Hundreds of Indigenous families have been forced to flee their homes in the mountains of central Mexico by intense attacks from a local criminal group, including drone bombings, an Indigenous rights organisation said on Monday.

A gang known as Los Ardillos has been carrying out attacks in Guerrero state for years, but they started to intensify last week. Villages were subjected to eight hours of bombings on Saturday, the National Indigenous Congress said, forcing between 800 to 1,000 families to flee to other towns.

“There is total anguish among the people,” said Carlos González García, a spokesperson for the congress, adding that at least four people had been killed. “The families are terrified, especially the women and children. It’s a level of violence that we’re not used to.”

Videos shared on social media showed women and children sobbing as they cowered inside a local church. In other footage, intense gunfire and explosions can be heard echoing across farmland and forests as smoke rises in the background.

“They were attacking us with drones and with .50 high calibre weapons, that’s why I left and took my twin sons with me,” a woman said in a Facebook video posted by another Indigenous rights group. “They killed the animals and now they’re setting fire to the hillsides.”

A video shared with the Guardian from the village of Alcozacán showed gunfire and explosions continuing on Monday morning.

The use of bomb-carrying drones and other powerful and sophisticated weaponry by Mexico’s drug cartels has become increasingly common. As violence has intensified, many poor and rural communities have been forced to flee their homes and seek safety elsewhere.

A recent study from Mexico’s Ibero University found that the number of people forcibly displaced by violence had more than doubled between 2023 and 2024, from 12,600 to 28,900. There were nearly 400,000 displaced people in Mexico as of the end of 2024, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

“We’re working to protect the population,” Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, told a press conference on Monday when asked about the situation in Guerrero. “With the presence of the national guard and at the same time with attention to these displaced families, we can help them return to their place of origin.”

According to González, the attacks are aimed largely at the armed community police forces established by villagers to protect themselves from the drug gangs. Los Ardillos were also trying to force villagers into growing opium poppies, he said.

He accused the local government of being in cahoots with the criminal groups. There are three joint military, national guard and state police bases in the area, but according to González, they have done nothing to halt the violence in this remote part of Mexico.

“It’s the obligation of the Mexican state to provide protection and to investigate any collusion between officials and criminal cartels, and dismantle them,” he said. “And to punish whoever needs to be punished. Because otherwise, this is going to keep growing and growing.”

The Guerrero state government said on Sunday that it had registered only 90 people displaced by violence, and that federal and state forces had been deployed to the area for “security and surveillance operations”.