SEATTLE - Since former President Felipe Calderón launched the so-called "war on drugs" against drug trafficking cartels, violence in Mexico has increased exponentially, leading to the deaths of thousands of people, with thousands more kidnapped as well as many others displaced from their homes due to the ongoing conflict.
In 2006, Calderón deployed 6,500 Mexican Army soldiers to Michoacán to end drug violence, but instead of controlling it the problem only grew bigger, and almost 20 years later, recent clashes between two Sinaloa Cartel factions serve as signs that the issue is nowhere near to being under control.
Thousands of civilians across Mexico have been affected by the war on drugs. According to the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), the public agency reported that 27% of the Mexican territory has seen a considerable drop in its number of inhabitants in the last 20 years.
That is about 680 municipalities all over Mexico that reported a decrease in its population, with the agency baptizing them as "pueblos fantasma" or ghost towns. These communities are abandoned by entire families, who are either pushed away by extreme poverty levels, the sense of insecurity and or by the violence generated by criminal organizations.
One of the communities with the biggest drop-off in terms of population is the municipality of Guadalupe, in the state of Chihuahua. Guadalupe is located less than 50 miles away from El Paso, Texas, and between 2010 and 2020 its population saw a 34% decrease, going from 6,458 inhabitants to just 4,237.
This is not an isolated issue to the northern parts of Mexico. In 2021, almost half of the nearly 30,000 people that were displaced due to violence between cartels lived in the state of Michoacán. And just like The Latin Times reported earlier this year, people living in small towns in Chiapas were also fleeing their communities due to cartel violence, crossing the border to Guatemala looking for protection.
According to intelligence reports, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) are the main criminal organizations responsible for the displacement of thousands of people.
The state of Sinaloa, who has been traditionally seen as the stronghold for most Mexican cartels, has also seen a decrease in population in certain parts of its territory.
The small town of Badiraguato, birthplace of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán and other narco drug lords saw its population drop from 37,757 inhabitants before the 2020 census to just 26,542 people, a decrease of almost 30 percent.
Other Sinaloa towns such as La Petaca, Santa Lucía, El Palmito and Potrerillos have also seen a steep decrease. In El Palmito, at least 180 people left their homes and everything they owned behind as members of the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies escorted them out.
"They do not do anything to stop the waves of violence," said one of the victims.
According to an article from Sinaloa's Autonomous University, at least nine thousand families have been displaced due to cartel-related violence. But according to data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the world's leading source of data and analysis on internal displacement, an estimated 8,659 people had to relocate due to violent conflicts between January and June of 2024.
According to their data, if we include numbers from 2008 up until 2023, more than 392,000 people have had to leave their homes due to cartel-related violence.
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