ETZATLÁN, Mexico — There are two sides to the town on Jalisco’s tequila trail.
One is the charming pueblo in foothills lined with neat rows of agave cactus. In the central plaza you’ll see swaths of handwoven fabric draped like canopies over the cobbled streets — splashes of pink, blue, yellow and green offering welcome shade from the afternoon heat. Locals boast that their cielo tejido is world famous, and once even went on display in Dubai.
The other version of Eztatlán is one most people are scared to talk about.
It’s the place where cartel foot soldiers torched the gas station last week, along with the bus depot, a state-run bank and dozens of vehicles, leaving residents hiding in their homes during a 24-hour reign of terror.
Many remain fearful in the aftermath, left wondering whether a sense of normalcy ever will return and venting frustration with local authorities, who seemingly did nothing to intervene amid the chaos.
This area was once the domain of Mexico’s original cartel godfathers, among them Rafael Caro Quintro — “El Numero Uno” — who was rumored to have kept a residence nearby. Today, it belongs to the Jalisco New Generation cartel. The recent mayhem followed a Mexican military operation on Feb. 22 that killed the group’s leader, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho.”
An aerial view of the Etzatlán bus terminal, which was burned in retaliation for the military killing of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes.
Reprisal attacks were widespread, hitting at least 20 states, and days after the chaos, the charred husks of vehicles and Oxxo convenience stores still were visible heading west out of Guadalajara, the state capital, toward the Pacific.
Reaching Etzatlán — pronounced etts-at-LAN — takes about a 90-minute drive from Guadalajara. It was among the hardest-hit places in terms of property damage. Official statistics are hard to come by, but town residents — several of whom asked to be identified by only first names to protect their safety — estimated around 80 cars were set aflame in a municipality of just 20,000 people.
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“It’s not just a vehicle — it’s your whole life, how you get work,” said María, a retiree who lives in a modest home a short drive from the historic center of town.
The main industries outside of tourism are ranching and agriculture, and many residents do not have insurance on their vehicles. María recalled the word spreading over WhatsApp early on Feb. 22, a Sunday, that cartel members were setting fires around town. They threatened to burn any business that opened that day. Nearly a week later, the schools still remained closed.
Municipal police and firefighters were nowhere to be seen, she and other townspeople said. The ones setting the fires were teenagers on motorbikes and they didn’t carry guns or bother to mask their faces.
“All they had were cans of gas and rocks for breaking the windows,” María said. “The night was interminable with explosions. The next day was a big silence.”
A burned Pemex gas station in Tala stands along the highway connecting Guadalajara and Etzatlán in the western Mexican state of Jalisco.
(Felix Marquez/For The Times)
María was among the locals sweeping up the ashes and trying to scrub burn marks from the streets and buildings when The Times visited Etzatlán in the days after El Mencho’s death.
As a police truck approached and threatened to interrupt the clean-up effort, Maria stood in the street and blocked the way, hands on her hips in a pose of defiance.
“We will not permit you to pass,” she told the officers. “Get out of here! We don’t want you here! The state should have been here before, if only just to help us clean.”
The police truck idled for a moment before reversing down the street, drawing a round of applause from the crowd that had formed on the block.
A row of parked cars had been set on fire, and the flames had swept across the sidewalk onto the doorstep of a family’s home. The front door was charred black and the smell of smoke and soot lingered in the entryway.
The household matriarch, Sylvia, 64, said it took them five hours of dousing with buckets to extinguish the flames. The home, she said, is more than 200 years old and built by her Spanish forefathers, with a tiled courtyard in the center and Moorish accents on the masonry. Repairing the damage will take special materials and money they don’t have. Her daughter’s car was among those torched, leaving her without a way of getting to work.
Sylvia, a resident of Eztatlán, poses for a portrait with her daughters inside their home damaged by a fire set by teenagers acting on behalf of the local cartel.
(Félix Márquez)
The family rearranged the bedrooms with her daughters and grandchildren so nobody is sleeping in the smoke-damaged room facing the street.
A former teacher whose job took her to rural towns, Sylvia said some of her students would speak about the drug business that was operating in the shadows — poppy fields hidden deep in the mountains, landing strips for planes coming from Colombia. But those were simpler times.
“Everything was different then,” she said. The cartels kept to themselves. “They were never messing with the people.”
After the killing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent in 1985, what was then known as the Guadalajara cartel crumbled as its leaders were hunted down. Sinaloans — co-led by the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — rose to power, then splinter groups formed and fought each other, with El Mencho’s outfit emerging as the dominant force in the 2010s.
Along the way there were generations of migration, with many families from Jalisco now spread across California. There is a “Little Etzatlán” in Sylmar, with other pockets of immigrants from the town in other parts of the San Fernando Valley.
As the fires burned after El Mencho was killed, videos from Etzatlán circulated widely on TikTok and Instagram. Locals said it was their way of putting out a call for help when local authorities appeared to be standing by.
Volunteers clean the facade of a family’s historic home damaged by fire in Etzatlán, Jalisco.
(Felix Marquez/For The Times)
Things had been relatively calm in Etzatlán. There have been whispers of paramilitary training camps in the mountains, but the sinister presence mostly lingered just below the surface. Then last year came the discovery of Rancho Izaguirre, just 45 minutes down the highway, where bone fragments, clothing and other evidence indicated the cartel had been disposing of bodies.
Authorities had raided the ranch before, but it wasn’t until a civilian-led group that searches for the remains of the disappeared began poking around that the full extent of the horror at the “extermination camp” came into view.
Yet still, life went on in Etzatlán, until the sense of tranquility was shattered. Residents have puzzled over why so much of their town was burned. Questions also linger about what was left untouched — the police station and homes of local officials.
Nobody seems to have much hope that those responsible will face any consequences.
“Other places in the world would call this terrorism,” said María, the retiree who blocked the police from interrupting the street cleanup.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, disagreed. Asked during a news conference last week about the fallout from El Mencho’s death, Sheinbaum said blocking roads and damaging property were certainly crimes, “but that has nothing to do with terrorism.”
A girl looks through a window cordoned off with tape at the bus terminal damaged by cartel attacks in Etzatlán.
(Felix Marquez/For The Times)
At her home in Etzatlán, María simply shrugged when asked what she thought would happen in the coming days and weeks.
“Who is going to come for us? Nobody.”
