Hollywood made Puerto Vallarta. The beautiful coastal town might never have been more than a bucolic Mexican fishing village were it not for the fact that John Huston filmed his tawdry 1964 melodrama The Night of the Iguana there, kicking off a wave of tourism that exploded only after an international airport was built in the area several decades later. Soon, retirees from the U.S. and Canada moved in. Remote workers joined them after Covid. Puerto Vallarta was a gringo’s dream: safe, clean, artsy, Americanized—the sort of place you could walk around without really knowing how to speak Spanish.
This gringo’s fantasy is now up in smoke rising from the Costco parking lot where members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel set cars alight as retribution for the killing of its leader, known as El Mencho, by Mexican government security forces on Sunday. Across Mexico, the drug gang set fire to vehicles and buildings, plunged Puerto Vallarta and other cities into chaos, halted flights, and forced many residents and visitors to shelter in place.
A Canadian-born real estate agent, Gerard Allard, who lives and sells property in Puerto Vallarta, said he was watching a hockey game (in true Canuck fashion) when he realized something was amiss. “I started seeing really deep, dark plumes of smoke moving northward,” Allard told The Free Press on Tuesday. “It was something like you would see in a disaster movie.”
