Just after Christmas, drug hitmen rolled into the isolated village of Tierras Coloradas and burned it down, leaving more than 150 people, mostly children, homeless in the raw mountain winter.
The residents, Tepehuan Indians who speak Spanish as a second language and have no electricity or running water, had already fled into the woods, sleeping under trees or hiding in caves after a raid by a feared drug gang on Dec. 26.
Using murder and intimidation, rival cartels are fighting for control of this drug-growing area. A group of armed men came searching for a man rumored to be cultivating marijuana.
He died trying to defend himself, but not before killing a suspected drug trafficking leader, and residents were sure the gang would return for revenge.
“We saw they killed one person and we thought, ‘Now they are going to kill everyone.’ So we ran,” said Jose, a village leader, standing in front of the charred remains of the one-room pre-school, with mangled desk chairs strewn outside.
On Dec. 28, two days after the initial raid, a column of 50 to 60 men, some in military-type uniforms and ski masks, filed on foot down a steep mountain road and torched three dozen homes — about half the village — as well as two schools, 17 trucks, the radio receiver and the community store.
The attack on Tierras Coloradas is one of the most dramatic examples yet of a still largely hidden phenomenon of Mexico’s drugs war: people forced from their homes by the violence.
“The situation is out of control,” Durango state prosecutor Ramiro Ortiz said in an interview at his office last week. “Organized crime has no limits any more. They don’t respect women or children. It’s a situation of total brutality.”
President Felipe Calderon’s four-year-old army-led campaign against the cartels has shaken up the balance of power in Mexico’s criminal underworld and sparked a wave of turf wars, sometimes trapping civilians in their midst.
Tierras Coloradas lies in the heart of a marijuana and opium poppy growing region known as Mexico’s “Golden Triangle,” and is more than 11 hours by car on poor roads and dirt tracks from Durango’s state capital,
The rule of law is evaporating in the region as drug gangs extend their power. Jose said he tried to call the municipal police on the village’s only radio the day before it was reduced to ashes but he was told there were ‘dangerous people’ on the road who wouldn’t let police through.
“We were waiting and waiting but they never came,” said 24-year-old Maria Guadalupe, wearing the traditional Tepehuan dress of brightly colored satin blouse and skirt lined with ruffles, paired with fuzzy fluorescent socks.
Walking with difficulty because of a limp, she fled with her mother, seven brothers and sisters and a four-month old niece. The villagers hid in the mountains for nearly a week before soldiers arrived to secure what was left of the town.
In the northern states of Durango, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, cartels fighting for control of lucrative smuggling routes to the United States have threatened entire towns with ultimatums to flee or be killed.
No official numbers exist, but the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, or IDMC, estimates 115,000 people have been displaced by Mexico’s drug violence.
Another 115,000 or more have fled and slipped into the United States, IDMC says. Some leave and then move back, creating a floating population that is hard to track.
“The focus of the government is obviously on beating the cartels ... Beyond keeping a tally of people who have been killed, they are not tracking the impact of this violence on the civilian population,” IDMC’s Mexico program director Sebastian Albuja said.
