The humanitarian crisis of forced internal displacement has spread rapidly in recent years. Mexico has begun to appear in world reports as a country with an alarming growth in incidents of internal displacement since 2006, when the administration of Felipe Calderón, former Mexican President from 2006 to 2012, decided to declare war against the drug trade. In the absence of a regulatory framework, public policies or a broad and concrete definition of forced internal displacement, the phenomenon and its victims demand comprehensive and immediate attention. This article recovers the testimony of a displaced family using a memory exercise to try and re-signify their experience in order to build a claim for the construction of public policies that contribute to the prevention of displacement, and to justice and pacification in current Mexican society.
Norma Adriana Garduño Salazar holds a Masters’ degree in Public Health from the National Institute of Public Health (INSP). She has taught various courses and diplomas in areas such as midwifery, traditional Mexican medicine and the training of community health promoters both in indigenous and/or peasant communities and in public and private institutions. She is a member of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity since 2011 and of the Morelos Movement against open-pit mining concessions since 2012. She currently collaborates with the Minerva Bello Center for the Rights of Victims of Violence, where she provides support to human rights defenders and journalists who, like her, have survived attacks for their work before the Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists and in civil society organizations that push for forced displacement to be regulated in a law that includes the voice of victims.
This Working Paper was written by the author during her Summer Fellowship on Internal Displacement at the Internal Displacement Research Program of the Refugee Law Initiative. The grant was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, on behalf of the UKRI Global Challenge Research Fund, as part of the funded project “Interdisciplinary Network on Internal Displacement, Conflict and Protection” (AH/T005351/1).
