On Sunday, the killing of Mexico’s most-wanted cartel leader sparked an unprecedented retaliatory barrage of explosions, fires, and gunfire in the popular beach resort area of Puerto Vallarta and across the country. A day later, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum was proclaiming that calm had been restored.
Still, visitors and residents in resort areas from Puerto Vallarta and Baja California on the Pacific coast to Cancún and Tulum on the Yucatán Peninsula and many areas in between were told by both the U.S. and Mexican governments on Monday to continue sheltering in their homes and hotels after the violence spread across multiple states.
One big question remained: Is it—or when might it be—safe to travel to Mexico?
“No travel to Mexico is ever risk free,” said Kent Webber, senior manager of intelligence products and services at Global Rescue, a travel-risk and crisis-response service, and former senior intelligence operations officer in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security at the Pentagon.
“While major tourist destinations have historically been insulated from direct cartel targeting, the operating environment can shift quickly when senior leadership figures are removed. Travelers need to understand that volatility, not just location, defines risk in moments like this,” said Webber.
Is it safe to travel to Puerto Vallarta, Cabo, Cancún, and other destinations in Mexico?
The safety of travel south of the border has been an on-and-off question in response to cartel activities for years—one that, after Sunday’s widespread violence, appears unlikely to be answered definitively anytime soon.
“Yesterday’s violence was seemingly unprecedented and may be opening a new, violent chapter,” added Webber.
Mike Rogers, chief security analyst for global risk-mitigation company International SOS, agreed that Sunday’s reaction to the killing by Mexican government forces of Jalisco New Generation Cartel head Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, or “El Mencho,” at his mountain retreat in Tapalpa, about 250 miles east of Puerto Vallarta, was more widespread than past cartel-related flare-ups.
But, he added, “the most acute phase has passed, and we’re likely to see stability over the next few days.”
Still, he said that his firm was advising people to defer nonessential travel to Puerto Vallarta and the state of Jalisco for now, although he expected that guidance to be lifted in a “matter of days, not weeks.”
While cartel violence in Mexico is far from new, the backlash to Sunday’s killing was the first time it spread so broadly.
Mexico travel advisories and flight cancellations
Fires, explosions, and roadblocks initially spread across the states of Jalisco, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Nuevo Leon Sunday, prompting the U.S. and Mexican governments to issue travel advisories directing residents and tourists to shelter in place. The U.S. advisory was later updated to include Baja California; Quintana Roo, including Cancún, Cozumel, Playa del Carmen, and Tulum; as well as Sinaloa, Oaxaca, Puebla, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Zacatecas, and other areas.
Sunday’s violence was also the first time cartel issues brought the major resort area of Puerto Vallarta to a standstill. Flights to and from Puerto Vallarta were canceled, businesses shuttered, and public transportation and rideshares halted, leaving visitors wondering everything from where to get food to when they might be able to go home.
Videos and photos on social media showed buses and cars on fire across the city on Sunday, including billowing black smoke over the hotel zone, in the parking lot of Costco, and over the marina.
Monday morning, President Sheinbaum said roadblocks that had been set up by retaliatory groups had been removed across most of Mexico. Residents on social media groups reported a kind of eerie calm.
Sara Lynn Valentine, a resident from Castle Rock, Colorado, who arrived in Puerto Vallarta on Saturday for vacation, said things were quiet on Monday morning as she stood in a line of about 200 people trying to get groceries to stock her condo.
“Seems peaceful,” she wrote in a direct message to Afar on Facebook. “We are in the Romantic Zone [an area of Puerto Vallarta also known as the Old Town] and close to the Malecón [boardwalk]. Don’t know what is happening in other parts, but we have been advised not to go far from the condo, to be prepared to return to the condo quickly, and not to be out at all after dark. We are prepared, once we have groceries, to hunker down in shelter in place if necessary for another few days or even a week if things reescalate. We have been told that may well happen, that this is not over.”
While security experts advised deferring travel to hot spots for the short term, Rogers said his firm currently remains confident that tourists will be safe traveling to FIFA 2026 World Cup games scheduled in Guadalajara this summer.
“Obviously, we’ll be tracking it very closely, but we have a lot of confidence in [the government’s] capability to ensure safety,” he said, noting that cartels generally do not target tourists or high-profile events.
Rogers said Sunday’s reaction was “almost like a tantrum,” with the cartels “targeting state assets, police, and things of that nature to create public disorder.
“I don’t want to downplay the impact to civilians,” he said. “It’s a terrifying, highly disruptive situation, but ultimately that’s not who they are targeting.”
