Although the news reports are brief, the scenes are repeated day after day: Indigenous people in Chiapas are being violently displaced from the lands they have inhabited for centuries; residents living near the silver mines in Zacatecas are forced to flee due to threats from criminal groups; paramilitary forces are expelling farmers in the Tierra Caliente region of Guerrero; no authority intervenes to stop the violence forcing small-scale ranchers in two municipalities of Chihuahua to abandon their homes and belongings.
Taken together at the national level, the figures are shocking. Between 2006 and 2021, the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights recorded 386,000 people forcibly displaced from their homes and places of origin. The majority come from rural communities (87.5 percent). However, a substantial portion belong to indigenous populations (41 percent).
Forced displacement that occurs gradually or on a small scale reveals even more grim figures. The statistics point to the now unimaginable number of individuals or families who are forced to move from their homes or communities due to extortion, threats of kidnapping, or frequent robberies of their homes or small businesses. This is a form of violent displacement that is far more silent than the previous, large-scale type. In 2021, the figure provided by the National Survey on Victimization and Perception of Public Safety reached a scale that encompasses a significant portion of the national population: 831,000 people fleeing their homes and places of origin under siege by criminal groups.
Until recently, the causes and consequences of this geography of terror were largely unknown; each resident came up with their own personal explanations. Today, thanks to the invaluable dedication of a professional community of sociologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and others, we have a more detailed understanding of its economic, social, and political causes, the mapping of the displacements themselves, and the devastating psychological, individual, and familial effects on its victims.
Among the many publications on this subject that have appeared over the past decade, the recent volume edited by Jairo Antonio López Pacheco and Libertad Argüello Cabrera stands out: Internal Forced Displacement and Violence in Mexico: Causes, Trajectories, and Effects (UNAM, 2026). It brings together texts by more than twenty researchers—active members of a joint working group—who have been exposing what three regimes since Felipe Calderón’s six-year term have strived to conceal: the collusion between transnational and national capital, organized crime, law enforcement agencies (the police, the Army, the National Guard…) and countless members and officials of the federal and local governments to turn part of the country into the territory of a necroeconomy—that is, a form of hyper-savage capitalism that bases the deployment of its mechanisms on dispossession, murder, disappearances, and forced displacements, without law, the rule of law, or any authority to contain it.
In the various studies that make up this volume, the unique characteristics of this necropolitics—which has defined the Mexican state since 2007—become increasingly clear. Mining companies that appropriate water and land, dairy corporations that divert entire rivers and turn what were once fertile lands into deserts, transnational agribusinesses that dispossess small-scale farmers and destroy the basic ecosystem, migrant smuggling, routes for the (practically industrial) trafficking of drugs to the United States, and the expropriation of areas and lands for commercialization—these constitute the pillars of social machinery that have made displacement and disappearances synonymous with a human devastation which, given its numbers, dimensions, and scope, can now be described as a holocaust: the Mexican holocaust.
The term derives from a combination of Greek and Hebrew and, in ancient texts, refers to a theological sacrifice. In Mexico, it equates to the sacrifice of a segment of the population to create optimal conditions for the two fundamental deities of capital: investment and compliance (read: docility in the face of its expansion). One of the texts in the volume calls it “the control of the living.” And, indeed, what is at stake is not only establishing dominion over human beings, but over everything that makes life possible.
If the effects of forced displacement affect entire rural communities—and, in particular, indigenous populations—we are facing a form of ethnic cleansing, which amounts to nothing less than the eradication not of these communities’ resistance to this process, but of the communities themselves. And these are crimes against humanity.
Original text published by Ilán Semo published in La Jornada on June 4th, 2026.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.