After spending nine winters in Puerto Vallarta, a sunny resort city on Mexico’s Pacific coast, Berl Schwartz has heard plenty of rumors about cartels.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is said to be laundering money in the luxury hotel and construction industries. Sometimes businesses close down suddenly. Many people thought they had not paid the extortion fee. But for Schwartz, a 79-year-old American retiree, the cartels were largely invisible.
Things changed on Sunday. Cartel operatives went on a rampage after killing leader Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera, setting fire to cars and buses and attacking stores. Schwartz heard blaring alarms and explosions from the balcony of his apartment. A black, pungent cloud billowed over the turquoise waters of Banderas Bay.
“Cartels never really crossed my mind as something serious that would affect me,” said Schwartz, a former journalist from Lansing, Michigan. “We’re not sure right now. We’re nervous.”
The violence that gripped Mexico on Sunday highlighted how aggressively organized crime groups have expanded their control over territory in recent years. The government said Jalisco cartel leaders threw up flaming barricades in 20 of Mexico’s 32 states. The country’s third-busiest airport, Guadalajara, was paralyzed, causing chaos and dozens of canceled flights. The U.S. government has urged Americans in five Mexican states to shelter in place, and travel warnings have been echoed from countries as far away as India. (The government reported that more than 60 people were killed in the occupation of Oseguera and the subsequent attack; not a single American.)
The unrest highlighted the fragility of a country that is America’s No. 1 trading partner and a top tourist destination for Americans, even as criminal organizations infiltrate local governments, security forces and the economy.
‘It’s like being in a war zone’: Americans shelter in place as violence erupts in Mexico
This split-screen reality has rarely been more evident than on Sunday. The acts of violence captured on cellphone videos and shared around the world – bus arson, gas station attacks, military helicopters flying overhead – are not just happening in remote rural towns long plagued by drug violence.
The tournament was held near five-star hotels in resorts such as Puerto Vallarta, Cancun and Tulum, as well as in Guadalajara, an industrial city known as Mexico’s Silicon Valley, which 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 and Leisure magazine, visitors had to rush indoors before a state-wide 3 p.m. curfew.
“What’s so surprising is that all these places where cars and buses have been burned and highways have been blocked are a kind of X-ray of the presence of the Jalisco New Generation cartel,” said Catalina Pérez Correa, a Mexican law professor who studies organized crime.
She said the violence showed in a dramatic way that criminal networks were no longer just operating in a few areas. “It’s the entire country.”
How did the situation get so bad?
El Mencho’s arrest and killing focused attention on the 59-year-old kingpin who ran Mexico’s most powerful Jalisco cartel. But while El Mencho may have been a savvy crime boss, his group’s strength derived primarily from its nationwide recruitment of affiliates.
The Jalisco cartel benefited from the proliferation of mini-cartels and gangs across the country over the past two decades. They were the product of the fragmentation of large cartels attacked in the U.S.-backed “war on drugs” and the decline of Mexico’s one-party state, which secretly but firmly regulated drug trafficking. Analysts say the democratic system that took office in 2000 did not establish judicial or security structures to replace authoritarian control.
Moreover, Mexico’s criminal economy has steadily grown, often with the collusion of local officials. This includes not only drugs, which are now the fastest growing market both globally and in Mexico, but also extortion, oil theft, migrant smuggling, wildcat mining, and illegal logging.
In 2021, Gen. Glenn D. VanHerck, then commander of the U.S. Northern Command, caused an uproar when he told reporters that criminal organizations were operating in Mexico’s “ungovernable territories,” which made up 30 to 35 percent of the country.
The Mexican government vehemently denies that it lacks control over its territory. And President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office in 2024, has adopted tougher policies against organized crime than her predecessor. Under pressure from President Donald Trump, she transferred nearly 100 cartel leaders from Mexico to U.S. custody and stepped up arrests of key criminal leaders. She claims that murders have plummeted as a result of her policies.
However, cartel regulations remain prevalent in many regions.
“Governments tend to equate crime statistics with peace,” said Claudio Lomnitz, an anthropologist at Columbia University who studies violence in Mexico. “If the murder rate goes down, that means there’s peace. That’s not really the case.” “There are many situations where cartels have tremendous local power, but there aren’t as many murders and disappearances, and that’s precisely because they don’t need to be.”
Despite Sheinbaum’s efforts, criminal groups remain prevalent. They continue to thrive due to international demand for drugs, a weak Mexican justice system, and the collusion of local politicians and police who are bribed and blackmailed into giving them their freedom.
“There is a protection network that has historically operated throughout Mexico,” said Sandra Rey, a political scientist at the Monterrey Institute of Technology who studies criminal groups. “We’re not doing anything to dismantle them.”
Mexico’s beach resorts demonstrate how organized crime has taken root in the economy and society.
Drug traffickers moved to Cancun in the late 1990s, bought up mansions and used the state’s remote Quintana Roo coast to receive shiploads of Colombian cocaine. In 2012, former Governor Mario Villanueva pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to laundering millions of dollars in drug bribes.
Criminal activity does not prevent millions of people from visiting Cancun and nearby coastal towns each year. Most people don’t have any problems with gangs. But regular gunfights are a reminder that beneath the surface of the sun and fun vacation destination lurks the presence of organized crime.
Puerto Vallarta became famous in the 1960s when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton filmed “Night of the Iguana” in the fishing village. In recent years, the resort city has become a “strategic base” for the Jalisco cartel, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. Its operations go far beyond drugs and include timeshare fraud that defrauds Americans of millions of dollars, U.S. officials say.
Yet millions of American and Canadian tourists flock to this beach city each year. It is known for its friendly residents, hacienda-style architecture with whitewashed walls and red-tiled roofs, and the seaside Malecon, which is lined with restaurants. Schwartz, a retired journalist, spends half of the year in Puerto Vallarta, escaping the ice and snow of his home state of Michigan.
“Frankly, I’ve always felt safer here than anywhere else in the United States,” he said.
Another snowbird, David Custers, 65, a retired metallurgical engineer from Kingston, Ont., said he and his wife spend the winter in the city.
“I’ve known for a while that there are cartels here, but I understood that they were laundering money here to protect tourists, because that’s how they make money too,” he said. Sunday’s violence was therefore shocking.
“I could see everything from a bird’s eye view” from the balcony of my apartment, Custers said. “I could see fires everywhere.” He spent the day recording videos of the riots to upload to his YouTube channel, “David Living Outdoors.”
Despite the violence, he plans to continue visiting the resort. “We don’t see much crime here, apart from some pickpockets,” he says.
Whether Mexico’s beach resorts can continue to maintain the precarious balance between the tourism industry and the presence of organized crime is an open question. Beachgoers from the United States and Canada have all but abandoned the famous Pacific resort of Acapulco in recent years as murder rates have skyrocketed due to rivalries between mini-cartels.
“I think Acapulco will be a perfect lesson” in what could happen, Lomnitz said. “No one would have thought that a city like Acapulco would be lost.”
