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 | | | | In our new issue, Jared Olson writes on the crisis of forced displacement in Mexico, where U.S.-backed drug wars have kicked hundreds of thousands from their homes. |
| | | ZENAIDA PROMISED SHE’D BE HOME no later than 1 a.m. When the hour came and passed, her sister wasn’t too worried; she figured it was a flat tire, common on the mountainous stretch of rural coast where they lived in the Mexican state of Michoacán. She had thought little of it when earlier, around 9 p.m., her mother saw a caravan of pickup trucks, the same used by sicarios, or gunmen, barrel down the road in the direction Zenaida had gone. |
| The sisters had moved with their family to the region in the late 1970s, when the eldest—whom I’ll call Natalia—was five, and Zenaida was a baby. Hardly a soul lived in the oceanside hamlet of Huahua, where their father would go on to manage over one hundred cattle. The family opened a small seafood joint in an adjacent village; they also ran a pulpería (convenience store), a laundromat, and four rental cabins. “It was perfect,” Natalia told me. “We had everything we needed.” |
| In the early 2000s, violence in the region spiked with the arrival—what locals call the “invasion”—of Los Zetas, then the paramilitary enforcers of the Gulf Cartel, which began recruiting members as it took over the drug trade and illegal mining and logging operations. Neither Natalia nor Zenaida andaba metido en algo—“were involved in anything.” So they never worried too much. But the family owned property, and Zenaida had participated in local search brigades for clandestine graves, earning the ire of a criminal outfit called Los Tenas. In April 2019, the group told the family they had eight days to vacate their home and leave the village; when they resisted, they received a series of anonymous texts demanding 100,000 pesos. The sisters filed a formal complaint at the regional office of the Fiscalía General del Estado, or State Attorney General’s Office. Nothing was done: “They sent no one to help us,” Natalia told me. Two months later, after they started seeing their neighbor interacting with the Tenas, Zenaida once again requested assistance, this time from a different government office. |
| “When they resisted, they received a series of anonymous texts demanding 100,000 pesos.” |
| At 5 a.m. on that June night in 2019, still without a word from her sister, Natalia and her mother drove out into a downpour to look for Zenaida. Driving on a remote stretch of the highway, toward the town of Maruata, they came across the same kind of car that she drove, with the lights still on. It was riddled with bullets. Natalia got out, went to the car, and then returned to her mother in silence. She was too tired, in too much shock, to say that Zenaida, her bubbly and loving sister, lay slumped over, dead. “It’s nothing,” she reassured her mother. “Let’s go home.” |
| The next afternoon, she returned with her brother and agents from the Fiscalía to recover Zenaida’s body. Fearing further reprisal from Los Tenas, the family abandoned their home of decades to move three hours up the coast, to the banana-producing enclave of Coahuayana. There, under the watch of an armed group created in the name of self-defense, they joined the unenviable ranks of the desplazados, the displaced. |
| The Mexican war on drugs, reinvigorated on a massive scale in 2006 under right-wing president Felipe Calderón and bolstered by billions of dollars of U.S. security aid, has created one of the most entrenched internal armed conflicts in the world. One of the most significant, and underreported, aspects of that conflict are the over 392,000 victims of enforced displacement, the majority of whom have been pushed out of their homes and villages by criminal groups who have at times been protected by state authorities. It’s part of the same vortex of violence that’s fed the crisis of enforced disappearance, in which officially over 116,000 individuals—though likely far more—have been disappeared at the hands of criminal groups or state agents, often in collusion with one another. Yet the scale of those displaced by violence in Mexico is just as poorly understood as those disappeared. |
| Continue reading “None of This Is Happening,” an essay by Jared Olson, on our site. |
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