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.
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.
Portents of Disaster
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. “The problem,” said Julio Franco, a researcher at the Observatorio Regional de Seguridad Humana de Apatzingán in Michoacán, “is that there aren’t statistics in this country on anything: not displaced people, not disappeared people, not homicides. We’re dealing with this all this time.”
The government turned a blind eye to all of it. So some residents took matters into their own hands. In 2013, the state of Michoacán became ground zero for an unconventional uprising of autodefensas, or armed vigilante self-defense groups, who sought to upend the dominance of criminal groups and establish themselves as new de facto guarantors of security.
Rural men who were left out of work flooded into criminal enterprises of growing sophistication, moving cocaine and methamphetamine through the state.
Three hours west of Mexico City, the rural state has long been an epicenter of organized crime. Following the presidency of left nationalist Lázaro Cárdenas, whose mandate was considered the last cry of the Mexican Revolution before the country’s consolidation as a one-party autocracy, Michoacán became the heart of Mexico’s agrarian reform efforts, as vast tracts of land were divvied up and parceled out to campesinos as ejidos, the communally owned territories enshrined in the 1917 Constitution. Following the 1982 debt crisis that tanked Mexico’s economy, greasing the skids for the shift to NAFTA, those same communal lands were bought off and converted into agro-industrial estates—a vast territorial dispossession leading to epidemic levels of poverty. Rural men who were left out of work flooded into criminal enterprises of growing sophistication, moving cocaine and methamphetamine through the state. Subsistence farmers in Michoacán’s coastal mountains, meanwhile, turned to growing marijuana and opium to avoid economic ruin. From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, the groups of gunmen, corrupt police, and transporters moving drugs were under the strict control of protection rackets violently managed by the military and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, the one-party regime that took power after Cárdenas. By the time the PRI lost its hold on the federal government in 2000, the groups they’d overseen, able to negotiate more flexible protection pacts with local governors, had spun off into cartels, autonomous from the federal government but never beyond its reach.
In 2006, President Calderón, facing widespread social discontent, deployed the military throughout the country with the ostensible mission of dismantling these cartels. The first salvo of that war would be carried out in Michoacán, where nearly seven thousand troops were sent. While the government succeeded in ending Los Zetas’ stranglehold on the state, they were soon replaced by other, more violent groups, who operated with intensifying paranoia and were more prone to fracturing into bloody internecine conflicts. Inheriting the decades-old role of caciques, local strongmen who negotiated with the federal government, these groups established themselves as parallel local authorities, latching onto the municipal and state government as parasitic power brokers. Aside from the marked uptick in death and displacement that followed, one of the clear outcomes of Calderón’s war was the establishment of an indefinite state of exception, one that enabled the government to increase the militarization of public life and exert greater influence over criminal networks.
The autodefensas sought not to challenge the government but to uproot the criminals acting as its intermediary. A significant number of groups emerged autonomously, including a number of indigenous Nahua or Purépecha comunitarío groups seeking to defend themselves from extortion or illegal resource extraction, but there’s plausible evidence to suggest that the military helped organize some of the largest autodefensas, who have been accused of carrying out reigns of terror and devolving into cartels in clear view, if not with the active complicity, of state forces. Though the government publicly welcomed the self-defense forces at first, they soon moved to rein them in, alleging they created more violence and were usurping the role of state authorities. The autodefensas that weren’t suppressed by the government tried, with mixed success, to offer a modicum of security to their neighbors. An uneasy status quo emerged.
Mexicans—and the world—expected major change with the election in 2018 of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO. The founder of a new party, the ostensibly left-wing Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, or MORENA, AMLO campaigned as an avatar of progressive reform: he promised to end the war on drugs, demilitarize public security, and eradicate institutional corruption. But once he was swept into office, AMLO was quick to give unprecedented power to the armed forces, granting them not just growing responsibilities over internal policing but control of infrastructure. He also created a civilian National Guard that he incorporated into the military. These policies coincided with a continued growth in the power of criminal groups—but AMLO papered this over with a simulacrum of nascent stability. At his mañaneras, or morning press conferences, he disarmed critiques of intensifying criminal wars and militarization with his unhurried, avuncular charm, claiming disappearance numbers were exaggerated.
But in 2022, after the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons visited the country, the government finally moved to recognize the crisis. That year, Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez, AMLO’s sub-secretary of human rights, Population, and migration, put out an official communiqué expressing the conviction that “the path we have taken will allow us to build the foundations of a comprehensive policy to address this problem.” The government proceeded to publish numerous reports and sponsor workshops on the issue. But legislation that would dedicate the necessary resources and trained personnel to support displaced people has remained little more than a blueprint. In 2020, the Chamber of Deputies approved the “Law to Prevent, Deal With, and Entirely Repair Internal Forced Displacement,” but it’s languished in legislative purgatory ever since—even as the ranks of the displaced have grown.
“There is no political will to recognize [the issue] and approve the law,” MORENA Senator Nestora Salgado told reporters in 2023. In the blunt words of Evangelina Contreras, who runs Desaparecidos de la Costa y Feminicidios de Michoacán, or DECOFEM, an organization that works to find the disappeared and provides aid to the displaced, and who was herself displaced in 2016 after sicarios disappeared her daughter, “The government’s solution to this is to act like none of this is happening.”
Down the Mine
Héctor Zepeda Navarrete, known as “Comandante Teto,” the leader of Coahuayana’s autodefensas, voted for AMLO in 2018. He hoped the violence triggered by Calderón’s war on drugs—which escalated conflicts with the cartel, led to the murder of his brother, and sparked him to create the self-defense group—would end. At the time, he wouldn’t have guessed that the violence would become worse than he’d ever seen.
Resisting the mine is an easy way to get yourself killed or run out of town.
I met him in July 2023 at the group’s outpost, an unmemorable concrete building surrounded by plateless pickups. Inside, men in their twenties and thirties with AK-47s or AR-15s and pistols on their belts lounged around. In the back room, at a broad, rough wooden desk next to an enormous flatscreen livestreaming seven camera feeds of every entrance to the community, was Navarrete. With enormous veiny biceps and a bulletproof vest complete with magazines of ammo, he looked built for war. Behind him, an M-1 and an M-16 were mounted on the wall, one of them cradled in deer antlers and hung with a beaded white Catholic rosary beneath framed photos of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the seal of the Mexican government, and headshots of members that had been killed since the group’s founding in 2014.
The desplazados, he said, trickled into Coahuayana with little more than the clothes on their backs, fleeing criminal attacks not just in Michoacán but from the neighboring states of Guerrero and Colima. Coahuayana, a town of some seventeen thousand, is now home to over a thousand displaced individuals, though the number tends to fluctuate. According to Navarrete, the stories they told often echoed each other: squads of men with military gear would swoop into a village, attacking armed groups who controlled the area, sending bullets flying. They would set homes ablaze, taking military-aged men away, never to be seen again, and giving the rest an ultimatum: leave or meet a worse fate. “So people grab what they can,” Navarrete said, “and then they go.”
Though at first Navarrete’s group fought against the Caballeros Templarios, they’re now threatened by the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG, a paramilitary criminal organization from Jalisco involved in the drug trade, illegal mining, sex-trafficking, and more. It’s notorious for the flagrance of its violence and linked to thousands of enforced disappearances and murders. In recent years, the group has expanded its influence down the coastal mountain range, despite a significant presence of state agents. “It makes sense,” Navarrete said, drily. “The complicity is clear to us.”
Coahuayana’s autodefensas have always had an uncertain relationship with the official armed wings of the state: they’re not in opposition to the government, but they can never tell if the government will come to their aid if they’re attacked. Navarrete pointed to how, a few years ago, the CJNG upended a highway with an excavator to limit the movement of enemy groups. Though this occurred within miles of a National Guard base, the military did nothing. The authorities have responded to attacks by the CJNG that the group has suffered since 2022, including a nighttime ambush and an attack that used an improvised explosive device, though Navarrete added that they took thirty-six hours to send units to the scene, despite having multiple outposts within a thirty-minute drive.
The fraught relationship between autodefensas and the state is on clear display in Aquila, a village ten miles up the coast from Coahuayana. In recent years, it’s been hard-hit by conflict over an open-pit iron mine operated by an Italo-Argentine conglomerate. Locals claim criminal groups have disappeared and killed opponents while, at the same time, attacking the local autodefensas. “The government doesn’t do its job,” Rubén Baltazar, the leader of the group, told me. He explained that National Guard and Marine units stationed nearby rarely showed up on time when the village was attacked by sicarios from CJNG, something that, at that point, was happening several times a month. The group dealt with the same uncertainty as the autodefensas in Coahuayana: it was never clear if, or to what degree, the government would assist them.
Baltazar, who goes by the name “Chopo,” reiterated what two anonymous residents of Aquila had told me: that the CJNG had commandeered a ranch several miles above town, in a hamlet called La Naranja, turning it into a de facto base and displacing the family that lived there. Up to that point, there had been no indication that the military was concerned with taking it back. “They’re letting the Jaliscos advance through the region to clear it out for mining interests,” Evangelina Contreras later told me.
It can be difficult to establish clear links between transnational mining conglomerates and criminal networks, though the theory that mineral extraction in a given region corresponds to rising criminality, fueling displacement, isn’t new. For at least fifteen years, cartels in Michoacán have been involved in the administration of illegal mining complexes. And even when the mines are operating legally, criminal groups are still often involved. In Aquila, in accordance with laws established by the 1917 Constitution, residents of collective ejidal land are owed monthly payments if a mining corporation wishes to extract minerals from their territory. In 2012, executives for Ternium, the conglomerate running Encinas, claimed to local press that it was paying almost $1,000 every month to hundreds of residents of Aquila. As the anthropologist Ana Del Conde and longtime Michoacán reporter Heriberto Paredes write in their 2019 report published in Organized Violence: Capitalist Warfare in Latin America, this resulted in the almost overnight arrival of the predominant criminal group at the time, the Caballeros Templarios, who swooped in to extort residents, igniting a new wave of displacement. Resisting the mine is an easy way to get yourself killed or run out of town: over the past two decades, dozens of opponents of the Encinas projects have been disappeared or murdered.
A 2022 study by geographers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico points out that the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains sweeping through Michoacán and Guerrero have the highest simultaneous rates of mineral extraction and forced displacement in the country. They note that “municipalities with mining conflicts in Michoacán, with 613 migrants per 100 thousand inhabitants, have the second-highest nationwide average of migration presumably linked to mining.” One of the report’s authors writes separately that “sites with social conflicts over mining activity present a rate of migration caused by violence and insecurity that is more than double that of territories without mining concessions.” Anthropologists commissioned by the secretary of governance affirmed in a 2023 report that mining was one consistent force among many behind displacement, and that the CJNG had taken a “political-administrative” role in mining in Michoacán.
When I asked Navarrete about accusations that displacement is linked to the expansion of mineral extraction, he was blunt, as if the question was too obvious to merit much elaboration. “The mines?” he said. “Organized crime has always managed them.” But criminal groups like the CJNG are only part of the puzzle.
According to Julio Franco, “The armed forces of the state [historically] served as a repressive arm against the population in territories like Michoacán,” using soldiers and police to break apart community organizations opposing extractive interests. “But the recent history of criminal groups means that this role is no longer necessary. If the state wants to repress any population nowadays, they only need to allow organized crime to act, with its almost mechanical tendency to plunder.” State forces, he continued, just have to open the passageway so criminals can sweep into the mountains unimpeded, though he stressed that far more research needs to be done regarding potential links between criminal groups and extractive interests. “Just focusing on cartels doesn’t explain this.”
Everything is Under Control
In the broad valley surrounding the city of Apatzingán, across the mountains from the coastal havens of Coahuayana and Aquila, the violent uprooting of entire villages has become so common that it rarely warrants coverage in the national news. On June 9 of last year, Carmen Zepeda received a series of WhatsApp messages informing her that the nearby villages of Las Bateas, Tepetate, and Llano Grande were under attack by the Viagras, a feared paramilitary gang that, months later, would ally with the CJNG. The Caballeros Templarios, who controlled the region and made uneasy peace with residents, went house to house telling people to leave. Zepeda gathered members of her political organization, the Pancho Villas, to drive out to the villages, where she encountered an exodus of trucks coming down dirt roads. “We saw lots of people on foot, with kids in their arms with little backpacks with their belongings. . . . People were scared, crying,” she told me. At least eight hundred people were displaced that day.
Zepeda let several dozen of them take shelter in her office, downstairs from her home. She assumed the matter was temporarily over. But late one night, approximately two weeks later, she walked to her library and ran into two masked commandos for the National Guard carrying assault weapons. They had broken into her home, and seven more had climbed onto her balcony out back. “Why did you enter my house like thieves?” she asked them.
“At one point organized crime took it from us, and the government didn’t take it back.”
At first, the guardsmen sought to assuage the livid, lifelong political activist, claiming they had come for a noise complaint, then because of an airsoft gun they had found out back, and then because there were threats against her. The next morning, she discovered they’d ransacked her office downstairs. The official report the National Guard later filed alleged her home was near a casa de seguridad, or safe house, for a cartel. But Zepeda, who has lived in the region since the 1980s, came to another conclusion: the National Guard was protecting the Viagras. The raid, she came to believe, wasn’t an accident but a threat.
While it’s difficult to map out which wings of the state are behind which criminal groups in the Tierra Caliente region surrounding Apatzingán, it’s clear that collusion between state institutions and criminal groups remains widespread. As one man who lost his daughter to a kidnapping gang put it, “The government is 100 percent colluding with these motherfuckers.”
Complicity goes beyond one institution and is far from consistent, according to a sweeping report published by Crisis Group last year. “Fragmentation within the Mexican state, alongside fierce competition among a multitude of illegal armed groups, have given rise to a volatile set of collusive arrangements . . . between or even within state security institutions, with some parts collaborating with one criminal counterpart while others link up to a rival,” the report read. Few trust any authorities in Apatzingán, where victims of violence feel they have nowhere to turn and no recourse to find justice. Three sources, all of whom asked to remain anonymous, told me that approximately half of municipal police in Apatzingán are polimañas, or “mob police,” who work for different criminal groups from within their institution and carry out enforced disappearances, as well as helping to extort farmers. “The police are dangerous,” a lime-picker from south of the city told me.
The minimization of this state of permanent, low-intensity conflict goes up to the state and federal levels. Over the period of a week, as I interviewed not just displaced people but those whose family members had been murdered, disappeared, or kidnapped, almost no one made it thirty minutes into an interview without mentioning, with bitter sarcasm, the fact that Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, the governor of Michoacán, makes frequent flights in a helicopter to Apatzingán to hold forth at press conferences, where he claims that “todo esta bajo control”—“Everything is under control.” The government, as multiple sources I interviewed allege, treats displacement with the same criminalizing dismissiveness as enforced disappearance: andaban metido en algo, the victims were involved in something bad and so deserved their fate. And in many cases of mass forced displacement, men who remain or are unable to escape are forced to become sicarios. “If you don’t want to become displaced,” said one woman who works with DECOFEM, “it’s taken as an indication that you want to work for the mob.” For families caught in the middle of these warring criminal groups, few options are available.
I spoke to one such family from Mezquital, a village south of Apatzingán with no more than a hundred residents, most of whom pick limes for around 220 pesos a day—not including the quota paid to armed groups. I met with the family late one night last October, when they came to run errands in Apatzingán, having taken a roundabout route three hours longer than the normal one because, as residents from a village controlled by the Templarios, they couldn’t pass through a village controlled by a rival group.
“You hear the drone attacks and the machine gun fire,” the father said. “Day and night, day and night.” Despite the inordinate presence of soldiers, National Guardsmen, and state and municipal police in the valley, these authorities almost never intervene in the clashes between the Templarios and the Viagras, who, supported by the CJNG, are vying for control of the Tierra Caliente region surrounding Apatzingán by seeking to uproot the Templarios from their historic stronghold south of the city. Though no member of the family is part of either group—as a matter of fact, some left after suffering horrifying violence at the hands of sicarios—they have accommodated themselves to the presence of men with bulletproof vests and assault weapons.
I asked the mother how many had fled from their village already. For twenty or so seconds, she took her time to count as she thought out loud—“One, two, three, four,” she said, raising a finger every time she remembered a new group—before pausing long enough to come to her conclusion: five whole extended families had already left. The family believes it’s just a matter of time before the Viagras and CJNG take their village. “I’m afraid they’ll come to take my husband and sons to be soldiers,” the mother said, so they’re working to gain asylum in the United States. After thirty years living in their village, they, too, will likely join the invisible ranks of the displaced.
The Lie of the Land
One morning last April, a video emerged on social media of a line of palms across an empty pasture in which you can hear, through the unconcerned warbling of songbirds, the devilish rattle of automatic gunfire. The worst was beginning to happen: a group of over one hundred sicarios from the CJNG—using military-grade weapons and drones jerry-rigged with homemade bombs—had descended on the villages of El Órgano, Palos Marías, and Chorumo in the mountainous foothills to the east of Coahuayana, burning homes and seizing the phones of residents. According to Evangelina Contreras, at least one was killed, nine were injured, and an undetermined number were disappeared, many fearing they were forcibly recruited into the criminal group.
The autodefensas of Coahuayana and neighboring Aquila managed to partially hold off the incursion, but the CJNG were able to take over the village of El Órgano, displacing dozens of families. In response, residents blockaded a nearby highway to demand military intervention; after three days, troops finally arrived and pushed back the CJNG. A communiqué subsequently issued by the Observatorio de Seguridad Humana de Apatzingán demanded an eradication of the CJNG from that municipality, support for the autodefensas, and an end to collusion between criminals and the government.
I went back to Coahuayana later that summer, but it was hard to get people to talk about the violence that caused displacement, harder still to get them to talk about structural forces behind the violence, and hardest of all to talk to those who had been displaced. Eventually, I managed to speak with a man I’ll call Ricardo, a member of the governing council of Ostula, the indigenous Nahua village that forms a part of the coast controlled by self-defense groups. The case of Ostula is particular because, for years, its indigenous Nahua residents have fought the Mexican government to recognize their ancestral land titles.
For Natalia, it was clear: they would never be able to return.
The village of Ostula was founded in 1531; its land titles were recognized by the Spanish colonial viceroy in 1773 and again by the post-revolutionary government in 1964. But by the late 1990s, much of their coastal territory had been colonized by mestizos from outside states who were linked to the PRI and criminal groups. In 2009, the residents of Ostula gathered the few hunting rifles or shotguns they could procure and marched to their sacred beachfront, Xayakalan, running out the local cell of Caballeros Templarios that had taken control of the land near the beach, where they had built private homes and begun illegal logging. Two years later, fifteen residents were killed in a wave of assassinations by criminal groups, displacing numerous families to neighboring states, though in 2014, in the context of the autodefensas uprising, they returned and formed a guardia comunal, a ragtag militia that works with comunitarios in Coahuayana and Aquila to defend the village from attacks by criminal groups.
I interviewed Ricardo as we drove past the spot on the coastal highway where, just over a month earlier, one member of Ostula’s guardia comunal had been stopped by a truck of gunmen in military uniforms—sicarios from the CJNG, according to residents—who shot him dead in front of his wife and two-year-old son. They’d been driving to the hospital for a medical emergency. It was the sixth killing of a resident from Ostula since January 2023. (Over forty members of the community have been disappeared or killed by criminal groups since they formed the guardia comunal.)
We turned onto a sandy road that led to the beach through a towering forest of royal palms. A misty white haze of salt spume emanated, breath-like, from the waves. “This place represents a lot for us,” Ricardo said. “At one point organized crime took it from us, and the government didn’t take it back.” They’d spent the last twenty years trying to reclaim it for themselves through organization, marches, and with guns.
Members of the guardia comunal told me how, on occasion, when they’ve faced attacks from CJNG, the military has sent in Black Hawk helicopters to support them, ripping the sicarios to shreds with miniguns. It didn’t make sense: Why did they receive that kind of support from the armed wings of the same state that refused to recognize their right to land taken over by criminal groups?
Days before my return to Coahuayana, AMLO protégé Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidential election in a landslide, becoming the country’s first female head of state. A Stanford-educated former climate scientist and daughter of leftist militants, Sheinbaum centered her campaign on furthering AMLO’s so-called Fourth Transformation, during which MORENA implemented limited but meaningful social programs while overseeing, among other things, a renewed manufacturing boom. (The Transformation also consisted of draconian crackdowns on U.S.-bound migrants and historic levels of militarization, as well as state complicity in criminality and abuse.) But like her charismatic predecessor, Sheinbaum has little to say about violence in the country—even though insecurity was the most pressing concern of citizens in many polls—and even less about the crisis of enforced displacement.
Following her inauguration in October, Sheinbaum unveiled a new security plan that deviates little from that of AMLO’s administration. It was cosigned by her secretary of citizen security, Omar García Harfuch, whose claim to fame was overseeing a drop in homicides in Mexico City but who was himself accused of protecting heroin trafficking gangs while head of the state police in Guerrero. Harfuch was also implicated in the potential coverup of the mass disappearance of forty-three students in 2014, and his father and grandfather were notorious military and security officials who oversaw mass killings in the dirty war of the 1960s and 1970s, when the PRI regime hunted down thousands of leftist students, peasant organizers, and guerrilla fighters. Beyond vague exhortations to attack the root causes of violence, the plan calls for the consolidation of the National Guard and the strengthening of intelligence gathering capacities of security bodies, as well as increased cooperation between them. There is no specific mention of either enforced disappearance or enforced displacement.
“We are not looking for extrajudicial executions,” Sheinbaum said in a speech shortly after the plan’s release. But within the first month of her inauguration, there were multiple military-linked massacres throughout the country: soldiers shooting migrants dead in the southern state of Chiapas, shooting up civilian cars on the U.S. border, and dragging eight people from a home in Colima, less than an hour from Coahuayana, six of whom were reported dead in a shootout hours later.
In October, Sheinbaum faced questions from reporters at a morning press briefing about incidents of enforced displacement in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán. “We’re working on it in various ways,” she said, reassuring reporters in the same breath that “in the period of President López Obrador” the plan to fight displacement was, contrary to all evidence, “very successful.”
An Island of Peace
Eleven months after Natalia and her family were displaced, they acquired an escort from the Fiscalía to accompany them down the coast to their old home in Huahua in hopes of recovering their belongings. They found little of their past life: the rooms were ransacked, the windows smashed, the walls pockmarked by gunfire and covered in graffiti, the floor strewn with trash. A month later, one year after Zenaida’s killing, neighbors told them their home had been set partially ablaze. For Natalia, it was clear: they would never be able to return.
For now, the family is trying to settle into life in Coahuayana, where Natalia has thrown herself into work helping displaced people alongside Evangelina Contreras and others. “We’re on an island of peace surrounded by this violence,” she told me. Though she has placed her faith in the self-defense groups, safety is never guaranteed. “I’m still afraid,” she added, “that one day masked men from the Fiscalía will come to disappear me.”
The attacks by the CJNG, meanwhile, have only intensified: sicarios descended on the indigenous Nahua village of El Coire, south of Ostula, in the middle of August, displacing almost half of the village’s five hundred residents, killing two, and disappearing seven. The following week, eight members of Coahuayana’s autodefensas were massacred after being ambushed by an armored vehicle believed to have been sent by the CJNG, the largest apparent killing in the self-defense group’s history.
I went back to Coahuayana in October, where I met with Contreras in the shade outside the party decorations store where she works when she isn’t organizing efforts by DECOFEM to search for clandestine graves or provide aid to the displaced. While we sweated freely in the heat, she pointed to individuals walking by. “His father was disappeared up near Aquila,” Contreras said of an infant watched over by an elderly woman. Men pushing carts loaded with snow cones, women walking their kids home from school, they all shouted greetings to Contreras. “We all know each other; they’re displaced too.”
In 2023, she spearheaded an initiative with the municipal government of Coahuayana, under the approving gaze of the autodefensas, to create Colonia de la Paz, or Neighborhood of Peace, on a parcel of approximately twenty acres of land that had once belonged to a leader of the Caballeros Templarios. The land was to be divvied up and given to displaced people at fixed, below-market prices so they could have permanent residences.
A little before noon on the day we met last fall, she took me to visit the land where the homes were set to be built, a semi-forested plain looking out toward the blue mountains. The only signs of life were two roughshod tarpaulin shacks where, as we approached and got out of the car to survey the expanse, tired-looking people stood up and squinted at us from the shadows. Unfortunately, progress on the project has stalled out, the original, idealistic vision derailed: local municipal government officials reneged on their promises and sold the land cheaply to developers who turned around and raised prices to market rates. The displaced people, used as a pretext to get the land, will be unable able to buy in. “Rotten apples” is what the municipal president called displaced people to justify why he had let the project fall apart.
Colonia de la Paz may never materialize, but Contreras isn’t deterred. We got back in the car and returned to town: she had a meeting with DECOFEM to continue her work on behalf of the disappeared and displaced. “We can’t shut up about something this bad,” she said. “There are already more displaced people.”