Beyond the “Narco”: Violence, Forced Displacement and Capitalist Dispossession in Northeast Mexico

Abstract

This article presents the results of a research on forced displacement in Mexico, based on the case of the northeast region — bordering with the United States —, where several municipalities have been affected by the dynamics of violence and depopulation in the last two decades (2000-2020), in the context of the drug war. Through a critical geography perspective, its study is based on a quantitative methodology, through a spatial and statistical analysis that seeks to relate forced displacement, as a product of criminal violence, with the presence of important hydrocarbon deposits in that region. The main contribution is that the municipalities most affected by the violence are located precisely along the Burgos Basin area, which contains the largest shale gas reserve in the country. In this sense, the evidence obtained indicates that forced displacement in these municipalities could respond to a strategic logic of dispossession, in which criminal violence operates as a means for transcend it and which has geopolitical roots.