Former Santa Barbara City Councilman Gil Garcia and his wife, Marti Correa de Garcia, told the News-Press on Sunday that they are among a group of Santa Barbara tourists stuck in Mexico on a day of upheaval in the country.
Six sister-city members are stranded in El Grullo, a town in Jalisco. Garcia, Correa de Garcia, Maria Garcia, Alicia Baltadano, Mike Hernandez and Angela Cipriano came to El Grullo for seven days of treatment at a health detox spa, Gil Garcia said.
Their return flight was canceled Sunday because of cartel violence throughout several states in Mexico, one of which is Jalisco, Garcia said.
“We changed our flight back to Santa Barbara to Feb. 27,” Garcia said. “Hopefully all is back to normal by then and the U.S. removes Mexico flight restrictions to the U.S.”
Violence erupted in several states in Mexico after Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, “the powerful and long-pursued head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and one of the world’s most-wanted traffickers, died following a Mexican military operation on Sunday,” according to CNN.
The death “unleashed a wave of violence following the operation, torching buses and businesses while clashing with security forces,” the CNN report said.
Six other cartel operatives were also killed in the operation, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Garcia, who served on the Santa Barbara City Council in the late 1990s and early 2000s, said his group was called by the taxi van that was en route to pick them up and told “he ran into cars, vans, freight trucks, buses that were put on fire by cartel blocking the highways.”
“We were advised by the hotel that it would be very dangerous to travel on highways and suggested we stay at the hotel and not go outside because the military is gathering to fight with the cartel,” Garcia said. “We can see helicopters flying around, and we can hear rapid gunfire from them.”
Garcia said everyone is concerned for friends and relatives in Mexico.
“As for six of us from Santa Barbara, we are huddling together in the hotel lounge with other guests and sharing updates from friends, family and watching evolving military responses on Mexican television,” he said. “We feel a strong sense of sister-city camaraderie as we experience this tragedy together.”
