Introduction
Criminal groups have driven a wave of displacement in the north of Central America – El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. In 2014, escalating arrivals of refugees from these countries at the US southern border attracted global media interest; and drew attention to the role of criminal groups in driving displacement. But levels of internal displacement in these small countries have also been significant and continuing. As of 2024, at least 318,600 people were internally displaced just in El Salvador and Honduras.
Ten years on, what wider lessons does this regional context hold for how we understand and respond to internal displacement linked to the violence of criminal groups? In these countries, such groups have included violent street gangs – like those affiliated to the MS-13 and Barrio 18 identities – and local criminal organisations dedicated to cross-border trafficking of goods, as well as Mexican drug cartels. This short paper identifies four main learning points that illustrate why labelling of such groups as ‘criminal’ should not serve to distract us from their potential to drive patterns of population displacement.
Criminal groups as ‘armed actors’
In the countries of the north of Central America, it has been possible to analyse how such criminal groups drive displacement by understanding them as organised armed groups operating in localised contexts where State authority is attenuated. These situations display strong similarities with low-intensity armed conflicts. For instance, they have comparable levels of violence in ‘hotspot’ locations. Equally, both criminal groups in the north of Central America and parties to conflicts such as Colombia depend on illicit economic activities (and have but tenuous ‘political’ aims). Likewise, in both, the State contributes to the violence (often using military as well as police forces) and ultimately treats any opposing armed groups as ‘criminal’. The point here is not that the situations of violence in the north of Central America are ‘armed conflicts’ (although some might qualify as such). Rather, by treating criminal groups as strategic armed actors like those in conflicts, we can better grasp how they contribute to displacement crises.
For instance, it is clear that only certain kinds of criminal groups drive displacement at scale. In the north of central America, they are those that pursue, however incoherently, control of local populations in ways that include (but need not be limited to) the use or threat of violence. Yet, even among such criminal groups, considerable differences are also seen to exist between the different kinds – e.g. gangs, local trafficking groups and Mexican cartels – in terms of structure, locality, scale, aims and methods. For instance, in the north of Central America, the cliques of the main violent street gangs have tended to be small, relatively undisciplined and poor, localised to a few square blocks of urban zones and often act in predatory ways towards inhabitants. By contrast, groups engaged in cross-border trafficking have tended to be larger and better organised and resourced, operating across extensive predominantly rural zones, and usually less predatory towards inhabitants. As we will see, such particularities shape the ensuing dynamics of displacement in the respective zones.
Shaping the dynamics and profiles of displacement
In the north of Central America, displacement ‘hot spots’ have tended to concentrate in urban zones. It is also often atomised and pre-emptive, i.e. individuals or families fleeing the threat of death as perceived traitors, rivals or informants or, with gangs, as resisting extortion or their wide range of other arbitrary rules. Allowing someone to live and leave the area is usually not in the illicit group’s interests. As such, displaced people with these profiles face serious protection risks if they return home or are located by the group (and some people are actively pursued). However, people also leave the zones where groups such as gangs operate due to more diffuse pre-emptive fears about insecurity, often losing out financially as a result. Finally, criminal groups do sometimes displace people intentionally in order to occupy lands or houses. Similarly, where control of the zone is disputed between two of more groups, they not only scale up the threat of violence underpinning ‘everyday’ displacements but also often order mass displacements as a quick way to get rid of any ‘suspect’ inhabitants.
In these contexts, the differentiating and often targeted nature of the violence underpinning displacement creates different profiles of protection needs among the displaced, based principally on which criminal group they are fleeing and in what circumstances. For instance, youths from poor neighbourhoods find themselves again of interest to the criminal groups present in the areas to which they displace or are generally vulnerable to violence from State security forces. Likewise, the conservatism on issues of sex and gender that cuts across society (including gangs and the State) can heighten protection risks for female and LGBTIQ+ individuals. Extreme avoidance strategies can be seen post-displacement as well as prior to flight, with at-risk youths confining themselves hidden within the family house for weeks or even months. Protection needs, as well as displacement patterns, can thus be highly differentiated.
Responding to the displacement crisis
The State is an ambiguous actor in the violence affecting these countries. The limited capacity of its civilian institutions, the aggressive violence of its security forces and the degree of infiltration by criminal elements (such that it cannot always be neatly separated from them) are all factors that contribute to the displacement crisis. Criminal groups are not the only drivers of violence and displacement here. Indeed, in many ways, the State acts like a State involved in a low-intensity conflict (even at times trying to negotiate settlements with gang structures, as in El Salvador in 2020). But there are also differences. For instance, the fact that the Salvadorian security forces could, in a matter of months in 2022, enter gang territories and locate, arrest and detain all suspected gang members (and many innocent youths too) and ‘pacify’ those localities indicates that, for a State determined to take extreme (and probably unlawful) measures, the gangs’ territorial ‘control’ was flimsier than that of non-State armed groups in conflicts. At the same time, the scope for the State or other actors to agree and sustain ‘humanitarian’ accords or access with criminal groups appears relatively more limited.
In this context, ‘recognising’ displacement as a humanitarian issue (and not just a matter of suppressing crime) can be a challenge, given government concerns about the resulting political impact. But addressing the needs of displaced persons through penal law provisions for victims of crimes is ineffective when the displacement is at scale or where the displaced are required first to denounce a crime (thereby denying protection to the many people who displace pre-emptively in this context and bringing additional dangers for them as ‘informants’). By contrast, by adopting displacement-specific laws, Honduras and El Salvador have been better able to tailor the protection and assistance response towards the needs of displacement-affected people. Given resource scarcities in each country, the frameworks also usefully prioritise interventions based on needs within those populations. In both countries, UNHCR – the UN refugee agency – played an important role in supporting the development of this response.
The 2014 north of Central America situation: an aberration?
It is tempting to see the north of Central America in 2014 as paradigmatic of displacement driven by criminal groups. But, whilst that context attracted substantial interest, it was not static through time. Gangs and trafficking groups are highly adaptable and how they operate and use violence can shift quite quickly, often in response to external factors. Indeed, the surge in displacement in the north of Central America in the mid-2010s itself arguably reflected a change in the scale and methods of extortion practised by gangs in urban zones. Likewise, in the rural areas, it partly reflected the sudden introduction of brutal violence by rival Mexican cartels and their proxies seeking to take over trafficking routes. Conversely, the recent mass detentions in El Salvador have dramatically curtailed the scope for gangs to operate (whether this is sustainable is less clear). Thus, criminality in such contexts should not be seen as endemic or unchanging, but rather they should be recognised as having the potential to shift rapidly with changes in the underlying conditions, in much the same way as conflict dynamics.
Conversely, in regional terms, the north of Central America is not an aberration. In the past ten years, criminal groups elsewhere in the Americas have generated significant displacement in parts of Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and under the umbrella of the armed conflict in Colombia. This is also ever more evident in Ecuador. In Haiti, the breakdown of State authority has seen over one million people internally displaced, many multiple times, as predatory criminal gangs consolidate their power in a vacuum of State authority. Indeed, a shift towards criminality as a key driver in the dynamics of organised social violence is evident across the Americas. But violent criminal groups operate and produce displacement in contexts of weak State authority in many other parts of the world. In Nigeria, for instance, extensive attacks by armed criminal gangs in North West State have forced people to flee their homes. In parallel, many internal armed conflicts across the world are shaped in important ways by the efforts of armed actors to control illicit economies. The Democratic Republic of Congo is but one tragic example of lives lost and people displaced.
Looking to the future
The 2014 wave of displacement in the north of Central America was not a temporal anomaly and, in some of those countries, it continues to this day. It was also not a geographical anomaly: similar kinds of armed criminal groups are present in many other countries in the world. Where they seek to control local populations in ostensibly ‘peaceful’ but violent locations where State authority is weak, dynamics of forced displacement are likely to emerge as a result of the activities of such groups and/or the State’s security forces. The same is true where they operate under the umbrella of more established armed conflicts. Finally, we should be alert also to the involvement of armed criminal groups in development projects that generate their own displacements. The fact that we label groups such as gangs, trafficking organisations and cartels as ‘criminal’ must not blind us to the wider social and humanitarian consequences of their activities – that includes displacement.
David Cantor is Professor and Director of the Refugee Law Initiative and its Internal Displacement Research Programme. This short piece draws principally on his research on conflict, violence and displacement in the Americas since 2004.
This paper is part of the Researching Internal Displacement series on ‘Internal Displacement in the Context of Organised Criminal Violence’. The first five volumes in this series draw on research by experts at the Internal Displacement Research Programme of the RLI, working collaboratively with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons in relation to her 2025 Call for Inputs on this theme.
KEYWORDS: IDPs, Displacement, Americas, Organised Violence, Criminal Groups
Selected bibliography
Cantor, David (2023) Criminal Groups and A Decade of Displacement in Central America and Mexico. Brown Journal of World Affairs. 29(1), pp. 1-19.
Cantor, David (2018) Returns of Internally Displaced Persons during Armed Conflict: International Law and its Application in Colombia. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.
Cantor, David (2016) As deadly as armed conflict? Gang violence and forced displacement in the Northern Triangle of Central America. Agenda Internacional, 23 (34). pp. 77-97.
Cantor, David (2014) The New Wave: Forced Displacement Caused by Organized Crime in Central America and Mexico. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 33(3), pp. 34–68, https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdu008
Knox, Vickie (2019) Gang violence, GBV and hate crime in Central America: State response versus State responsibility. Forced Migration Review, pp. 61-62.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2018) Eligibility Guidelines for Assessing the International Protection Needs of asylum-seekers from Guatemala, https://www.refworld.org/policy/countrypos/unhcr/2018/en/120120.