María Cabrera, 74, fled into the night‑cloaked mountains of central Mexico last week as bombs dropped from drones and bullets ricocheted off her concrete floors. A week later, escorted by soldiers, she picked through the charred scraps of her home in Tula, Guerrero — salvaging pots, woven cloths, and a small wooden cross — her home of 60 years reduced to ash by a cartel attack.

“Oh God, why have you abandoned me,” she said through sobs, standing near a collapsed roof and a melted refrigerator. “How are we going to rebuild? We don’t have money, we don’t have anything.”

Cabrera and her husband, 75-year-old Alejandro Venancio Bruno, are among hundreds of Indigenous Náhuatl people displaced after members of the Los Ardillos cartel struck a cluster of towns in Guerrero on Friday. The group opened fire with rifles, killed livestock, burned homes, and employed commercial drones rigged with explosives, according to residents and a local human rights group.

The Indigenous and People’s Council of Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata, or CIPOG-EZ, said at least 800 people — including children and the elderly — were forced to flee, and three community police officers who fought back were killed. The official tally from Mexico’s government, released Tuesday, was far smaller: only 120 displaced and no confirmed deaths. One community leader, speaking at a basketball court where hundreds took shelter, told a local official that their town alone had seen roughly 280 people flee.

The attack pushed President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration to send 1,200 military and police reinforcements to the region. Officials say they have contained much of the violence, established a “safe corridor” for humanitarian aid, and begun working to defuse the long-running territorial feuds among fractured criminal groups.

“What we do not want is a confrontation that would affect the civilian population. Above all, we must preserve people’s lives,” Sheinbaum said at a news conference last week.

But critics say the government’s response is the latest example of downplaying a displacement crisis that lacks even a baseline count. Unlike Colombia, Mexico does not maintain a comprehensive registry of internally displaced people. A 2025 government survey estimated that nearly 250,000 households fled their homes in 2024 to escape crime. Between 2024 and 2025, researchers at the Ibero‑American University documented at least 44,695 people who had moved to other parts of Mexico to escape violence; many more sought refuge in the United States.

“There’s no more life in these communities,” said Prisco Rodríguez, a CIPOG-EZ representative. “The government says people have already returned to their houses, but there’s no one here. People don’t say where they’re going out of fear … and the majority never appear.”

Cabrera and her husband were still trying to decide where to go. Their children pleaded with them to move to Mexico City or the state of Querétaro and start over. But Venancio said he had spent his life working his land, and without his goats, his home, or any savings, a life outside Tula felt impossible.

“It’s like starting from zero,” he said.