An estimated 500,000 people cross into Mexico every year.Source: UNHCR MEXICO FACTSHEET. February 2017. Last visited 18 April 2017. Data compiled by UNHCR based on SEGOB and INM official sources. The majority making up this massive forced migration flow originate from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, known as the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA), one of the most violent regions in the world today.

Since 2012, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been providing medical and mental healthcare to tens of thousands of migrants and refugees fleeing the NTCA’s extreme violence and travelling along the world’s largest migration corridor in Mexico. Through violence assessment surveys and medical and psychosocial consultations, MSF teams have witnessed and documented a pattern of violent displacement, persecution, sexual violence, and forced repatriation akin to the conditions found in the deadliest armed conflicts in the world today.The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development. Global Burden of Armed Violence 2015: <a href="http://www.genevadeclaration.org/fileadmin/ docs/GBAV3/GBAV3_Ch2_pp49-86.pdf">Every Body Counts</a>, October 2015, Chapter Two,

For millions of people from the NTCA region, trauma, fear and horrific violence are dominant facets of daily life. Yet it is a reality that does not end with their forced flight to Mexico. Along the migration route from the NTCA, migrants and refugees are preyed upon by criminal organisations, sometimes with the tacit approval or complicity of national authorities, and subjected to violence and other abuses — abduction, theft, extortion, torture, and rape— that can leave them injured and traumatised.

In 2015, MSF carried out a survey of 467 randomly sampled migrants and refugees in facilities we support in Mexico. We gathered additional data from MSF clinics from 2015 through December 2016. The results are presented in this report.