The charming beach town of Corral del Risco, Mexico, falls into eerie silence after a cartel boss’s capture threatens to erupt into gang violence, forcing a traveller into hiding, where she attempts to live a normal life while waiting for the impending chaos to pass. This story was selected as a finalist in our “When Things Fall Apart” travel writing competition.
Everything has shut down, the surfer tells me. He went out for drinking water but returned ten minutes later empty-handed. It’s Sunday, but the beach and the streets are empty. No music plays. No children shout.
They got El Mencho, the surfer says. The big narco boss.
Rumours spread online about an ultimatum from the cartel. Let our leader go or we start to shoot. They say they’ll enter homes and hotels, even target tourists, a protected class. We’re tourists, but we’re not in a hotel: the surfer, my husband, and me. We’re in a chain-link-surrounded compound in the centre of Corral del Risco, a sleepy pueblo away from the city. We can hide.
“Not much protection in my place,” the surfer says, referring to the shipping container where he sleeps.
“You can hide with us,” I say. The walls of our concrete box are thick. We’ll retreat there if necessary.
“Let’s hope for the best,” the surfer says with a shrug before returning to his shipping container.
Authorities order us, via media channels, to shelter in place, but we need water and food, so we venture out anyway. I learned a long time ago about the difference between perceived and real danger. It’s an essential distinction when travelling to places where my usual markers, the things that signal safety in Canada, are not helpful. Instead, I learned to look at the people around me–especially women–to judge a situation. The people who live in the place, I mean, not the visitors.
I suspect the surfer, who’s from San Diego, may be overcautious. I want to go out and see what the Mexicans make of this.
The surfer wasn’t exaggerating. The town is silent except for the waves and the birds. The beachfront restaurants, pharmacies, craft market, and beer store are all empty, like an apocalypse.
But we find one tienda open, with a queue out the door. We join it. People chat quietly, scroll on their phones. I’m surprised by their purchases: not lockdown supplies like sacks of rice and toilet paper, but Jarritos and chips. They don’t seem scared.
On the TV inside the shop, a newsreader lists horrors unfolding around the country, with footage of burning cars and masked militias. She uses the word narcobloqueos. I’ve never heard it before, but the meaning is obvious: roadblocks erected by narcos. How sad that there’s a word for that, I think, that this terror is so commonplace it’s earned a spot in the dictionary.
We buy water and beans for us, water and bananas for the surfer. We’ll be hydrated and regular, and we’ll hope for the best. The sun is bright as we leave the tienda, the plastic handle of the four-liter jug cool in my hand.
The birds didn’t get the lockdown memo. Grackles, doves, pelicans, and terns squawk, coo, flap, and wheel. A golden vireo flits in the old higuera tree above a red awning across the street from the tienda. Beneath, a stern abuela grills chickens for her customers. She got the memo, but she’s also got forty freshly killed chickens that won’t keep. She takes our order and tells us to come back in two hours.
We walk home through hot, vacant streets, listening, but not sure what we’re listening for. The motors of a guerrilla convoy? Machine-gun fire? What does that sound like? I can only think of Scarface; Al Pacino as the drug lord Tony Montana, holding a grenade launcher, shouting in his fake Cuban accent, “Say hello to my little friend!” I doubt this information is useful. We peek around each corner to make sure it’s safe before proceeding. I can hear a motorcycle, but it’s far away.
The surfer is grateful for the supplies. He says that while we were out, El Mencho died from the injuries sustained in the shootout with the army. And so they’ve updated the ultimatum. Now they’re demanding his body be returned to them and two of his lieutenants, captured but alive. At least that’s what the online rumours say.
I pass time in the hammock watching yellow-winged caciques and reading The Book of Records by Madeline Thien. Times are tough for the protagonist, Hannah Arendt, whose friend Walter Benjamin says, “But in all times, and not just ours, catastrophe is the rule, not the exception. This state of emergency is one we hoped would bypass us, and so we failed to react. Don’t lose sight of this as we turn history over and over in our hands.”
It’s like he’s saying, You should have seen this coming.
Thanks to the brown skin and hair I inherited from my abuela, who was from Puebla, I can pass as a local if I tie my hair back, wear long jeans, and don’t wear sunglasses. But there’s no disguising my güero of a husband. Should I go alone to pick up the chicken? Is that safer? No, we decide, best to stick together. We go out again, the second time we’ve ignored the Code Red order, now coming from the Canadian government, too. But what do they know? They’re in Ottawa, DoorDashing whatever they want for dinner. We’ve finished our beans and only have a brown avocado and some stale tortillas remaining.
Back at the chicken place, waiting, I look for the closest wall that we could hide behind. I try to be as unconcerned as the golden vireo in the old higuera but I’m also doing a quick mental inventory: Am I ready to die? Where are my kids? Is everything arranged? I should have burnt my journals. They show me at my pettiest. How embarrassing.
A child in a faded Powerpuff Girls t-shirt walks past. Her flip-flops slap the sidewalk as she chants her grocery list: maseca, harina, leche, y sal. The future is uncertain, but dinner is probably going to happen, and she has a job to do.
The news on my phone shows a bus burning in Mezcales, thirty minutes down the road. What happened to the passengers and driver, I wonder. I picture them walking along the highway, carrying groceries and babies, ready to run.
Finally, our order is up. The chicken, tortillas, rice, and salsa smell delicious. Nearby, a grandfather in basketball shorts and chanclas sells six-packs from his patio. A dude in espadrilles and Ray-Bans parks his golf cart at the curb and warns us that we’ll be swindled. “They always jack the prices when this happens,” he mutters in a Scottish accent, pulling his wallet out all the same. But the tepid bottles of Pacifico lager are the same price as they were yesterday at Oxxo.
The drug dealers next door to our concrete box have abandoned their makeshift shopfront. I’ve been curious about them all week, wondering what they’re selling, hoping they’re willing to ignore us the way we’re willing to ignore them. Now I worry they’ll scale the chain-link fence like geckos, like the foot soldiers of Tony Montana’s rival at the end of Scarface, and take us hostage.
After filling my belly with chicken and beer, I peek through the fence. The children across the street are playing in their yard. The lockdown order is only hours old, and already, there is a relaxation.
The surfer checks in. We compare notes on what we’ve gleaned from the internet, trying to find the sweet spot between the hyperbole of the mainstream media and the careless bravado of Reddit. He repeats his mantra, “We hope for the best.” I’m reminded of Stanley Tucci’s character from The Devil Wears Prada, who says these words after he’s betrayed by his boss. It’s a sad moment in the film, and it makes me feel sad for the surfer, and sad for Mexico.
Black columns rise up from the city across the bay on the screen of my phone, but I can’t smell burning metal from here, only the water treatment plant and a distant cigar.
School is cancelled on Monday. The Code Red is still in place, and buses are not running. But the army has regained control of the city, and the president announces in a news conference that all narcobloqueos have been removed.
I lie in the hammock reading again. In The Book of Records, Hannah Arendt is waiting for a boat to take her from Lisbon to New York to escape the Nazis and fascism of Europe. She’s grateful to be safe, to have hope, but waiting is difficult. She has to wait three months. For me, it’s been 24 hours. I realize I have no idea what hardship is.
In the afternoon, we walk to the beach, where children are swimming and laughing. I remember how Canadian kids are happy when schools close due to snow, even if the adults are stressed. A few businesses have reopened, but it’s still quiet in town. I don’t know if the people ignoring the Code Red are brave, indifferent, desperate, or affiliated with the cartel and therefore immune. We’ll never know.
On Tuesday, the Code Red is lifted. The children across the street go to school, and we prepare to go to the city. I pack my bag, then knock on the door of the shipping container. There’s no answer. Maybe the surfer is surfing. It’s weird to think we’ll never see him again.
The city feels normal except when army Jeeps roar down the narrow streets, and helicopters fly low over the highway. Soldiers wear face coverings and carry semi-automatic rifles. We pass charred and smouldering tiendas, restaurants, gas stations, and a Honda motorcycle dealer, with rows of black metal skeletons that used to be sport bikes.
Again, I watch the locals, trying to understand how they’re feeling. A taco vendor apologizes that she has no horchata ready. “I wasn’t sure if I’d open today. I didn’t know if it would be safe, but it seems okay.”
Now that the risk of immediate danger has lessened, the worries are economic. Will the tourist trade collapse? Many foreigners have cancelled their vacations already.
I stay up late to finish The Book of Records. Hannah Arendt and her husband make it to New York and start a new life. I’m glad I brought them with me on this trip.
The botanical gardens announced on Sunday that they would be closed indefinitely, but by Wednesday, they had reopened. It’s an hour’s bus journey south of the city and into the mountains. The clean-up crews haven’t reached this area yet, and we pass six burnt buses and two destroyed Pemex gas stations. Passengers are quiet, pensive. We are the only foreigners on the bus.
It’s just me and my son Sebastian today. He was on holiday in the area with my mom, and I was on holiday with his dad, and now we’ve come together in Puerto Vallarta for one precious day. But my husband has to catch up on work, and my mom wants to rest, so it’s just us two on the outing.
Sebastian has visited Mexico many times in his twenty years, speaks a smattering of Spanish, and feels at ease everywhere. But he’s also seen Hollywood movies. The same way my mind keeps conjuring Scarface, he can’t stop thinking about Sicario, the 2015 Denis Villeneuve narco-crime thriller. My hijo knows there’s a real darkness underlying the events of this week.
The gardens are a wonderland of tropical plants and birds, a bromelia Eden, an orchid El Dorado, and we’re the first visitors of the day. We follow a path ascending gently to a pink chapel. It seems appropriate to start here with a prayer of thanks. Three juvenile peacocks stroll in and join me at the altar.
The chapel walls are a vibrant fresco of hummingbirds, my favorite class of avians. I think they’re one of the best things about the Western Hemisphere. Better even than gold and potatoes. Among the greedy conquistadors from Spain, I imagine there must have been a few who appreciated the iridescent beauty of these birds above the other marvels of the Americas. Of course, hummingbirds are harder to exploit than people and ore, which is perhaps why they survived.
The three-hundred-year Spanish occupation of Mexico has been on my mind this week, after studying maps of cartel territories, the way they’ve carved up and taken control of large swaths of the country. I wonder how and when their reign will end.
We descend to the river where white masked tityras whip past overhead, and kingfishers seem to skate along the tops of the currents. Sebastian points out strange insects and oddly-shaped rocks and says, “It’s so beautiful here.” The stress of the previous, uncertain days fades as Nature works her magic on our nervous systems. We share an omelette and drink cappuccinos in the open-air restaurant overlooking a verdant valley.
We reluctantly leave the gardens and cross the highway to the bus stop. I have at least thirty itchy chigger bites on my legs, but that’s a small price to pay. The beauty of the gardens is a balm for the emotional rawness left by fear.
In the end, nothing happened to us or any other tourists. Some flights were cancelled and people had to stay longer than they planned. Some won’t return to Mexico for their vacation again. 79 people lost their lives, including El Mencho, members of the Jalisco cartel, police and military personnel, and at least one civilian. The expected loss of tourist income will take a toll on the region. A cab driver asks my mom whether she’ll return to Puerto Vallarta. “Maybe,” she says, “but first I need to forget.”
We arrive early at the airport, just in case. It’s busy but orderly. We’re through security in ten minutes, and then we queue for snacks at the airport tienda. A liter of water is USD $9, and a bag of pretzels is $8. Where is the old Scottish dude in espadrilles to warn us about price gouging now?
Riding the people mover on the way to our gate, I see a familiar face coming toward me. “Taylor!” I shout. That’s the surfer’s name. He turns, takes a second to figure out who I am, then grins and shouts back, “Have a good trip!”
Waiting to board, I exchange messages with a Mexican friend who emigrated to Canada years ago after surviving a narco shooting in a bar. Her friend did not survive. Today, her aunt is stuck in Tapalpa, the town where they captured El Mencho. “Living in fear is no way to live,” my friend says. I think of the taco vendor afraid to open her cart, the grim-faced abuela doing brisk business with her roast chickens, the haggard bus driver steering carefully around burnt-out buses blocking the southbound lane to the gardens. I heart my friend’s message. There’s nothing else to say.
“What about Mexico City next time?” my husband asks, always looking ahead to his next trip.
“In the summer?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m in,” I say, and drink my $9 water.
