To the description of the serious humanitarian crisis that Colombia is experiencing due to the armed conflict, whose consequences in 2025 reached the most severe level of the last decade, according to that year’s report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, is now added the Global Report on Internal Displacement 2026 (GRID 2026) from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the world’s main source for monitoring and analyzing internal displacement.
For the case of the Americas region, this document states that new internal displacements caused by conflict and violence increased from 700,000 in 2022 to 800,000 in 2023, before almost doubling to around 1.5 million in 2024 and reaching 1.6 million in 2025. These figures refer to displacements recorded in each year, not cumulative totals, and they show how conflict and violence are driving an increasingly severe displacement crisis in the region.
“Internal displacement in the Americas is increasingly marked by violence,” said Stine Paus, regional director of the Norwegian Refugee Council in Latin America, quoted in an NRC bulletin. “IDMC data confirm that violence, particularly criminal violence, has become one of the main factors forcing people to flee within their own countries.”
The cumulative number of internally displaced people in the Americas reached 10.5 million in 2025, up from 9.7 million in 2024, according to IDMC estimates, in a context marked by the persistence of conflict and violence. Of the total cumulative figure, the vast majority (10.2 million) corresponds to displacement caused by conflict and violence, while around 360,000 are due to disasters.
Colombia records highest displacement figure to date
The report shows that 87% of all displacements caused by criminal violence globally were recorded in the Americas. Haiti concentrates most of these movements and, for the fifth consecutive year, recorded the highest number of internal displacements in its history: almost one million displacements were recorded in 2025, most of which occurred in the first half of the year, amid an accelerated expansion of violence and territorial control by armed groups.
In Colombia, IDMC recorded 394,106 displacements due to conflict and violence in 2025, the highest figure documented to date, as a result of the worsening of violence and internal conflict.
On a global scale, the five countries with the highest number of internally displaced people account for nearly 50% of the global total. In this map, Colombia ranks second worldwide: just between January and February 2025, the department of Norte de Santander recorded more displacements than in all of 2024.
A look at what is happening in other countries (where criminal violence is generating new patterns of internal displacement) shows the severity of the situation in Colombia: in Ecuador, for example, IDMC estimates that only in 2025 nearly 132,000 displacements were caused by violence, accumulating at least 316,000 internally displaced people.
Honduras and Mexico also show how violence is driving sustained internal displacement, in contexts where the lack of official records limits the visibility of the phenomenon and the response.
Lack of visibility, another problem for displaced people
Despite the scale of internal displacement driven by conflict and violence in the region, these crises often receive insufficient international attention and funding, which limits humanitarian response capacity at a time when needs continue to grow.
The lack of international visibility contributes to millions of displaced people facing prolonged emergencies without adequate support.
The IDMC warns that these figures likely underestimate the true scale of the phenomenon, especially in contexts where insecurity limits access to information or where official registration systems do not exist.
“The IDMC figures also show what happens when there are no strong official records,” Paus said. “Without data, displaced people are left out of public policies, access to services, and basic protection guarantees. Internal displacement requires an urgent humanitarian response to save lives and, at the same time, state leadership to prevent these crises from repeating and lasting over time.”
“When people are forced to flee within their own countries and do not find guarantees to rebuild their lives, displacement becomes a cycle with no way out,” Paus added. “The cost of inaction is enormous. Recognizing violence as a driver of displacement and assuming state responsibility in the response is key to preventing this crisis from continuing to deepen in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
At the global level, 2025 marked the first year in which displacement due to conflict and violence surpassed that caused by disasters, according to IDMC. In the Americas, although disasters still represent a significant proportion of the total, displacement linked to violence, especially criminal violence, continues to increase steadily.