Women shoulder the burden of internal displacement in Mexico

Mexico City—“Every night she asks me, ‘Why are we sleeping out here on the ground and not in the palace?’” Doña Marisela Cástulo Guzmán said, gesturing to her seven-year-old daughter, Frida.

Last February, with around 350 other families, Doña Marisela and Frida camped out on the sidewalk outside Mexico’s National Palace in the Zócalo, the central plaza of Mexico City. They’d trekked to the capital to demand action from the federal government on their displacement from their pueblos in the mountains of Guerrero state last November. The desplazados (displaced people), who are largely small-plot farmers, fled the mountains when their towns were invaded by armed members of the organized criminal gangs that plague the region, often fighting for the lucrative territory where opium poppies and marijuana are grown and transportation routes for silver, titanium, and gold mining are nearby. The incursion left several dead and many wounded, including children, and the gang members now occupy the homes of the displaced.

The displacement of Doña Marisela and Frida and their neighbours is hardly an isolated incident in Mexico, where the latest figures from the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights report that there were 25 cases of large-scale internal forced displacement in Mexico in 2017, which affected 20,390 people.

While camped in the Zócalo, the desplazados were visited by Cecilia Jimenez-Damary, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, who was in town for a conference of human rights defenders. Along with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN is urging the newly elected Mexican government, led by the populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly called AMLO), to create stronger measures to support, compensate, and re-house internally displaced people in Mexico.

As Jimenez-Damary notes in her most recent report on the rights of internally displaced peoples, “men and women experience displacement differently and suffer different abuses throughout displacement,” and women’s concerns are often marginalized in government approaches to the problem.

Doña Joaquina Cantor, a mother and grandmother, told Women Under Siege that she fled the town of Tlaltempanampa with other mothers and grandmothers in November, walking through the night with the children of 17 families to escape an armed narco gang that was threatening to kill everyone in the village who did not join them.

“The women could only find white rice and dry tortillas to feed everyone with, drinking only river water, which made some of the children sick,” said Teodomira Rosales, who, as a director of a local human rights organization, has been advocating for the desplazados and also spoke to Women Under Siege.

Once in the Zócalo, it was the daily job of the women to prepare lunch from donated ingredients and to ensure that everyone had enough to eat. They nursed and comforted the elderly and children as they caught colds and gastritis.

The desplazados are now back in Guerrero, having been assured by the government that they are going to secure the region and provide humanitarian aid (food, education, and health services) to the families while they wait to return safely home to their pueblos. When Women Under Siege visited them in the municipal auditorium where the community gathers every day, women were preparing and serving lunch, meeting to discuss the monthly food budget, and making decorations for the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, which they set up under an old basketball ring. A schedule of chores is stuck to one wall, showing an equal division of bathroom cleaning duties between women and men. 

Cantor said she “felt safe” in her new temporary accommodation. In securing the future of the desplazados, the federal government will have to find a place where there is fertile land so that families can plant corn and beans, since that is their only source of employment, she noted. Doña Joaquina’s community is seeking re-location, while Doña Marisela’s wants to return to their former homes.

It is estimated that the families will be waiting some six months before this is going to be possible. And while they wait, the community will continue to be nurtured by its mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and sisters – women who make place in the face of displacement.