Caught in the crossfire

BY CRYSTAL PUGSLEY

If all goes well, Dolly and Gary Venables will be returning to Huron Saturday from a Mexican resort in Puerto Vallarta, where they found themselves in the middle of cartel violence Sunday that was set off by the killing of a local drug cartel leader.

“This is our 19th year of coming down here, and we’ve obviously never, ever had any issues like this,” Dolly Venables said Tuesday evening. “It’s been very, very scary.”

The couple traveled to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on Feb. 10, with plans to stay for the rest of the month.

“It was Sunday morning, Feb. 22, and Gary and I were getting ready to go down to the pool,” Venables said. “I looked out the window, and the sky was very, very dark. I turned to Gary to say it looked like rain, but I looked closer, and the sky was dark from smoke.

“We had no idea what was going on,” she said. “I got dressed quickly, grabbed all our medications, and we went downstairs to the desk and said, ‘What’s going on?’ All they said was the main leader of the cartel had been killed, and the cartel was getting revenge.”

Venables said they had signed up for a security alert program when they entered the country, and a message flashed on their phone advising everyone to shelter in place.

“I was terrified,” she added. “You get in that mode, I want to go home, and I want to go home now. There was no way we were leaving the resort; to go out on the streets could have been deadly for us.

“The resort has not communicated at all with us,” Venables added. “We watched it on TV.”

Throughout the day on Sunday, she and Gary stepped out on the deck to survey what was happening on the streets below.

“We could see there’s a new fire, that one is new; they kept setting them throughout the day,” Venables said. “Smoke was pitch black from tires burning, we kept hearing ‘Boom,’ ‘Boom,’ ‘Boom.’ That was the tires exploding.

“There’s a window that overlooks the road in front of our resort, and there were five cars on fire,” she said. “The cartel had pulled the people out of them, thank God, then they set the cars on fire. All the way down the coast there were fires set.”

“The first military presence we saw was Sunday about 4 p.m.,” Venables said. “Two gunner ships were in the bay, there has been a lot of military helicopter activity, and we were seeing pickups of soldiers. It’s feeling better.”

After sheltering in place for a couple of days, the couple ventured down to the resort pool, gathering with others who had been confined.

“Today was a good day because we did go to the pool,” Venables said. “That was a nice diversion. The road in front of our resort, as well as the water, was eerily quiet after this happened on Sunday. Today things almost appear normal. There are watercrafts on the water and cars on the street again.”

The shelter in place order has been lifted, but Venables said they are still feeling cautious.

Venables, whose third children’s book, “Just to See You Smile,” will be released on March 25, is looking forward to getting back on American soil.

“Hopefully it’s getting back to normal,” Venables said. “I will definitely be glad to be back in Huron.”