iDMC+NRC, Global Report on Internal Displacement 2016

"People flee criminal violence in a number of forms, from gang violence and drug traffickers’ turf wars in Mexico and Central America to clan feuds in the Philippines and armed banditry in CAR, but their migration is not systematically monitored worldwide.

[...] Organised criminal violence associated with drug trafficking and gang activity has reached epidemic proportions in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in recent years. As a result, there were at least a million IDPs in the region as of the end of 2015, up from 848,000 at the end of 2014, many of them driven from cities suffering the highest homicide rates in the world and levels of violence comparable with a war zone.

[...] Despite this evidence, displacement associated with generalised criminal violence in the region tends to remain hidden and unquantified. People flee unseen and their subsequent protection and assistance needs go unaddressed for a number of reasons.

In some countries, there is a general lack of recognition that criminal violence causes displacement. Mexican authorities acknowledge the phenomenon at a regional level, but not within their own borders, and Guatemala is similarly reluctant.

[...] The figures that do exist point to an alarming situation. Research to quantify the scale of displacement in Mexico indicates that around two per cent of the country’s population, or 1 7 million people, were forced to migrate between 2006 and 2011 because of the threat or risk of violence – an average of 330,000 people a year." [source]