Narcos show up in the most unexpected places

Patzcuaro is a lovely city situated in the highlands of Michoacan Mexico. Surrounded by pine forests and lakes, and with beautiful crafts from the local indigenous people, is a popular weekend spot for Chilangos to escape the craziness of Mexico City. It’s just about the last place we expected to encounter the violence that has been plaguing Mexico. We couldn’t be more wrong.

We were walking into the main square for our evening stroll, where we saw a very unexpected thing. Where there were normally crowds of people buying snacks and walking around, there was a car in the middle of the street engulfed in flames. Odd we thought, where are the police? The fire department? Soon we realized there weren’t even many onlookers for such an event. The scene was strange to say the least, so we decided leave and make our way to the other town square a few blocks away. Well, if the first burning car didn’t scare us, the second one sure did. Just as in the main square, the second square had a burning car, no police, no fire department, and few people. A street vendor who was quickly packing up her things (others had just abandoned their stalls) told us “It is happening, you should go back to your hotel”. And so we did.

The next day there were parades of machine gun touting federal police on the streets and helicopters in the sky, but otherwise it was business as usual. We asked a policeman what had happened and he told us not to worry everything was fine… thanks. Locals weren’t very eager to talk about it either. When we asked, people shrugged off the question, “It was just those bad guys, it’s nothing”. Much later we read it was narco gang violence, many people had died and cars where burnt all over the state. I have to say that other from this one incident, our 2.5 months in Mexico was incident free, and that in general this country, and the whole world for that matter, is pretty damn safe. But as a rule, if you ever see cars on fire, it’s a good idea to keep your head down.