Californians ‘hunkering down’ in Puerto Vallarta as cartel violence frays nerves

Craig Chamberlain planned to have a leisurely breakfast with his wife at Los Muertos beach in Puerto Vallarta. But when they spotted plumes of smoke billowing from the heart of town as they drove into the city, they decided to turn around.

About a minute later they were stopped on the road Sunday, and an armed man wearing a black mask strode up to the window of their Kia Sorento, yelling in Spanish.

“He was very hyped up and agitated,” said Chamberlain, a Newport Beach resident who spends half the year in the bustling coastal town in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

“When someone’s waving a gun in your face, you don’t really want to talk back too much,” he added. “It took us a minute to figure out what he was saying. We didn’t know if he wanted us to pull over or keep moving. We finally realized he was taking our car.”

U.S. tourists and expats across Mexico were advised to shelter in place Sunday as cartel violence engulfed several beach resort towns after Mexican security forces killed Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, Mexico’s most-wanted drug trafficker.

In retaliation, gunmen set cars and buses on fire and blocked highways across western Mexico. By late Sunday, the chaos had spread to eastern Mexico’s popular resort towns of Cancun, Cozumel, Playa del Carmen and Tulum.

For many Californians in Puerto Vallarta, a tourist magnet widely known as one of the safest cities in Mexico, the experience was jolting.

After the carjacking, Chamberlain and his wife walked a few blocks to a restaurant to figure out their next move. The restaurant owner let a few people inside and then barricaded the doors.

The couple hunkered down with 15 other people, including a man in his 80s and a mother with her 1-year-old daughter. From the restaurant terrace, they watched fires pop up across the city.

At one point, a group of men drove a car about 200 feet from the restaurant, doused it with gasoline and set it on fire.

“This mom was walking her little baby back and forth across the terrace, teaching her how to walk,” Chamberlain said, “and she’s giggling while there’s a car burning,”

By Monday, the situation returned to normal in many parts of the country, the U.S. Embassy and Consulates said in an updated security alert. But U.S. citizens were still urged to shelter in place in Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara, Ciudad Guzman, Tijuana Chiapas and Michoacan.

Wesley Eure, an actor and writer from Palm Springs who played Michael Horton on the American soap opera Days of Our Lives, spent Sunday hunkering inside his apartment after he spotted a faint billow of smoke outside his window.

The smoke got bigger and darker, until it swelled into a thick pillar of black that seemed to swallow the blue sky. Then more fires popped up blocks away.

Eure, who lives on the Mexican coast six months a year, said his local pharmacy was burned and looted. A bus with a propane tank was set alight and exploded, shooting flames into the building that houses his bank and his gym. His Mexican landlord urged him not to leave his two-bedroom apartment.

“All hell seemed to have broken loose here in Puerto Vallarta,” Eure told The Times on Monday.

Many tourists were stranded.

Katy Holloman, a makeup artist from El Dorado Hills, was supposed to head home from vacation in Puerto Vallarta on Sunday when she was told by hotel staff that everyone was sheltering in place.

She rebooked her flight for Monday, but that flight also was canceled. “At this point,” she said in a Facebook video, “just really hoping that we make it back home safely very, very soon.”

The Chamberlains considered themselves lucky. The restaurant staff served them a complimentary lunch, a gesture that Chamberlain said is typical in Mexico.

“It’s a beautiful place with mostly really nice people,” he said. “It’s interesting that even these bad guys, if you want to call them that, are pretty careful about not hurting people.”

The couple eventually left the restaurant and walked a few blocks to a nearby hotel. If things stayed calm, they hoped to head back to their home by the marina by tomorrow.

Much of the violence that had gripped the town had calmed by Monday: the hollowed shells of burned cars and buses were cleared off the roads and airports reopened for domestic travel.

But there was still no public transportation, which meant some employees could not get to work, so businesses remained shuttered.

Some longtime Puerto Vallarta residents took it in stride.

Elizabeth Shanahan, a California expat who moved from Newport Beach to Puerto Vallarta two decades ago, said that the television news made it seem as though buildings were being engulfed across the city. But the damage she’d seen was mostly focused on buses and cars.

“They’re not looking to hurt civilians …” she said. “And it really doesn’t seem like civilians of any nationality are being singled out.”

Shanahan, who runs a business that provides professional yacht services, said her clients had not expressed any fear of being in Mexico. She was advising some wealthier clients not to drive into the city with their luxury vehicles and to be mindful in any location that’s not familiar.

“The truth is,” she said, “I feel safer here than I would in Minneapolis right now.”

Until this weekend, Eure had never felt unsafe in Puerto Vallarta.

But after holing up Sunday in his apartment 90 steps from the beach in the historic Zona Romantica, Eure was ready to venture outside. He had not been to the grocery store for a few days and he and his friend were tired of going through boxes of old cereal. He’d gotten word that one of the Oxxo convenience stores was up and running.

So on Monday morning, he and his friend stepped outside.

“It was like ‘The Wizard of Oz’ — walking out into a colored world,” he said. “It was beautiful.”

The sun was out. His neighbors were sitting on the stoop. On the Malecón, the town’s oceanfront boardwalk, locals were jogging and walking their dogs.

“Everybody was like, ‘Everything’s OK, Don’t worry,’” he said. “Everybody’s trying to assure each other.”

A friend pointed him to an open restaurant, where he devoured a salmon bagel.

But there were long lines at grocery stores. And when they ventured inland, a few blocks from the beach, they found charred condos and stores surrounded with red “Peligro,” or danger, warning tape.

Still, even amid the devastation, he said, everyone was calm, orderly and friendly.

A lady friend, finding out they didn’t have food at the apartment, invited him and his friend to her place overlooking the ocean for a dinner of pork chops and stuffed portobello mushrooms.

“This is a very tight community here,” Eure said, “I’m hoping things are going to get back to the way they were.”