“Mom, why are they trying to kill us?” a young girl asked her mother as they ran through the wilderness fleeing from a massive and indiscriminate attack by Mexican marines who opened artillery fire and dropped grenades on hundreds of innocent civilians early October causing 600 people to flee their homes.

The child's words describe the horror that thousands of people lived for days as marines descended on their communities on board helicopters. They also explain why close to 100 children required immediate psychological attention after living through a highly traumatic experience at the hands of the very same forces that are supposed to protect them.

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Powerful gunshots are heard in a video released by El Debate, a Sinaloa state newspaper, as people hid in the forest and silenced their children as to not be detected.

VIDEO: Artillery fire can be heard in this video in which people can also be heard reacting to the Mexican marines’ attack while hiding in the wilderness.

“They yelled at us not to run or that we would be shot at and killed regardless of who we were,” a resident of El Verano, in the northern state of Durango said in the video.

Source: Google Maps

Today, El Verano has become a ghost town, along with other nearby communities in the Sierra Madre — the mountainous region that covers a wide region of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango states — where Mexico's most powerful drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is more than likely hiding out because he controls it all.

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​Over 600 people were displaced by the violence by the marines, who say they are after El Chapo: a claim nobody believes. Sinaloan organized crime writer and journalist Javier Cardenas recently told teleSUR it is all “pure circus.”

Hundreds of people have been forced out of their homes by Mexican marines attacks and in to shelters. They remain hopeful that someday they will be able to go back. | Photo: Internet

While a source very close to El Chapo, Julio “El Tio” Martinez also recently told teleSUR, “It's all lies. They (army and marines) fabricate stories about being after El Chapo to justify the abuses they commit against innocent civilians.”

Another witness of the attacks said, “I was alone with my wife and children when they began massively firing on my house and destroying my pickup truck. We ran toward the forest. We called 066 (emergency) and they told us it was the marines, and when we called again for information they completely denied it was them.”

The Ministry of the Navy responded to the accusations days after the attacks and besieging various communities, saying their marines were shot at and that they did not commit any human rights violations.

“In fact, nobody has complained about they way the marines operated,” the ministry said in a statement dated Oct. 12, despite the fact that Oscar Loza Ochoa, a veteran human rights defender from Sinaloa, had already visited the affected communities after a complaint was presented by dozens of locals and reported that over 600 people have been displaced by the marines abusive actions.

University Professor and veteran human rights defender Oscar Loza Ochoa. | Photo: Internet

Loza Ochoa spoke with teleSUR and said his task was to investigate the abuses and elaborate a recommendation to the authorities.

“The marines say they were after Guzman, but I don't know if it's true nor how close they actually were in capturing him,” he said.

When asked that various experts and analyst believe the marines were not after El Chapo and were only using this as an excuse for the abuses they committed, Loza said, “It's possible that it's true.” Instead, Loza explained the crisis of displacement across the country.

“Despite that, the displacement of people gets worse by the day because of the violence carried out by state and federal authorities, the government's first reaction – as usual – is to deny the issue and only after insisting, do they accept the reality, but still, they do nothing about it,” Loza, former president of the Sinaloa State Human Rights Commission, said.

The activist, who still works for the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights in Sinaloa, known as the CDDHS, confirmed after collecting testimonies of the displaced and visiting affected areas that the military fired on homes and streets to instill fear among the population.

“After shooting from helicopters, marines arrived by land raiding homes without search warrants and demanding people not to leave their communities,” he said.

In a recommendation addressed to the governor of Sinaloa, Mario Lopez, and of neighboring Durango, Jorge Herrera, Loza and the CDDHS, emphasize that Mexico is going through a humanitarian crisis Mexico, with close to 300,000 people displaced in recent years due to state violence.

They describe how communities have been completely abandoned by their inhabitants.

“In Sinaloa, the number of displaced people was about 25,000 in 2012 as we pointed out then. Since then, the number has increased by at least 10 percent,” the CDDHS stated in its document, dated Oct. 20, which was sent to teleSUR Tuesday.

It says international organizations are aware of the situation throughout the country, but have been unable to assist the victims because the Mexican government seems more eager to downplay human rights abuses and humanitarian crises than attend to them.

Catherine Bragg, who served many years as the U.N. Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, said last year, “the United Nations is very concerned about the situation of violence in Mexico which has caused the displacement of people. They are aware of the serious situation, in spite of which the Mexican government has not requested their support nor are they themselves taking care of the situation.”

The CDDHS condemns the Mexican government: they say the problem of displacement currently affects about 1 million people.

The 600 people recently forced to pick up whatever they can carry from their homes and abandon them to go elsewhere are hopeful of someday returning to their places of origin. The human rights organization wonders if this will be possible in the short term. More than likely, “no,” is the response.

The worse thing now, according to an editorial in Siglo de Durango, quoting a displaced person, is that all those communities on the border between Durango and Sinaloa remain besieged by the “murderers of the Ministry of the Navy.”

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