The Mayan Riviera in Mexico has become a deadly battlefield for feuding drug gangs — and tourists are getting caught in the crossfire.
It's happy hour at the Sunset Bar, and Sarah and Charlie are on day 10 of their visit to Tulum on Mexico's so-called "Mayan Riviera". The table is covered in empties and Charlie, 30, is singing along to Bésame Mucho. But things are not going well for the young London couple.
Trouble started after the bar closed one night at 9.30pm. "We'd been drinking until 3am most nights and then suddenly they were saying, 'You have to go now, we're shutting.' They seemed very nervous," says Sarah, 29. Apparently, a hotel employee had been "pistol-whipped" in the car park. "They thought it might lead to a gunfight so I said to Charlie, 'Let's go to the room, lock the door, lie low.' I was terrified."
In the past few years, Tulum, an idyllic resort of swaying palms and powder-white beaches on Mexico's Caribbean coast, has fallen in with rough company as drug cartels slug it out for control of the burgeoning tourist economy - even at the risk of killing it. Like tropical downpours sending everyone running for cover, shoot-outs, or balaceras, have become an increasingly common inconvenience for visitors, although for some it may add a frisson of excitement: "Wow, my first balacera in Mexico," I overhear a Spanish tourist exclaim a day after gunshots ring out in the street. It turns out to be fireworks.
For other visitors, the results have been fatal. Late last year, two tourists were shot dead at a Tulum pizzeria after getting caught in the middle of a gunfight between rival narcos. This was once a peaceful place, a well-kept secret for laid-back, leathery-skinned yoga enthusiasts and hippies - the self-styled "Tuluminati" - who lived in ramshackle beach huts with no electricity enjoying cheap seafood, sunshine and superior weed. All that has changed.
Tulum's visitors today can order drugs from the concierge. They often pay hundreds of pounds a night for seafront hotel rooms, spa treatments and gourmet meals in a resort boasting the greatest density of luxury hotels and "eco-lodges" anywhere in the Caribbean.
Demand for this "barefoot luxury at its best", as one hotel advertises it, has been fuelled by visits from a string of celebrities, including Jennifer Aniston, Sting, Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz. Now the place is thronging with New York bankers, overpaid social media influencers and a multitude of Brits: some 500,000 visit Mexico each year and the Mayan Riviera, in the state of Quintana Roo, is their favourite destination. About 80 miles (129 kilometres) to the north of Tulum is Cancun, a bigger, less well-heeled resort that has become Latin America's party capital, a magnet for cocaine and margarita-bingeing "spring-breakers". Its airport is now one of the world's busiest.
Until recently it was rare for tourists to come face to face with the criminal underworld. But now the ubiquitous drug gangs and the violence they engender are getting harder for visitors to avoid. The flood of money to the Mayan Riviera has lured some of Mexico's most dangerous crime groups, including the notorious Sinaloa cartel, whose former leader, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, is serving a life term in prison after being extradited to the US in 2017. The tourist demand for drugs is one attraction. The burgeoning opportunities for extortion are another.
"Tulum used to have such a relaxed vibe but now it's become really nasty," says Michelle Cuervo, 48, a longtime resident who runs Regen Tulum, a scheme to fund local projects through a "community" cryptocurrency. "I'm afraid to go out at night to walk the dog." We're sitting in a bar just down the road from La Malquerida restaurant, where Anjali Ryot, 29, an Indian-born travel blogger, and Jennifer Henzold, 35, from Germany, were killed in a drive-by shooting by men on mopeds last October. Today a police truck is parked outside and crime-scene tape still hangs over the road where two German men and a Dutch woman were also injured. They were not targeted but clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time: spraying the place with bullets may have been punishment for the restaurant's failure to pay "tax".
Violence has also flared in Cancun. In November, 15 men in ski masks stormed ashore from boats and executed two men from a rival gang on the beach outside the Hyatt Ziva Riviera. Other foreigners have joined the country's growing toll of more than 100,000 "disappeared" since 2006.
The first such case Cuervo remembers in Tulum involved a young Israeli backpacker, Dana Rishpy, who vanished after a party on the beach in 2007. "That was a turning point," Cuervo says. "Things began to change." The next to disappear was El Hungaro, or "the Hungarian", the town's only drug dealer in those days. "He was everyone's friend, a lovely guy. His car was found abandoned by the side of the road."
"They began killing more and more people," Cuervo adds. "I mean, they found a severed head just outside a school near my house a few months ago."
For holidaymakers, though, the party goes on. "It's just gangsters killing each other, isn't it?" says Marina, a young German who has come to Tulum "in search of a holistic experience". She has been dancing by herself at sunset on the beach while her boyfriend sits on the sand in the lotus position.
Further along the beach, the beautiful people primp and pout into their phones at the entrance to a fashionable bar where Leonardo DiCaprio was once spotted. Just down the road is "the invasion", as it is called, a slum area of wooden shacks without electricity or running water that has sprung up on land that was, until recently, rainforest. Bordering this is a street of luxury villas and tourist complexes, including the Arthouse, a gated community with a gourmet poolside restaurant.
The Girl from Ipanema wafts from a hidden speaker among the palms as a blonde woman in a tiny black bikini struts to a lounger by the pool. A black chihuahua trots after her. A former model from Ukraine, Ekaterina Grusheva, 29, came to Tulum on holiday last year and stayed after falling in love with Diego, from Argentina, who runs the Arthouse restaurant. She has a sub-machinegun inked on one hand next to the word "Killa", and "Psycho" etched on her inner thigh. "I'm a vegetarian," she tells me when I ask her about the tattoos. "I can't imagine killing a person." The violence in Tulum is "something they should work on", she says. Isn't she afraid of it? "I seldom leave here. In fact I stay here all the time, so it's quite safe," she replies.
At a table nearby sits Peiman Fazil, 33, who runs CoWorking Tulum, a service for foreign remote workers. Even before the pandemic, digital nomads were flocking to the Mayan Riviera but that process only accelerated when the rest of the world locked down and Mexico stayed open to foreigners. "Remote working is a new form of luxury," says Fazil, who grew up in Australia before working in IT in London. "We want to integrate people here with all the services they need to feel comfortable."
Gang violence is not a popular topic. "There are challenges everywhere," he says. His sister and co-director, Nazieh, interrupts. "The reality is that everything that happens here does get reported."
Or does it? Most of the killing takes place far from the media spotlight, a daily part of Mexican life. Only when foreigners are involved does it attract wider attention. To get a better idea of what goes on just outside the tourist bubble I visit Rafael Barajas, who runs the Tulum people's observatory, an online news site chronicling crime. I find him in his favourite café several miles outside town. Tattoos on his arms and hair in a ponytail, he is sipping a michelada, a Mexican bloody mary but with a more potent afterburn.
"The big cartels are confronting the smaller local cartels and each week, as a minimum, we have one person shot dead in Tulum," Barajas says. "Recently it has got a lot worse." On the same night that a parking valet was pistol-whipped - prompting the closure of Charlie and Sarah's favourite bar - a supermarket owner was shot dead, apparently for resisting extortion. Later that night, Josue May, a 16-year-old, was murdered at the Dos Ojos or "Two Eyes" cenote as he slept in a hammock - a bullet though his left eye and another through the cheek. His brother, Alex, 15, was seriously injured with a shot to the stomach.
This part of Mexico resembles Gruyère cheese, riddled with thousands of cenotes — cavernous limestone sinkholes, some of them tens of metres wide and filled with translucent water. They are said to have been formed by the same meteorite impact that killed off the dinosaurs millions of years ago and may have been used by the Maya as a repository for sacrificial offerings.
The brothers had been working as temazcaleros, helping to set the fires for a traditional Mayan sweat lodge or temazcal, a tourist magnet at the cenote. The boys may also have sold drugs, making them targets for a rival gang, Barajas speculates.
To find out more I drive to Dos Ojos. A bird with a surprisingly long tail - a turquoise-browed motmot, I learn later - darts across the bonnet of my Avis rental as I pull up in front of a shop. It is run, I've been told, by the boys' family. Inside, a few dusty shelves are lined with packets of biscuits and bottled water. A man sits at the counter. I ask him about the boys and he looks afraid. "I can't talk about it," he says with fearful eyes. "Don't say any more about them," he pleads, walking out the back door before I can ask if he is their father.
Back in the car I follow a sign to the temazcal along a meandering, rutted dirt track — Avis would be appalled. Two cars are parked at the start of a sandy path leading into the jungle. I follow the path for a few hundred yards as it winds its way through a grove of palms. Four tourists stand in swimming gear next to an inverted teacup-shaped adobe structure with a door in the side: the sweat lodge. To one side a fire is blazing. Near it stands a man in a white tunic with a red sash wrapped around it, a shaman. He shoots me the same fearful glance as the man in the shop. "I can't talk to you. I have clients here for a cleansing ceremony," he says. "I must go."
Fear of the cartels is pervasive, and for good reason. The next day I drive to Playa del Carmen, another resort north of Tulum where Chris Cleave, 54, a British estate agent from Cornwall, was shot dead at the wheel of his car in March in front of his 14-year-old daughter. She was in the passenger seat and survived unhurt.
The year before, Cleave had been threatened in a narcomanta, a message scrawled on cloth and erected over a road by a drug cartel. It was signed by "Comandante Cobra", who promised "red Audi-driver" Cleave would end up in a "body bag" if he did not "shut his mouth". It is not clear what this referred to.
Another Playa del Carmen resident is a European woman who has fled Tulum, where she owns a hotel, for fear of increasingly aggressive gangs. She agrees to speak on condition of anonymity. She claims that state officials are working in cahoots with the cartels, which is why the police have not clamped down on them. They are free to threaten business owners in Tulum with impunity. "If we complain we get threats," she tells me. "Someone I know received a photograph of her children being dropped off at school. The message was clear — we know where you live and where your kids go to school."
She claims to be as afraid of the police as she is of the cartels. "Because they are as corrupt as the cartels. They'll put drugs in your car to frame you. And worse."
Amin Jafari, a Canadian visitor, recalls being stopped by police with his elderly parents shortly after renting a car at Mexico City airport in May. "They told me to pull over … and I was completely shocked because I hadn't done anything wrong," Jafari says. "They were speaking Spanish and I didn't understand it. A police officer used Google Translate to show me that I had to pay US$500 [about NZ$800] for them to release me without any issues."
Rafael Barajas has heard many such complaints. "We tell tourists not to trust people in uniform. They're not there to watch over you but to extract money from you," he says. "The tow trucks, for example, are a racket. People come out of a restaurant after dinner and find their rental car is no longer there. The police ask for a payment, sometimes 60,000 pesos [NZ$4690], to return the car … The problem in Mexico is we have a self-esteem deficit. It's a colonial thing. We need to instil in our people better values; it's not honourable to extort and rip off visitors. What experience people take away from here is important. We're not all bloodthirsty criminals."
Heading north to Cancun I meet Eric Galindo, a veteran crime reporter for a local newspaper. A fleshy figure with dark, melancholic eyes, he has seen more of the victims of gangland violence than he can remember - "Thousands, perhaps," he says. "After a while you become insensitive to it."
Yet some stick in his memory. One is the body of his own stepson, Diego Manuel. Galindo and his Venezuelan wife had returned from a holiday two months before to find her son, who worked as a waiter in a bar, was missing. The body was found a few days later in an alley. "He was covered in plastic wrapped with tape. The cause of death was asphyxiation," Galindo recalls, displaying a photo of the body in a morgue. Galindo, 50, has no idea why his stepson was murdered but suspects a link with the ubiquitous crime gangs. "He might have got into an argument with the wrong people," he says. The murder rate, he adds, has shot up of late as the cartels battle in the shadows for control of the tourist bonanza.
The methods of murder are multiple and have engendered their own dictionary of horror: embolsado - a body found in a bin bag; encajuelado, one left in the boot of a car. Another entry denotes one who dissolves victims in acid - pozolero, after a Mexican stew. A descuartizado may be the unluckiest victim, dismembered by knife or chainsaw in a process that often begins while the victim is still alive.
As we are talking, Galindo gets a call: they've found an encajuelado. It's his day off but he agrees to guide me to the scene. Soon we are bumping over rutted streets in a part of the city few tourists - or their rental cars - will ever enter, even if thousands are staying in a string of mega-hotels down the road in the zona hotelera. Young men stand watch on street corners behind the yellow police tape in the Guadalupana district. As officers in white forensic overalls begin their work it becomes clear that this is an embolsado as well as an encajuelado - a body in a bag found in the boot of a taxi.
Locals have called police on account of an unpleasant smell. A trickle of dried blood is visible under the lid of the boot. When police open the boot, a black bin liner can be seen inside. The body in the bag turns out to be a descuartizado: they lift out the head, which has tape wrapped around it, then an arm still wearing a wristwatch. "Looks like the Jalisco boys," says Luis Baños, an affable former policeman, referring to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel - the main rival of the Sinaloa cartel - which likes to chop up its victims. Baños lives two doors down from where the taxi is parked and has been observing the grim forensic proceedings with a group of neighbours. This is not the first descuartizado to appear here, he says. "These types of killings are becoming more common. They're not isolated events - they're the evidence we live in a total narco-state."
Returning later to the centre of town I meet another journalist, Cecilia Solis, in a shopping mall café. "The security situation is out of control," she tells me over a milkshake while her bodyguard waits for her outside - Mexico is one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists and a dozen have been murdered this year. "There are people, many of them women, disappearing every day," she says. "There are many murders."
She describes how police opened fire on a crowd of women who had staged a protest over the authorities' failure to properly investigate murders in 2020. Solis was shot in the leg: "The bullet went right through my thigh," she tells me. She and a dozen other injured people are suing police. "The case keeps being put off," she adds. "The police will tell you everything is marvellous here. But it's not."
A new police headquarters for the region covering the state of Quintana Roo was inaugurated amid great fanfare on the outskirts of Cancun last year, a gleaming, white-walled modernist complex with a protuberance at one end that looks like an air traffic control tower.
"The design was inspired by a cenote," says Adriana Muñoz, a police spokeswoman leading me into a round, cavernous space with light filtering in from a circle above and a panel of 22 giant screens on the wall offering views of busy junctions in Cancun. It's like something from Star Trek.
In his office upstairs, Lucio Hernández, the state police chief, outlines the dilemma: each year 12 million foreign visitors arrive in the region, creating a big demand for drugs. He does not want to discourage them. Far from it. "Tourists can come here to relax and enjoy themselves and nothing bad will happen to them," he promises.
A poster in Cancun airport says: "Don't turn your holidays into a permanent stay." It shows a blonde woman behind bars - the bars are lines of cocaine. In reality, though, "We're very tolerant," Hernández says. He sounds almost apologetic about having to arrest people if they "consume" in public but adds, "They're freed in less than 36 hours after paying a fine."
He insists the state is doing everything it can to battle the gangs. Corruption has been a problem, he admits, in a state where two former governors are behind bars accused of collaborating with the gangs. Now things have improved, he claims. "It might seem we have more problems, but no - today there's a lot more control."
The chopped-up bodies in bin bags make this sound like wishful thinking. Some blame President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has proclaimed "hugs, not bullets" as a strategy for dealing with drug gangs.
"We've cleared the dealers from the beaches but we need to win more ground, not give it up. We're in a war," Osiris Ceballos, an officer in the newly created "tourist police", says when I join him on a patrol: we trundle along the beach on quad bikes, the police rifles and bulletproof vests in discord with the bikinis and bare flesh arrayed on the sand.
Later I send Charlie a text, checking if he and Sarah are all right. I hear nothing for two days and then I get a reply. "All good," Charlie writes, accompanying his message with a photograph of him presumably taken by Sarah. He's standing smiling on a jetty under an azure sky. A Mexican flag flutters overhead. I'm relieved they are OK - it's a holiday I imagine neither of them will forget.
Written by: Matthew Campbell
© The Times of London