Identification at the municipal level of forced displacement in Mexico: Analysis of the incidence of violence due to drug trafficking
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Abstract
Forcibly displaced populations flee extreme violence in their territories to safeguard their lives, during their transit, they are exposed to revictimization. Documenting the geographical dimensions of internal forced displacement in Mexico is difficult, due to the lack of official information systems that are necessary to generate systematic and specific indicators to the circumstances in which it occurs. This work develops a quantitative and documentary methodological route to identify forced displacement disaggregated by federal entity, by crossing three variables: presence of drug cartels, criminal incidence and emigration rate by municipality, through a weighting by quartiles that yielded a forced internal displacement index and an approximation in the identification of the municipalities that are likely to experiment this phenomenon. The results obtained during the research period show that, although a spatial pattern is not properly observed, there are 372 municipalities which display high values in the indicators, whose cartographic crossing indicates a high possibility that forced displacement is occurring. The work also contributes by revealing the scope and limitations of existing data sources in Mexico on this topic.