TULA, Mexico (AP) — When bombs fell from the sky and bullets ricocheted off her concrete floors, 74-year-old María Cabrera and her family fled into the night-cloaked mountains of central Mexico with only the clothes on their backs.A week later, Cabrera picks through the charred scraps of her life, salvaging pots, woven cloths and a small wooden cross. She knows that it’s the last time she’ll return to her home of 60 years. “Oh God, why have you abandoned me,” she said through heartbroken sobs, wandering past burned ashes of what was once her mattress in a small room with a collapsed roof and a melted refrigerator just through the door. “How are we going to rebuild? We don’t have money, we don’t have anything.”She joined a growing number of people displaced in conflict-torn regions of Mexico forced to flee their homes. Experts have described the phenomenon as an invisible crisis with long-term humanitarian consequences — there are few official figures on the number of displaced people, who have almost no resources to turn to once violence forces them to leave.
‘We can’t live here anymore’Cabrera fled her small town Friday after years of mounting cartel violence in Tula. This town of around 200 native Náhuatl people is among many in the central state of Guerrero ravaged by decades of fracturing rival criminal groups warring for territorial control. Last week, a group known as Los Ardillos attacked her town and a handful of others with drone-fired explosives, opened fire on local community police forces, killed livestock and burned homes like Cabrera’s to an undistinguishable crisp.
