“My family was stranded at a hotel in Puerto Vallarta. The Canadian government and airlines left us scrambling”

I still vividly remember my first trip to Mexico. I was seven years old, and I spent my time in Oaxaca snorkelling in bright, impossibly blue water and in Mexico City speaking Spanish with locals, feeling for the first time that I could move between worlds. It was culturally enriching in a way that changed me. Even though Mexico was only a five-hour flight from our Toronto home, being there helped me understand that the world is bigger than the place where you’re born and that your life is just one version of how things can be.

That was 39 years ago. Now I’m an assistant professor of cinema studies at the University of Toronto with a family of my own. As the school’s winter break approached this February, I felt a strong pull to give my six-year-old daughter, Wallis, what my mom had given me. I wanted her to experience that same broadening of the horizon, to hear another language and to see how people live differently from us.

Related: Canadian airlines have resumed service to Puerto Vallarta

My partner, Jason, and I decided to take her to Puerto Vallarta, a city on the Pacific coast. I hesitated at first because of its reputation for being touristy, almost existing in a bubble separate from the rest of Mexico. But it was one of the few destinations with a direct flight from Toronto, and we wanted to avoid a long, exhausting travel day since we had a young child with us. The plan was for a short trip: five nights in a small hotel in the old town rather than at an insulated resort. We landed on Tuesday, February 17, expecting to fly home on Sunday, February 22.

Since that first trip, I’ve become aware of the realities of cartel violence in Mexico, but I was also skeptical of the way it has been framed by media in countries like the US. Especially recently, I’ve watched how sensationalized stories about Mexican cartels are used to stoke fear about immigrants and justify horrific abuses of human rights like Donald Trump’s ICE raids.

Related: Ryan Wedding was arrested in Mexico last night

I also came to understand that, when violence does happen, it overwhelmingly affects locals, not tourists. The prevailing wisdom among frequent visitors to Mexico was that cartels have no interest in disrupting tourism in places like Puerto Vallarta because tourism is economically beneficial for them too. So I wasn’t worried about my family’s safety when we booked the trip. If anything, my concern was the opposite: that Puerto Vallarta would be taken over by tourists, that my daughter wouldn’t get to glimpse what real life in Mexico looks like.

After we arrived, the first few days were everything I’d hoped for. Wallis was ecstatic. We did a boat tour one morning and saw dolphins swimming alongside us, including calves tucked close to their mothers. We took a trip to nearby botanical gardens, spotting iguanas sunning themselves and, to our surprise, even raccoons like the ones back home. It was a special experience for my daughter.

On Sunday morning, we were getting ready to fly home. Our Flair Airlines flight was scheduled to leave in the afternoon. With our bags packed, we stopped at a nearby café for some breakfast. As we were leaving to walk back to our hotel, a local man pulled up beside us in his car. He rolled down his window and told us, in broken English, to get our daughter inside, because people were going to start shooting at cars and blowing them up. It was such an odd interaction, so we didn’t process it properly. We assumed he meant something environmental, maybe an accident, maybe toxins in the air.

We returned to the hotel courtyard, still trying to make sense of it and preparing to call a taxi to take us to the airport. That’s when we started to smell smoke. Within minutes, the air shifted. It grew darker, thicker. The smell was overpowering, like burning plastic and metal, the sharp, nauseating scent of black rubber. We hurried to finish packing and went to the lobby to check out, but there was no one at the desk. We stood there, confused, when a notification came through: Flair Airlines had delayed our flight by five hours due to technical difficulties. We were irritated, trying to figure out how to fill the unexpected time, when a hotel staff member approached us. On her phone was a message: “Do not leave the hotel. Shelter in place.”

We saw other guests heading up to the hotel’s rooftop terrace to get a clearer view of what was happening, so we followed. From up there, we saw fires burning in multiple directions and thick columns of smoke rising across the city. Then we saw an explosion in the distance, followed by another, then another. Somehow, through all of it, Wallis remained calm. We assured her that we were safe in the hotel, and she listened and watched, then took advantage of the crisis to swim in the adults-only rooftop pool she previously hadn’t been allowed to use.

Another guest beside us on the terrace said, “This is retaliation.” We learned that, earlier in the day, the Mexican military had killed El Mencho, the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the most powerful organized crime groups in the region. In response, cartel members had blocked highways and set fire to vehicles and buildings in multiple cities, including Puerto Vallarta. Guests stood around us, scrolling frantically through social media, trying to assemble a coherent picture of what was happening. There was talk of political pressure from the US, of Trump pushing Mexico to crack down on cartels and even publicly floating the idea of deploying American troops. Some believed that this pressure had prompted the Mexican government’s action against El Mencho and that what we were witnessing was the cartel’s revenge.

While we were still on the roof, Jason was tracking our incoming plane online. He watched it make it halfway to Puerto Vallarta before abruptly turning around and heading back to Toronto. In that moment, the technical difficulty notification we’d received earlier felt disingenuous. Then another notification came through: our flight was officially cancelled, with no clear guidance about what came next. We called Flair directly, only to reach a customer service representative who didn’t even seem aware that our flight had been cancelled. The earliest they could rebook us was Thursday, four days later.

At that point, four days felt like an eternity. I was supposed to be back teaching the next day, which added another layer of stress to being stranded in Mexico. I spent hours searching for someone to cover my classes, and thankfully my colleagues were able to step in. But we still decided we couldn’t wait. We scrambled to secure seats on a Porter flight scheduled for the following night to Hamilton, hoping we could get out before the situation deteriorated any further.

I started messaging friends and family to tell them what was happening. An academic friend who studies Mexican politics wrote back with urgency, telling us to obey the shelter-in-place order and stay in the hotel. They explained that this wasn’t one of the older cartels that followed the unwritten rule of leaving tourists alone. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel was newer, more aggressive and less bound by those traditional ways of doing things. The assumption that tourists would be spared might not apply.

Even then, in those first hours, I wouldn’t say I felt any fear. It was more stress and uncertainty. We had a six-year-old who was hungry and bored, and we had no extra food in the room or at the hotel. The air outside was acrid from the smoke, so we couldn’t even be outdoors. We were also technically no longer guests, but no one asked us to leave. In fact, there was almost no staff left. We learned that everyone except the staffer who had given us the translated shelter-in-place order had gone home to hide.

One of the other guests spoke fluent Spanish and talked to the remaining staffer. He told us she was distraught and anxious to return to her own three children. He also spoke to the family living next door, whom we could see from the terrace. They kept repeating the same thing: “Don’t leave—it’s not safe.” A couple staying at the hotel decided to drive out anyway to meet friends at a nearby Sheraton. We watched them go. When they returned, they said the roads were eerily empty, lined with burned-out cars.

As night fell, panic began to set in. A building one block from the hotel exploded and caught fire. Not long afterward, a military helicopter circled overhead, its blades chopping through the smoky air. After that activity died down, Jason and I became preoccupied with how we were going to feed Wallis. We had no idea how long we would be stuck there or how much the hotel had in reserve, given that there was no restaurant. Other guests began to talk about rationing food.

In the end, we gathered whatever was left in the kitchen. The lone staffer, though clearly shaken, cooked for everyone, with help from guests. There were eggs, spices and a few potatoes, and she turned them into a simple soup. When she noticed Wallis, the only child in the hotel, she took the extra step of making pancakes just for her. In the middle of all that uncertainty, that small gesture felt enormous. The staffer had nowhere to sleep that night, so we offered her our daughter’s bed in our two-bed room. The three of us squeezed into the other one and drifted in and out of a restless sleep, wondering what the morning would bring, whether there would be food, whether we would make that Porter flight.

On Monday morning, after eating some eggs for breakfast, we were notified that our Porter flight for later that night had been cancelled. Another guest told us that the airport had shut down the day before, which meant we never would have been able to leave anyway. We felt trapped, cut off from reliable airline information, and dependent on the news and rumours circulating on social media. By then, the smoke had mostly cleared and the streets appeared calmer from the rooftop. A few guests ventured out and returned, describing bombed-out storefronts nearby. We were increasingly worried about food since the hotel’s supplies were running low.

We had friends staying at a resort about a 15-minute drive away, and it seemed wiser to be somewhere with people we knew, a bigger place with more reliable access to food. We decided to book a couple of nights there and figure out our flight situation once we checked in. The problem was getting there. Taxis still weren’t running, so we asked the couple who had driven to the Sheraton the night before if they could give us a ride, and they kindly agreed. It was the first time we had left the hotel since the explosions. Driving through the city, we saw the magnitude of the damage: burned-out cars lining the roads, blackened buildings, even a massive grocery store reduced to a shell.

At the resort, we phoned Porter repeatedly and spent hours on hold only to be told that they had no clear timeline for flights to start up again. The earliest they might rebook us was in a week’s time, on March 3, and even that wasn’t guaranteed. Meanwhile, we were hearing that Puerto Vallarta’s airport had reopened and that other airlines were operating. So we hedged our bets. We booked an Air Canada flight for Thursday via Montreal. Then we booked a United Airlines flight for Wednesday via Houston, just in case.

Late Tuesday night, just before bed, we received a notification from Porter: we had been rebooked on a Wednesday flight arriving in Toronto at 2 a.m. on Thursday. We cancelled the other two flights immediately. On the day of our departure, we were tense right up until the plane lifted off. Only once we were in the air did the relief finally set in.

Now that we’re back in Toronto, I’ve been able to reflect on our situation. I keep thinking of that local man who warned us just before the explosions began. I’ve wondered who he was and how he knew. I’ve even considered whether he might have had some connection to the cartel and, seeing that we had a little girl with us, felt compelled to tell us to get her somewhere safe. I’ll never know the full story there.

The media have reported that at least 73 people have died—mostly cartel members and Mexican security personnel—in the aftermath of El Mencho’s killing. Even though we didn’t experience any violence targeting us directly, it was still a rattling, stressful experience. What unsettled me most was the sense of abandonment. There was very little meaningful information from the airlines and, for days, no indication of when we would get a flight home—a consequence, perhaps, of too little corporate accountability. We received generic travel advisories from the Canadian government, mostly repeating what we already knew. No one was coordinating anything for stranded travellers. We were left to figure the situation out for ourselves.

We paid roughly $6,000 for three extra nights of accommodation and multiple flights across different airlines, booking them redundantly to increase our odds of getting home. I’m fortunate to have a salaried job and the ability to absorb that kind of credit card debt. Not everyone does. Other travellers may still be stuck in Mexico, without the means to buy their way out.

The experience also sharpened my anger at the political dynamics that may have helped ignite the situation. Puerto Vallarta has long been considered a safe destination. Seeing it erupt in violence like that felt tied to broader geopolitical pressure from Trump, who seems to be fanning the flames of instability across the planet.

And yet, despite everything, I would absolutely return to Mexico with my family. The people we encountered were generous and kind. It’s the locals who bear the brunt of this kind of violence, not visitors. If tourism supports their economy rather than undermines it, then solidarity with Mexicans matters now more than ever.