when people or groups of people are forced to flee their home or place of habitual residence as a consequence or to avoid the effects of a situation of violence. of an armed conflict, human rights violations, natural disasters or man-made catastrophes, without crossing an international border.
Salvador Maldonado Aranda, professor at the Colegio de Michoacán, assures that internal forced displacement is a “dramatic” phenomenon whose true dimension is unknown because the country does not have a record of these forced movements.
“There is no record. But we can observe this dramatic phenomenon. There have been displacements of families and of several people and that are unquantifiable due to the existence of data, of small cities that have had to migrate due to the effects of violence. It is a forced displacement that is not seen because there are many families who leave because they have been threatened, extorted, due to the effects of violence, but these figures are not known”, he maintains.
The states with the most displacement
Michoacán, right where the war on drug trafficking began, is the state with the most episodes of forced displacement in 2021. The increase in violence in the “Tierra Caliente” region has turned this state into a focus of displacement. In municipalities such as Aguililla, Buenavista, Chinicuila, Coalcomán, and Tepalcatepec, entire families have had to leave their homes due to blockades, attacks, and armed clashes between organized crime groups. It is estimated that at least 9,000 people left their homes in that entity in the second half of 2021.
Other states that concentrate the largest forced displacements, according to journalistic notes, are Chiapas, Guerrero, Sinaloa, Oaxaca, Chihuahua, Durango, Zacatecas and Coahuila.
Organized crime groups operate in these states, such as: Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, La Familia, Los Viagra, Los Beltrán Leyva, El Cártel del Pacífico, Guerreros Unidos and the Cartel del Noreste.
