By Jack Guy, CNN
(CNN) — The killing of Mexican cartel leader Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes on Sunday set off a wave of retaliatory violence from his gunmen, affecting areas popular with foreign tourists such as Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara.
In response, the US State Department urged American nationals to “seek shelter and remain in residences or hotels,” while several US airlines suspended flights to the popular resort town Puerto Vallarta, stranding many tourists who were desperate to escape the violence and return home.
CNN spoke to a number of those affected, including Dallas resident Adryan Moorefield, who was set to travel home from Puerto Vallarta on Sunday but awoke to the news that members of organized crime groups had set buses on fire, blocked roads and clashed with authorities.
“It was such a complete shocker and it almost felt like being in the twilight zone,” Moorefield told CNN. “We’ve been to PV before and thought that this would be a no brainer place to come and do a quick, easy beach vacation.”
American tourist Jim Beck told CNN he ventured outside his hotel in Puerto Vallarta to get breakfast on Sunday and saw “taxi cabs blown up all over town, blocking the roads.”
“Then immediately, everyone was running down the street, screaming and yelling, and they told everyone to get back to their hotels,” Beck said.
Mari, another tourist who asked to go by her first name for privacy reasons, said her young family had been sheltering in their vacation rental and watching the unrest unfold outside.
“We have two little kids, and it’s really scary,” she said. “The entire bay was just covered in fire,” she added. “For hours, there was just a billow of smoke, hovering. You could not see anything across.”
Another US tourist, Travis Dagenais, told CNN that he was woken up in Puerto Vallarta on Sunday morning by so many loud noises that he initially thought construction work was underway.
“We woke up this morning to a lot of what I thought was a building demolition,” Dagenais said.
It took him some time to figure out what was happening as reports of chaos gradually began to surface on social media, he said. Soon he could see the unrest unfold from his balcony.
“I was able to see quite directly, a little too visibly, some of the tactics and some of the cars that were being set on fire, some of the looting that was taking place as local stores and buildings were being attacked,” he said, adding the city “smells like burnt rubber at the moment.”
Dagenais said he and other tourists are currently beset by a raft of uncertainties.
“How long does this lockdown, so to speak, last? How long does the airport stay out of operation? What are some of the ways out? What (are) some of those answers, or just some of the plans we can make?” he wondered.
Dagenais added that most of his fellow tourists were dealing with the sudden chaos “with a certain degree of patience and understanding of things that are beyond the individual’s control.”
“I really hope that everybody in this city, everybody in this country, is able to feel normalcy and is able to feel some degree of safety after this,” he added.
Shelter-in-place separates family
An American woman from California visiting family in Mexico told CNN that she had been temporarily separated from her son and left wonde