Amid the insurrection, February 2026

Letter from Puerto Vallarta
by Trevor Carolan

[Editor’s Note: The following was compiled from various pieces of correspondence from author, poet, and The British Columbia Review contributor, Trevor Carolan, currently in Puerto Vallarta.]

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…We remain holed up as the insurrection that rocked town here continues, though in low-key mode now.

It’s Day Three of the cartel violence that continued at least through the morning here; however, the world is opening up again. A gardener came to work early this morning where we live, and the grocery store down the way was open early without the lineups of yesterday when only 20 people could go in at once, like in Covid times.  We are okay, although when I went to brush my teeth, I realized I hadn’t shaved for three days and looked, well, haggard. The air is still smoky and we’re all hacking crud from the fires that were set by torched taxis and vehicle throughout the city and up and down the state of Jalisco and beyond. 10,000 soldiers were sent into Guadalajara where there was heavy battling with the main cartel in the streets.  Those are Vietnam War numbers. The Army is still patrolling public areas and shopping centres where arson targeted big stores. 

I looked at the Vancouver Sun news online early this morning and saw a headline that “people are cautiously returning to the beaches.”  Oh? There’s a military Code Red warning still operative: no unnecessary movement outside. So, the beach bunnies must be safe downtown exactly in front of the Naval station offices. We’ve still got military choppers patrolling the beach down a little trail from us, keeping an eye on things.  A young neighbour girl from Ontario who only came here for a week and got trapped in all this just came down and knocked to say the Army is setting up a command post on the intersection out front of our place. Yikes.  And might we have any spare coffee?  Most folks still nervous about going out.  

I’d like to say Canadian-style that the insurrection hasn’t been that bad, but truthfully, it has been pretty stressful.  The world is generally calm right now (3:45pm here) but there’s a sense this thing isn’t over. We had a surprisingly quiet night last night. No one moving around in the streets, few vehicles moving; but there’s an apprehensiveness underlying things.  We were supposed to fly out to the Yucatan down south today for a five-day birdwatching expedition, but a friend of Kwanshik’s texted in the night to say ‘Don’t Come. People get dragged out of taxis at gunpoint by the cartel guys. You lose everything.’ The Canadian gov’t has an alert up against travel there too, so we’ve cancelled, but tried for hours to getting our plane tickets and hotel dates rebooked to a later date. The Mexican airline and European hotel booking outfit have hung us out to dry.   We’ve basically had to burn $1,100.  It’s happening to others all around us here. C’est la guerre.

On Sunday, the 22nd, we were relaxing and having breakfast outside after a successful day previous in presenting my Tai Chi talk and demo (there’s an irony!), when we heard some anxious buzz from folks in the building that something was going on. At almost same moment, we saw clouds of heavy dark smoke drifting in just past our building and the big shade tree behind us, as if a house or store was on fire nearby.

No real alarm at first, then we heard more frantic buzz from the usual suspects here, that there were fires burning in multiple locations around the city. What???  Lots of alarm, with people freaking out that the cartels were taking on the gov’t. All sorts of rumours and stories were zipping across on peoples’ Facebook, but alien to me, as it’s something I have never used. The panic wasn’t helpful, so I cut out and I got my computer tuned into the national news in Spanish from the capital, Mexico City, which I trust–their national news source like CBC.   

We didn’t know at that point (around 9:30 am) that the Mexican Army had taken out one of the most violent narco-cartel leaders some hours before and killed him in what was reported as a heavy duty shoot-out south of the big city of Guadalajara.  We first heard that a different thug-boss, a woman leader, had been captured down south, not too far from where we were birdwatching last week.           

Anyway, what looked initially like two successful cartel takedowns for the gov’t started going sideways fast. In shitty bad-guy, high-school-thug fashion, the cartel involved cranked up its errand boys/members against the authorities. Their method is to tear around on small, fast motorbikes with bottles of petrol and butane, stop taxis and buses in key areas/intersections, haul people out, then set the vehicles on fire to block access to roads and plazas, etc., so the authorities can’t move in quickly when they deliver their demands. Government buildings were also set on fire–our local post office across the road included. Fast food and convenience shops were also burned and looted.  Shamefully, foreign visitors were filmed among the looters. It creates havoc and hardship on the people; most families shop fresh everyday.  (As we speak, there are half a dozen heavy choppers flying maybe 100 feet above our flat where I’m writing this, you can see the crew, presumably after someone, something, a vehicle. Like the opening of Apocalypse Now…)

Once, in the past, a national President here caved in to the gangsters and released the son of one of the maximum bosses after riots.  Bad precedent. So now when any of the big fish get nailed, they have a playbook for action. This is what kicked in, but it got much worse and spread rapidly thanks to online communications. Near the big city of Guadalajara, the army reports, they were facing very heavily armed cartel guys who had Russian-made rocket launchers to take out gov’t helicopters that might be used to bring in the National Guard–a previously used successful tactic according to La Jornada, the best paper in the country.

Meantime the cartel mobsters were demanding release of the captives, etc.   So, there were fires set all over. Everything stopped, streets emptied. From the front of our building, some neighbours saw flames, more plumes of smoke. It kept growing like Topsy. This morning, photos came online of burnt-out buses blocking main roads; over 250 vehicles torched.

The cartel had a strategy. Key buildings were set alight. A big Costco where many foreigners go to shop had four buses that pull up there set on fire, so that was going up too, guaranteeing media attention. By now reports were coming in of some explosions. I reckon gas tanks in burning cars must have blown up. The sky was deep-smoke dark.

I was getting a bit anxious. Late morning, news came in requesting people to stay inside: Do not go out in the streets. The army was coming from Guadalajara to help, about 4 1/2 hours away. We didn’t know thousands of soldiers were battling already with the cartel in Guadalajara’s streets, and the National Guard station here was already out. Very like martial law. Someone frantically got to our building and said the cartel was warning it would now shoot people outside on the streets.  What???   

All the various police forces were trying to keep order. As the Army got closer, we began hearing heavy, fast helicopters with machine-gun mounts, flying very low near us, like now–they were clearly patrolling the beaches, making sure no one was leaving or arriving by river or sea. All beaches still closed today. No one is going out anyway.  

President Claudia Sheinbaum, who is well-liked, sent out a message supporting the armed forces and again asked people to stay inside, keep calm.  We didn’t know how bad it was or widespread. She never lost her cool. Dressed in black, presidential, projects self-control–just what’s needed in a crisis. Doing a good job.

The word from the approaching army was the same: walking about outside was going to be dangerous. Anyone on the street was assumed to be up to no good.

All the time, we stayed inside, quietly waiting things out in our place. We have a large enclosed courtyard with a pool. Some room to walk off negative energy for the doggies.

What happens in a crisis? Some folks panic, freak out, blather mindlessly in groups that feed off each other. Some stay calm. I set about in our kitchen making a big meal of Thai fish and prawn soup for dinner. I needed to do something useful.

We’ve stayed in as requested. We like to cook at home, so we have fresh fish and meat and veggies in the fridge, rice and pasta in the cupboard. Always lots of delicious fresh fruit handy here, plus spare bottles of wine and a half-bottle of tequila.   

In late afternoon someone started yelling in the stairway outside: “The Mexican delivery guy says there’s no more bottled water!” 

Kwanshik says to the hyper American neighbour lady: ‘Okay, so now we just boil our own…”

It’s like that. I trust the authorities to do their job, and I know the Mexican army once helped my daughter and a friend when one of their bikes broke down way out in the mountains. We’ve also seen some tough-looking hombres on patrol out in the mountain villages protecting the locals.  I trust them. So now we just have to keep calm and pray that innocent people have not been hurt by the narco-thugs. They, of course, rely on young poor guys to do their dirty work.  Here’s hoping the Federales get a handle on all this. It’s lousy. We all know what the cartels deal in (see downtown east side Vancouver and parts of most urban centres these days).   

We are okay, but sorry for all the bad upset and harm that’s been done. The Mexicans are fine people, fundamentally Indio-Catholic religious, kindly and thoughtful to others. They don’t deserve this injustice. The gardener lady I spoke with in Spanish this morning was quietly angry. The crisis has hurt them financially, several days of work lost by marginal families hurts. They care about the families of the soldiers who have been killed, and about the innocent bystanders.

I had intended to go surf-fishing off the beach last night. Change of plans. Maybe tomorrow?

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Day Four

Kwanshik and I woke up early today. We’d both slept heavily; we were likely more stressed than we thought the past two days.  I got out to play Tai Chi in the pool garden early; I’d shifted from the white cotton I usually wear and went out in a bright turquoise flower shirt from Honolulu. It’s somewhat like Covid: we start sending out signals that we’re not going to be cowed by the unknown. Kwanshik has a banged-up knee and is wearing a brace for it. She came out intentionally though to practice her yoga too; we have our separate quiet spaces, but it felt meaningful to let others know how we feel.  Hardly anything was stirring; no locals going to work, no early morning joggers or bikers. Almost everyone inside, nervous, peeking through their curtains.    

People are trying to get out of Vallarta, but the highway is roadblocked with military security checks. The airport is still selectively shut down; some flights able to leave. Taxis or Ubers, if you could find one, were charging double, but getting back to normal as of late yesterday afternoon.  The news says the gov’t is trying to get the public buses up and running that almost all the Mexicans rely on.  They’ve been clearing away burnt wrecks all night.     

I tuned into the news here and see that President Sheinbaum is maintaining a steady hand on the tiller; she’s a decent leader and has the country’s senior General in combat fatigues standing right beside her, backing her up. Alas, as we feared there has been loss of life: 25 National Guard soldiers were killed yesterday, as well as several police officers, and a pregnant woman was shot dead in the street in Guadalajara.  We’re told more than 70 now killed, with close to a hundred cartel thugs captured, dozens killed. 

We heard our first explosion this morning: it scared me more than I expected.  The crocodiles here in the canals, who most of us are secretly thrilled to see now and again, after about a million years since dinosaur times are just marginally hanging on under pressure from unrelenting high-rise hotel development along the beaches and waterways–all wrinkly 16 feet of them–must be wondering why these dumb-ass humans still can’t get their act together after thousands of years sharing the planet. Life was probably easier back in the Stone Age.

So, today is calm but highly disrupted. Lots of emergency vehicle sirens still blaring out there.  We’re safe though, we think. Last night, Kwanshik invited a young, single girl she met by the pool garden who’s down visiting from Lake Huron in Ontario, to join us for dinner in our place. It must be frightening for her. Some friendly company seemed to help. She’s just left after joining us here for a long late-morning coffee chat.  Now, if we could just get that damned car alarm that’s been honking for endless hours to click off we’d be better.  But nobody really wanted to get shot for popping outside to click off their car alarm.

Last night, Kwanshik came in from a grocery walk with the Ontario girl.  Main road more active now; side streets still quiet, not much happening in shops.  They saw an electrical truck repairing wires. As they neared, they saw the corner OXXO convenience shop the wires serviced had been burnt out.  They walked a long narrow street and a familiar face came around a corner: a cleaning lady from our building.  They spoke and Maria told them she was searching for groceries to take home. She had a long, circuitous road ahead to her home in a satellite community outside Vallarta. The buses are still out and she hoped to find a shared van running workers home from town. Ixtapa and Las Palmas, she said, are cut off, roads blockaded, soldiers trying to establish control. San Sebastien, the old mining town 90 kilometres out, and a town popular for visitor day trips, is cut off and fighting continues. “Looks like this is where the cartels guys were hiding out.”

Even in a paradise-looking location like Vallarta, life in the progressive modern age is not quite all it’s cracked up to be.      

Yesterday morning, when the first gardeners and maintenance workers came back after the violence, I spoke a little in Spanish with the gardener/cleaning lady I see every morning. She seems to like the kung fu/meditation thing I’m doing and we swap laughs and holas.  I said to her, “Mas tranquilo ahora…”  More quiet today. She looked at me with sad eyes and said, ‘Si, pero donde esta la arrepentirse? ” Where is the repentance?  Who will repent? Then she said something about the 25 young soldiers who were killed and their families, and I gathered she was talking now about the pregnant woman shot on the street in Guadalajara. 

I went to the grocery store early to get some baked goods for breakfast, but except for some pan de sel plain bread, absolutely nothing on the many shelves of the supermarket bakery–nada.   The workers I met outside today were surly, not helpful like usual.  I was walking back to our place wondering what the hell was going on. Suddenly, a huge military helicopter arced around from the front of our building and was moving fairly slowly at maybe 100′ in the air, if that; very, very low above. I stood looking at it for a second, then saw a woman a few shops down from me holding a mop and waving at me frantically to get the hell off the street and duck into a doorway. Holy cow, I moved sharpish out of the way.  The chopper moved slowly above the road away from us.  They’ve been flying around all morning. An Australian friend with experience covering Asia’s many armed scraps reminded the young gov’t soldiers are probably scared themselves and to take real care when out and about.  There are still sirens blaring every little while. The world looks fairly normal otherwise, but it obviously isn’t.  No one has a clear idea of how the world stands here just now. There must be a reason for all the chopper action into Day Four, but …?    

So, today the confusing situation continues and I find myself pissed off. We should have been walking around today, looking at toucans and Tiger Herons in Yucatan.  Instead, we’ve got army helicopters buzzing around helter-skelter. The confusing situation continues.  

From Puerto Vallarta, where as old radio dee-jays used to say, “the hits just keep on coming.”   

Trevor Carolan

Las Glorias, P.V.

Jalisco

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Poet and author Trevor Carolan writes from North Vancouver. His work appears internationally and he writes for BC BookWorld and Literary Review of Canada.  He teaches Environmental Studies at UFV. Among his books are Return to Stillness: Twenty Years with a Tai Chi Master & Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World [Editor’s Note: Trevor Carolan has reviewed books by Yosef Wosk, Yosef Wosk, Richard Cannings, Tom Aversa, and Hal Opperman, Jonathan Manthorpe, Michael Schauch, and John Lent for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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