As of 2024. The figure is IDMC's end-of-year stock of people internally displaced by criminal violence in Mexico and is revised each year as new displacements and returns are recorded.
Since the militarised counter-narcotics campaign launched in December 2006, contests between criminal organisations and between those organisations and the state have emptied villages and urban districts in Guerrero, Michoacán, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas and Chiapas, through massacres, extortion, forced recruitment and the burning of homes. IDMC counted more than 392,000 people internally displaced by violence at the end of 2023, while INEGI's national victimisation survey put the number who moved for safety reasons during 2023 alone above one million; Mexico has no official register of the internally displaced and only adopted framework legislation on displacement at state level in a minority of states. The associated disappearances are on a scale of their own: UN experts noted in May 2022 that Mexico's official registry had passed 100,000 disappeared persons, up from about 5,000 reported missing in 2011, and warned of a chronic pattern of impunity, with enforced disappearances continuing daily. Displacement is typically short-distance and unrecorded, with families moving to municipal capitals or across state lines and rarely receiving assistance.
Cartels and armed criminal groups, and in places security forces, drove rural and small-town populations from their homes across northern, western and southern Mexico
INEGI's 2010 census counted 112.3 million people, implying about 110 million in 2007 when federal forces were deployed against the cartels; the displacement figure is the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's cumulative stock of people internally displaced by criminal and other violence.
No body has produced a death toll for displacement-related violence specifically. Mexico's homicide totals since December 2006 run into the hundreds of thousands and its official registry of missing and disappeared persons passed 100,000 in May 2022, but neither figure isolates deaths caused by or accompanying displacement, so no range is given.
Enforced disappearance in Mexico is documented by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, which recorded the passing of 100,000 registered disappearances in 2022.
Mexico