The Tribune

By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON Associated Press VERACRUZ, Mexico (AP) -- Rafael Echeverria had a steady factory job, a modest home of his own, and enough cash to ocassionally take his family to McDonald's. It was a good life until the drug war hit Ciudad Juarez, followed by two robberies at his house, extortion at his daughter's school, and finally, the shootout on the bus. When the firing began, six-year-old Valeria dove to the floor, breaking a tooth. There was so much blood from her mouth wound, her parents thought she'd been shot. The next day, the couple and their two children boarded a flight back home to Veracruz, along with 1,600 others who had once moved north for work in foreign assembly plants and now were fleeing south in search of safety. The Veracruz state government paid for the flights, and assured the drug war refugees that there would be jobs, education and housing. At the time, it seemed to the Echeverrias like the only solution. Then the drug war followed them home. Military offensives against the drug cartels and turf battles among crime syndicates has pushed the war into areas once considered quiet. A year after their hopeful flight, the Echevarrias are not only caught anew in a crush of violence, but still without the promised help. In Juarez, the Echevarrias had a house and a van. In Veracruz, they've had to pawn their appliances and move to a concrete hut to make ends meet. The trade of solvency for safety was a fake choice, because in Juarez, Echevarria said, "We would have been living well. "Now we're in a hole. And it's very difficult to get out." The Echevarrias are among thousands of Mexicans who make up the internal diaspora trying to escape drug violence that seems to migrate rather than cease, with more than 45,000 troops fighting cartels and more than 40,000 dead by many counts. Recent survey results by Parametria found that since 2006, 17 per cent of Mexicans have moved because of drug violence, a striking 1.6 million. One study by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre put the number at 230,000 in 2010, estimating that half fled to the United States. Another study, by demographer Rodolfo Rubio at Colegio de la Frontera Norte, says 200,000 people left Juarez alone for other Mexican cities between 2007 and 2010. Many of the affected are working class or poor who can't leave the country. "People who have status or small medium-sized businesses don't have a problem going to the US," said Genoveva Roldan, a migration expert at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. "That's not the case for workers in the maquiladoras. They don't have that option."