How the cartel's unthinkable violence has turned Mexico's spring break paradise into a charred war zone: TOM LEONARD's searing dispatch from Puerto Vallarta
By Tom Leonard
Daily Mail
Mar 6, 2026
The chaos was sparked by the Mexican government's killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias El Mencho
The cartel gunmen may have gone, but they left their calling cards all over town – scores of burnt-out buildings and charred vehicles that still carry the acrid stench of melted plastic.
It's the one topic of local interest that my taxi driver studiously avoids as we travel into the center of town from the airport, the terminal teeming with police. The same topic a young barman will later dismiss lightly, but wildly inaccurately, as 'the accident.'
It was certainly no accident. But nobody wants to talk to the gringos about that, especially when we shouldn't be in this part of Mexico at all after Western governments have warned tourists to avoid the area for anything but 'essential' travel.
I flew to picturesque Puerto Vallarta on an almost empty plane, usually unthinkable at this time of year. This is peak season, when holidaymakers from the frozen north pack out its sun-drenched beaches and pretty streets to listen to mariachi bands over a margarita or two.
Locals, who depend on tourists for their livelihood, would dearly love that to be the case now.
But the startling pictures that flashed around the world last month, of a beach resort resembling a war zone, have seen to that. The US State Department has this week issued a slew of 'Do Not Travel' advisories to the thousands intending to travel south for spring-break.
Puerto Vallarta has long prided itself on being 'la ciudad más amigable del mundo' (the friendliest city in the world) and has been one of Mexico's most attractive destinations since Richard Burton and Liz Taylor caroused there - without their respective spouses - in the 1960s.
Though it's not so alluring now. The chaos was sparked by the Mexican government's killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias El Mencho - leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Mexico's most feared and most violent criminal organization.
El Mencho (pictured on the cover of newspapers announcing his death on February 23) was the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Mexico's most feared and most violent criminal organization
With crucial help from US intelligence, whose government had put a $15 million bounty on his head, Mexican special forces troops tracked El Mencho's girlfriend when she visited him at his hideaway in a remote mountain town in Jalisco, the western Mexican state that includes Puerto Vallarta.
The drug lord was killed on February 22 – along with 25 troops and even more cartel gunmen - in the ferocious firefight that followed after they apprehended him.
In the days that followed, the city became one of the cartel's chief targets as it retaliated furiously for the death of its leader - a man so savage that he forced his recruits to commit acts of cannibalism as an initiation ritual.
As Mexico's - and possibly the world's - most wanted man, El Mencho had evaded capture for two decades, even as his rivals ended up behind bars. Investigators described him as so elusive he was a 'ghost.'
So it was a significant, if risky victory, for Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum as she faces growing US pressure to tackle the powerful 'narcos' cartels, who President Donald Trump blames for flooding America not only with drugs – cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and especially the deadly synthetic opiate fentanyl - but also with illegal migrants smuggled across the border.
Inevitably, the now-leaderless 20,000-member cartel exacted a heavy price the morning after El Mencho's death, unleashing a country-wide wave of shootings, roadblocks and arson attacks that spread to 20 of 32 states.
In the process, El Mencho's henchmen broke with the longtime convention – generally observed by the cartels and federal officials alike in their shared desire to keep western governments off their back – of steering the violence well away from tourists.
Even Liz Taylor and Richard Burton wouldn't have recognized Puerto Vallarta on February 22 when, all across town, thick columns of black smoke billowed into the resort's usually flawless blue sky.
Earlier that day, young men and teenagers armed with petrol cans and AK-47 assault rifles had suddenly appeared across the city and rode around on stolen motorbikes for hours - torching cars, buses and lorries as well as local businesses and petrol stations. They also blocked roads with burnt vehicles or spikes they threw on the ground. Twenty-three inmates escaped from the local prison after armed men rammed its gates with a car.
Police officers are pictured in front of torched cars in Zapopan, Mexico, following the death of El Mencho
Businesses in Puerto Vallarta were also set ablaze
Members of the Mexican Navy patrolling the streets of Puerto Vallarta on February 24
The violence across Mexico was primarily a show of force - a declaration of who really runs the country, some say - rather than an attempt to do serious injury. The businesses that were targeted in Puerto Vallarta were groceries, pharmacies and banks rather than government buildings.
'They hit our food, health and transport,' said Luis, a local waiter. 'They wanted to tell people, 'We're not going to hurt you, but we're going to make you struggle.'
The worst damage, he added ruefully, was done to the city's tourist economy, on which at least 70 percent of the local population relies.
Nobody appears to have been killed in Puerto Vallarta – drivers were bundled out of their vehicles before they were set alight - and the police appeared anxious to avoid a huge gun battle in a resort that at this time of year is packed with thousands of tourists, mainly from Canada and the US, and visiting cruise ships. The city is also an increasingly popular place for Americans to retire.
Whatever reason for their being in Puerto Vallarta, the gringos were ordered to take shelter in their barricaded hotels, homes or rented apartments, and watch or listen to the mayhem unfolding.
Some tourists fled for the airport, a US visitor describing his taxi driver kissing his rosary in terror as he wildly dodged burning buses to get there before it closed due to the violence. Three hundred stranded travelers had to be driven back to the city under heavy police escort.
When Puerto Vallarta's airport reopened, Scottish academic Robin Clugston and his wife, Erin, joined the queue with their two young children for one of the 'rescue flights' that had been laid on, theirs heading back to their home in Edmonton, Canada.
They said they'd spent 48 hours confined to the resort where they were staying. They were 'insulated' from the violence but could see the huge plumes of smoke fires start rising across the city. 'The doorman said that it was rubbish-burning day', he told me. 'The staff were nervous but they handled it very professionally. We certainly saw some agitated people.'
Even so, the family, who were on their first visit to Mexico, said they 'will be absolutely coming back.'
A Canadian guest at the luxury hotel, which was one of Richard Burton's former homes, said some fellow guests were crying as tensions mounted inside. 'The staff locked the entrance but we definitely heard what sounded like gunshots. You started to wonder about escape routes if they broke in,' he told me.
The violence across Mexico was primarily a show of force - a declaration of who really runs the country, some say - rather than an attempt to do serious injury
Some tourists fled for the airport, and 300 stranded travelers had to be driven back to the city under heavy police escort
Even Liz Taylor and Richard Burton wouldn't have recognized Puerto Vallarta on February 22 when, all across town, thick columns of black smoke billowed into the usually flawless blue sky
Guadalajara, Jalisco's capital and Mexico's second biggest city, was similarly targeted by the cartel. The beautiful colonial city is another popular tourist trap, and dozens were sent scrambling for cover the same week following a false alarm that the narcos were attacking the airport.
The city is set to host some of the 2026 FIFA World Cup matches – another looming nightmare for Mexican officials anxious to portray their country as sufficiently safe for the globe's most popular sports event.
Although I encountered plenty of tourists who were not perturbed by the violence and more than ready to return, others have vowed never to come back to Mexico, let alone Puerto Vallarta – fearful of what the cartel might do the next time.
And in the case of the uniquely cold-blooded Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), they can reassure themselves that they got off very lightly.
After all, when the cartel wants to make a point forcefully, it usually does so by beheading victims and leaving their remains in plastic bags by the roadside or hanging mutilated body parts from bridges. In a country where more than 120,000 people remain missing, kidnap and rape are standard business practice for the CJNG.
Its rise to power and notoriety has been marked by unspeakable acts of savagery. In 2011, it dumped 35 bound and tortured bodies in the streets of the city of Veracruz during evening rush hour. Two years later, its foot soldiers raped, killed and set fire to a ten-year-old girl whom they believed – mistakenly - was a rival's daughter. In 2015, the cartel killed a man and his pre-teen son by detonating sticks of dynamite taped to their bodies.
Last year, the cartel was discovered to have an 'extermination ranch' with underground crematorium ovens where 200 pairs of shoes were found.
The bodies of others are dumped in drainage canals or dissolved in acid.
The cartel has been able to equip itself like a modern army. It has no compunction about killing the police and military, thwarting a previous attempt to capture El Mencho by shooting down an army chopper with a rocket-propelled grenade.
Its rapid ascent to become Mexico's most powerful crime group was attributed not only to its sickening ruthlessness but to its success in convincing many ordinary Mexicans, who are sick of local gang warfare, that it was in their interests to accept control by a single, all-powerful cartel.
And its success owed much to the blood-spattered single-mindedness of 59-year-old El Mencho and his talent for sensationalist acts of violence against rivals and government forces.
The son of poor avocado growers, he was being paid to protect cannabis fields by the time he was in his teens and later moved to the US where he was jailed for drugs offences.
He returned to Mexico where, astonishingly, he was able to get a job as a state police officer before rising through the ranks of the Milenio cartel and eventually setting up his own organization some 15 years ago.
El Mencho wasn't only brutal to his enemies. Many of his 'sicarios,' or killers, were recruited after answering conventional job adverts only to be threatened with death if they didn't join. El Mencho ensured recruits were sufficiently inured to the extreme violence expected of them by forcing them to eat body parts from the cartel's victims as an unspeakably twisted initiation rite.
The cartel is now an international, multi-billion-dollar operation with trafficking routes in dozens of countries on six continents.
Inevitably, successive Mexican presidents have shied away from declaring all-out war on the hideously formidable cartels (especially when previous efforts have been undermined by corrupt officials tipping off the drug barons).
Guadalajara is set to host some of the 2026 FIFA World Cup matches
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum speaks at a press conference following the killing of Cervantes, or El Mencho
However, the current incumbent, left-winger Claudia Sheinbaum, increasingly doesn't have that option. Donald Trump has gone so far as to threaten her country with direct military action if she doesn't crush the Jalisco New Generation and rivals like the Sinaloa cartel.
Fentanyl, a super-powerful synthetic opioid, is responsible for nearly 70 percent of America's overdose deaths. The drug has devastated towns and cities across the US and, rightly, is a particular concern for Washington.
It's particularly attractive to cartels as it's cheap to produce and highly addictive. A kilo of fentanyl is worth $20,000 (£14,800) – and half as much again if you can sell it as far away as New York.
Trump has threatened to unilaterally bomb fentanyl labs in Mexico and cut the cartels off from the international financial system. In January, when he launched a military strike on Venezuela, he warned that Mexico was next.
Critics counter that cartels are like the mythological many-headed hydra and that destroying one will simply produce another, or more likely several more, battling for supremacy.
The only effective solution, they say, is either to legalize the drugs (which, given their deadliness, is most unlikely) or to tackle America's soaring demand for them.
Caught between rapacious criminals and a rapacious US president, the embattled Claudia Sheinbaum risks sparking a bloody war with the cartels if she continues to come down hard on them and, potentially, military confrontation with America if she doesn't.
At least she should be able to rely on her formidable security chief, Omar Garcia Harfuch, a former Mexico City police chief whom the cartels shot three times in 2020 and who now sleeps next to his office desk with an armed soldier outside his door. Under his leadership, the government says it is arresting cartel members and destroying drug labs at nearly four times the rate of the previous administration.
And yet, Mexico's implacable cartels have a history of coming out on top. There was, President Sheinbaum confidently insisted last month, 'no risk' to fans coming to Mexico for the World Cup. How she could be so certain, just a few days after cartel gunmen brought fear and destruction to the heart of its tourism industry, is anyone's guess.
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