For Americans who call Puerto Vallarta home, the violence over the weekend was an explosive reminder that they live in a country that is also home to some of the world’s most powerful drug cartels.
But they’re not about to give up their place in the sun.
Charity Palmatier, who lives year-round just outside the scenic city in a beachside development with other expats from the United States and Canada, dismissed the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s torching of buses and cars Sunday to protest the killing of its leader as “performative.”
“The cartels like to make statements,” Palmatier, 57, who has lived in the area for nearly a decade, told NBC News on Tuesday. “They have temper tantrums when one of their big guys gets captured or killed.”
The violence erupted after drug kingpin Nemesio Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, aka “El Mencho,” died following a shootout with the Mexican military about 180 miles east of Puerto Vallarta.
There had been a $15 million reward for the capture of the head of a cartel that is one of the main suppliers of cocaine to the U.S. market and which earns billions from the production of fentanyl and methamphetamines.
Palmatier noted that while vehicles and some businesses were set ablaze and masked gunmen raided some residences and menaced people on the street, “no citizens were injured or killed.”
“It’s not the Wild West down here,” she said. “It’s much more safe than you would think.”
Karen Davis-Farage, who divides her time between homes in Vallarta, as the expats call it, and New York City and Los Angeles, admitted that she booked a plane ticket to get out of town after a restaurant on the first floor of the building where she lives was set on fire.
“The cartel was driving up on motorcycles, they had these bags, and they were telling people to get out of the cabs, or get out of the car, or get out of a bus, and they were throwing these bags into the vehicle which was then lighting them on fire,” Davis-Farage, 70, said. “Those were going on all over the city. You couldn’t count all the plumes that were going on in the air.”
But after it was over and she was able to go outside and see the damage, she canceled her flights back to the U.S. She said the threat appeared to be over.
“Everybody is safe and sound,” she said of her friends in Puerto Vallarta.
The State Department on Tuesday lifted its shelter-in-place warning for U.S. citizens in the Mexican state of Jalisco, which is where Puerto Vallarta and another resort city that experienced violence, Guadalajara, are located.
Some 1.6 million U.S. citizens live in Mexico, according to government figures from 2024, many of them expats who spend the winters there, although the number of Americans living there year-round is also growing.
Mexico City is the most popular destination for American expats, according to Mexico News Daily, which cited government figures.
But the coastal cities in Jalisco are increasingly becoming a magnet for Americans in search of sunshine, a lower cost of living, as well as a slower pace of life, according to various websites like Viva Tropical that are aimed at expats.
Tourist visits — and eventually a new home
Both Palmatier and Davis-Farage said they started visiting Puerto Vallarta while still in college, drawn by the city’s colonial charm, its spectacular beaches and artsy vibe.
“It’s very mystical,” Davis-Farage said. “From the mountains to the ocean, it’s so beautiful, so vibrant. There’s a lot of creative people who come here and stay here from around the world.”
Palmatier said she lives in an expat bubble where she doesn’t need to speak Spanish well to get by. But, she said, the Mexican friends she’s made have been very warm and welcoming.
Alvaro Orozco, a Houston-based real estate agent who counts expats in Mexico as his customers and who previously lived in Puerto Vallarta for three years, said none of his clients are pulling up stakes since Sunday’s disturbances.
“No doubt what happened was scary, but generally it’s very safe over there,” he said. “A lot of the time, what happens in Mexico feels more dramatic in the United States.”
This was different, he said, because it was so unexpected and happened in a community in which violent crime is something that generally happens elsewhere in Mexico.
“What happened Sunday, they were not killing random people, which is the kind of crime that really scares people,” he said. “It was a show of power by the cartel.”
Davis-Farage said that right around the time when the gunmen flooded the streets and started spreading mayhem, she was entertaining a visiting sorority sister. She said that she lives in a building near the beach filled with expats and that it was her friend who first noticed the “fog on the water.”
“We don’t have fog like that,” she said. “I walked out on my balcony and saw black smoke on the horizon; I could smell the smoke and realized it was fire.”
Davis-Farage said she immediately flashed back to Sept. 11, 2001, when she was working in lower Manhattan and Al Qaeda terrorists piloted hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center twin towers.
“I was at 9/11, I watched the buildings come down,” she said. “It all came back. The kind of feeling where you are not in control and you know you could be in danger.”
Davis-Farage said she and her friend joined the other expats gathered on the top floor of the building, where they scoured the web for news about what was happening on the streets.
“We felt pretty safe staying on the roof … I felt safer there than in my apartment just because we were amongst other people,” she said.
Then her phone pinged and there was a text from a friend who said a bus had exploded nearby.
“They had to evacuate his condo,” she said. “That created another level of fright. “
The fright escalated a few hours later.
“We smelled smoke and we realized that our building was on fire,” she said. “That was probably the scariest part.”
It turned out, Davis-Farage said, a cartel member had tossed an incendiary device of some kind into a restaurant on the ground floor. The only casualties, she said, were some of the instruments that the house band kept there.
Asked if she ever felt her life was in danger, David-Farage did not answer directly.
“The irony of this experience is, we never heard sirens,” she said. “We never heard a siren the entire day. My reasoning is if (firefighters) had come out to try and put out the fires, they would have been killed by the cartel.”
While there have been numerous accounts of tourists running for their lives from masked gunmen firing shots in the air, Palmatier said she never personally felt in any danger while she sheltered in place in her building. Most of the residents are expats like her from the U.S. and Canada.
“I see what happened as something that happens as a matter of course from time to time in Mexico,” she said. “This got a lot more play because it was a big guy they managed to catch.”
Palmatier believes that when violence happens in Mexico, “it certainly is not directed at someone like me.”
Davis-Farage said, “I just hope people don’t stay away from Vallarta because of this.”
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