Expelled for violence saturate the northern border

Internal forced displacement remains a latent crisis in our country; with a general law frozen in Congress and thousands of people saturating some of the shelters on the northern border of Mexico, seeking asylum in the United States.

According to data from the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, AC, as of September 2022, it is estimated that at least 4,521 people had been displaced in Mexico, a figure that is added to the more than 379,000 who have left their homes due to of violence between 2008 and 2021.

While between January and August 2022, some 17 episodes of forced internal displacement due to violence were recorded, in states such as Chiapas, Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Michoacán, Oaxaca and Guerrero.

In Mexicali, Baja California, at least 70% of the people who keep the 32 shelters for migrants and people in vulnerable situations saturated are Mexicans, who arrived in the entity after being victims of forced displacement, as announced by José Ascensión Moreno Mena, president of the Coalition for the Defense of Migrants AC, in that town.

“For us it is normal to see the shelters saturated… but there is more internal migration due to forced displacement than that of Central Americans, Venezuelans, etc… they are now taking the northwest route,” he explained.

In this sense, Moreno Mena explained that for several years the internally displaced persons who arrive in Mexicali come from at least four three states, mainly from Michoacán, Guerrero, Jalisco and Zacatecas, where the climate of violence is the order of the day, which, he added, has caused entire families, groups of mothers and their children or women fleeing domestic violence, to move to the northern border.

And it is that the activist highlighted that in addition to being victims of threats or extortion by organized crime who charge them land rights for having a business or dispossess them of their lands, there is also another phenomenon that has arisen from this violence: mothers who leave their homes so that their children are not recruited by the drug trafficker.

Floods misinformation

This, the activist lamented, has generated an internal migration crisis in Mexicali, since many of them arrive uninformed thinking that, like Central Americans, they have the opportunity to request asylum in the United States, however, he pointed out that by approaching the US authorities realize that Mexicans are not contemplated within the asylum categories of the neighboring country.

Finally, the president of the organization warned that the federal government does not have an adequate policy to address internal displacement, while there is frozen legislation on the matter, which also does not allow public policies to be generated that attend to the people who want to return to their places of origin or that can grant them housing or jobs.

Since 2020, the Chamber of Senators has pending analysis and voting on an Initiative with a Draft Decree that issues the General Law to Prevent and Address Forced Internal Displacement, which, among other things, seeks to recognize the rights of displaced persons and that they protect them as victims of human rights violations, or victims of disasters linked to natural phenomena.

Cases in Chihuahua

At the beginning of September 2019, in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, the arrival of internally displaced Mexican people from Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Zacatecas who were fleeing different situations of violence began.

Within this framework, various organizations carried out the survey of Displaced Mexicans and Asylum Seekers in Ciudad Juárez (ENMEDESA-2022), which indicates that the family structure of displaced persons in the locality is characterized by being mostly nuclear relatives and enlarged. In 2022, 27.2% were heads of family, accompanied by their spouses (12.3%) and children (48.7%) and the average number of members was between 3 and 5 members.

maritza.perez@eleconomista.mx