In nine years of wintering in Puerto Vallarta, the sun-washed resort city on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, Berl Schwartz has heard plenty of rumors about the cartel presence.
The Jalisco New Generation cartel was said to be laundering money in the swanky hotels and the construction industry. Sometimes a business would suddenly close; many people assumed it hadn’t paid the extortion fee. But to Schwartz, 79, an American retiree, the cartel was nearly invisible.
On Sunday, that changed. Cartel operatives went on a rampage after the killing of their leader, Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera, setting fire to cars and buses and attacking stores. From his apartment balcony, Schwartz could hear blaring alarms and the boom of explosions. Billowing, acrid-smelling black clouds drifted over the turquoise waters of Banderas Bay.
“The cartel, it never really entered my mind as anything serious that would ever affect me,” said Schwartz, a former journalist from Lansing, Michigan. “Now I’m not so sure. We’re nervous.”
Smoke billows from burning vehicles amid a wave of violence, with torched vehicles and gunmen blocking highways in more than half a dozen states, following a military operation in which a government source said Mexican drug lord Nemesio Oseguera, known as “El Mencho,” was killed, in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, on Sunday, in this screen grab obtained from a social media video.morelifediares/Instagram/Reuters
The violence that swept Mexico on Sunday underscored how organized-crime groups have aggressively expanded their control of territory in recent years. Jalisco cartel lieutenants threw up flaming roadblocks in 20 of Mexico’s 32 states, according to the government. The nation’s third-busiest airport, in Guadalajara, ground to a halt, with dozens of flights canceled as chaos erupted in the city. The US government urged Americans in five Mexican states to shelter in place, a travel warning echoed by countries as far away as India. (The government reported more than 60 dead in the capture of Oseguera and the subsequent attacks. None were Americans).
The mayhem highlighted the fragility of a country that has become the No. 1 US trade partner and top tourist destination for Americans, even as criminal groups penetrate local governments, security forces and the economy.
This split-screen reality has rarely been as evident as it was on Sunday. The violence captured on cellphone videos and shared around the globe – buses burning, gas stations attacked, military helicopters flying overhead – wasn’t just happening in remote rural towns long plagued by drug violence.
It was playing out near five-star hotels in resorts such as Puerto Vallarta, Cancún and Tulum, as well as in Guadalajara, an industrial city known as “Mexico’s Silicon Valley” that will host several World Cup soccer matches this summer. In San Miguel de Allende, a Spanish colonial gem recently named the world’s No. 1 tourist destination by Travel + Leisure magazine, visitors had to scurry inside by a 3 p.m. statewide curfew.
“What’s very startling is that all these places where cars and buses were burned and highways were blocked are a kind of X-ray showing the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel,” said Catalina Pérez Correa, a Mexican law professor who studies organized crime.
The violence showed in dramatic fashion how the crime networks no longer simply operated in a few regions, she said. “It’s the whole country.”
Members of the National Guard stand guard outside the facilities of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime (FEMDO) in Mexico City on Sunday.Daniel Cardenas/Anadolu/Getty Images
The rise of the Jalisco cartel
How did things get this bad?
The capture and killing of El Mencho focused attention on the 59-year-old kingpin who ran the Jalisco cartel, Mexico’s most powerful. But while El Mencho may have been a savvy crime boss, his group’s strength stemmed in large part from its recruitment of affiliates nationwide.
The Jalisco cartel benefited from an explosion of mini-cartels and gangs around the country over the past 20 years. They were the product of the splintering of larger cartels attacked in the US-backed “war on drugs” and the decline of a one-party Mexican state that used to quietly but firmly regulate drug trafficking. The democratic system inaugurated in 2000 never established a judicial or security structure able to replace that authoritarian control, analysts say.
In addition, Mexico’s criminal economy has steadily grown, often with the collusion of local officials. It now includes not just narcotics – a market that has boomed, both globally and within Mexico – but extortion, oil theft, migrant smuggling, wildcat mining and illegal timber-cutting.
In 2021, the then-chief of US Northern Command, Gen. Glen D. VanHerck caused a furor by telling reporters that criminal organizations operated in “ungoverned areas” that he said made up 30 to 35 percent of Mexico.
Members of the National Guard patrol Tulum Ruins on November 8, 2021.Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Getty Images
The Mexican government strongly denies it lacks control over its own territory. And President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office in 2024, has adopted a tougher line on crime groups than her predecessor. Under pressure from President Donald Trump, she has transferred nearly 100 senior cartel figures from Mexico to US custody and escalated arrests of important criminal leaders. She has highlighted what she calls a steep drop in homicides as a result of her policies.
Yet cartel control remains pervasive in many areas.
“The government has tended to equate crime statistics with peace. The homicide rate goes down, that means there’s peace. That’s actually not true,” said Claudio Lomnitz, an anthropologist at Columbia University who studies violence in Mexico. “There are plenty of situations where the cartel has a huge amount of local power, and there’s not a lot of homicides or disappearances – exactly because they don’t need to do them.”
Despite Sheinbaum’s efforts, crime groups remain pervasive. They continue to thrive due to international demand for drugs, a weak Mexican justice system and the complicity of local politicians and police, who are either bribed or intimidated into giving them free rein.
“There are protection networks that have operated all over Mexico, historically,” said Sandra Ley, a political scientist at the Monterrey Institute of Technology who studies criminal groups. “We’ve done nothing to dismantle them.”
People walk near a burned-out car in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco state, Mexico, on Monday.Arturo Montero/AFP/Getty Images
Putting down roots in resorts
Mexico’s beach resorts offer an illustration of how organized crime has developed roots in the economy and society.
Drug traffickers moved into Cancún in the late 1990s, buying up mansions for themselves and using the secluded coasts of the state, Quintana Roo, to receive boatloads of Colombian cocaine. In 2012, the former governor, Mario Villanueva, pleaded guilty in a US federal court to laundering millions of dollars in narco-bribes.
The criminal activity hasn’t kept millions of people from visiting Cancun and nearby coastal towns each year. Most run into no problems with the gangs. But periodic shoot-outs offer a reminder of the organized-crime presence lurking beneath the surface of the sun-and-fun holiday destination.
Puerto Vallarta became famous in the 1960s when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton filmed “The Night of the Iguana” in the fishing village. In recent years, the resort city has become a “strategic stronghold” for the Jalisco cartel, according to the US Treasury Department. Its activities go well beyond narcotics, to include timeshare fraud that fleeces Americans out of millions of dollars, US officials say.
Each year, millions of American and Canadian tourists nonetheless flock to the beach city known for its friendly residents, hacienda-style architecture of whitewashed walls and red-tile roofs, and seaside Malecon lined with restaurants. Schwartz, the retired journalist, spends six months a year in Puerto Vallarta, fleeing the ice and snow of his hometown in Michigan.
“I’ve always felt, frankly, safer here than in many places in the United States,” he said.
A bullet hole at the Quintana Roo State Prosecution building in Cancun, Mexico, on January 18, 2017. The shooting came as Mexican authorities investigated whether a feud over local drug sales was behind a nightclub shooting that killed three foreigners at the Blue Parrot club in Playa del Carmen, a usually peaceful Caribbean seaside town.AFP/Getty Images
Another snowbird, David Custers, a 65-year-old retired metallurgical engineer from Kingston, Ontario, said he and his wife also spend winters in the city.
“We have always known there was a cartel here, but my understanding was they laundered money here and protected the tourists. Because that’s how they make their money, as well,” he said. Sunday’s violence thus came as a shock.
“We had a bird’s eye view of everything” from his apartment balcony, said Custers. “You could see fires all over the place.” He spent the day recording videos of the unrest to upload to his YouTube channel, David Living Outdoors.
Despite the violence, he plans to keep visiting the resort. “We don’t see a lot of crime here, other than some pickpocketing,” he said.
Whether Mexico’s beach resorts can continue to maintain the uneasy balance between their tourism industry and the organized-crime presence is an open question. In recent years, beach-goers from the United States and Canada have largely abandoned the famed Pacific resort of Acapulco as feuding mini-cartels sent the murder rate skyrocketing.
“I think Acapulco is a total lesson” for what could happen, said Lomnitz. “Nobody would have thought you could lose a city like Acapulco.”
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