Safely home from Mexico

By Mark Frost, Chronicle Editor

Glens Falls Realtor Angela Cugini Girard was in Mexico at San Antonio Tlayacapan in Jalisco State.

“I was at my mother’s property, with two of her tenants that are both Americans that rent little casitas, and we woke up in the morning on Sunday.
“We, us three, had a plan to go around Lake Chapala to a friend’s house across the lake,” she tells The Chronicle.

“My brother from Arizona called, and then my friends from Mexico started calling me saying ‘Do not go across….They just killed El Mencho at Tapalpa, which is across the lake. So they’re like, don’t go anywhere.”

El Mencho, actual name Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, headed the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and was seen as the kingpin of fentanyl flow into the United States. Mexican authorities killed him Sunday.

Angela says, “So the news started rolling in as to what was going on and they issued basically a shutdown for the town, for basically all the towns surrounding my mother’s, because I was right in Jalisco. So we just set up, we’re going to stay home. We have plenty of food. We’ll make lunch. We’ll do this.

“And here I am, I have a ticket for Monday to come home on Delta Airlines. So Patty, my mom’s tenant, and Jeff, my mom’s other tenant, said, you’re not going to get out of here tomorrow. There’s no way. So I booked another ticket for Wednesday and I booked another ticket for Thursday….

“And, of course, my family’s here [in Glens Falls and U.S.] They’re flipping out and I’m going: Listen, half the —- you’re seeing on the news is false. Like that they raided Guadalajara Airport. That was completely false…

“They burnt an Oxo a half a mile from my mother’s house. An Oxo is like a 7-Eleven that does not collaborate with the cartel. So, a lot of these businesses in Mexico pay the cartel for protection every month. Oxo refuses to be part of it…That’s why they were targeted. But they were targeted without people in them.

“So what the American people have to understand is this cartel is not targeting civilians. So when they burn a bus on a highway, they let everybody off it. And then they burn it. And they burn it to cause chaos. to stop traffic from being able to get through so they can make their routes to where they’re going.”

Angela speaks Spanish and spent much of her childhood in Mexico. Her mother started a business that thrived there and built her long-time home.

This past August she passed away.

Angela flew there last Thursday for the weekend, to tend to her mother’s estate and take care of the home, which they’re keeping. “I had appointments on Friday with the attorney and the accountant and I wanted to go pay the taxes, and the water bill only gets paid once a year so I said to my brother, I’m going to fly down there in between Brady’s basketball, his last game in sectionals.”

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Back to the story…

Angela continues, “So, I woke up yesterday morning [Monday] at about 6:15, which is 7:15 at our time. My son leaves the school at like 7:45 so I called on FaceTime. I said I’m fine. I have a ticket for Wednesday to get home.

“So I go on my Delta app. And I see the flight from Atlanta is coming to Guadalajara. My plane ticket I go back on that same plane. So I look at it, and I call my brother, and I said, Greg, the flight from Atlanta looks like it’s boarding to come to Guadalajara. If it takes off, I’m going to find my way to Guadalajara airport.”

The Chronicle asked how far that is.

“It’s 19 miles. It typically takes about an hour to get there because of traffic because it’s the main highway to Guadalajara, the 2nd largest city in Mexico. So I’m tracking this. I calm my husband. I said, I’m going to try and make it. He’s like, that’s a bad idea.

“I said I clocked it on Google, it was telling us it was only going to take 33 minutes, so that was telling me there wasn’t a lot of traffic.

“So he says, who’s going to drive you to the airport? Because the two tenants that live at my mom’s would never drive me to the airport. They’re both American ex-pats. They want to shelter in place.

“So I call this friend of mine, Danny, who’s a village Mexican, big burly Mexican. And he’s a friend of mine, and he answered his phone, and I said, ‘Danny, if this flight takes off from Atlanta to come to Guadalajara, would you drive me in my car?’ I have a car there, my mom’s car, we kept. Because he only has a motorcycle. I wasn’t driving to the airport on a motorcycle. So I said, will you drive me in my mom’s car to the airport?

“He said, yep. I sure will. And I was like, okay. So I said, be here at 10:30, so he got there at 10:30. We put his motorcycle behind the gate. He came inside. That Atlanta flight took off and was in flight.

“So we started driving the auxiliary road to get to the main highway and there isn’t a soul on it. It was like no man’s land.

Like, there’s nobody out. It was weird.”

The Chronicle asked, was it scary?

Angela replied, “It was eerie, not scary. It was just weird because that’s not what it’s ever like there. It’s always busy, you know?”

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“So we get on the main highway and it’s still really not a ton of cars, but about seven miles before the airport, we start seeing a ton of traffic. And we’re like, oh boy. They had a burnt water truck and another burnt water truck. They were the trucks that had been set on fire [by the cartel], and then you were seeing cars on the side of the road that had been just completely burnt.

“So when you get to this truck, the cops are there. The National Guard’s there. And they’re making everybody go around on this little dirt kind of pull off. Right when we get there, the tow truck gets there and the cop, the female cop, comes up and says, you gotta stop. [They’re] moving this truck out of the way, but it’s going to be probably 20 minutes to half an hour. Of course, we miss getting around it by one car.

“So, we watch this all unfold. The tow truck starts pulling the water truck. The water truck catches on fire again. So now the police are trying to take dirt to put out the fire underneath the water truck, and Danny my friend’s yelling, that’s a water truck, just open the valve and you’ll have water. So he yells out, they start, everybody starts grabbing.

“I’m talking civilians are getting out of their cars and they got 5 gallon buckets and they’re throwing water and the police are all there and the National Guard and once they got the truck moved a little bit, the civilian people cleared the road because the fire truck’s not gonna get there because there’s now so much backed up traffic. So the civilians are out of their cars just clearing the road.

“At one point, Danny says, hey, turn your head to the left inconspicuously. And I did, and he said, you see that guy leaning up against that wall? There was like probably 30 yards. I said, yep. He says he’s a cartel guy. He’s sitting there reporting what’s going on here right now. And I was like, oh, great.

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“We get through and then we get to the airport. We park. He [Danny] said I’m not leaving you till you’re 100% comfortable. So he walked in with me, and there was a lot of extra police, a lot of National Guard, and it was business as usual…I got to my gate. The lady at the gate said as soon as this plane gets here, we’re getting the people off and we’re getting you guys on it. We want to move fast and we want to get out of here.

“The pilot said, welcome to Delta 1804 to Atlanta. We know things are a little uneasy here in Guadalajara, but be assured that we are gonna get you home to wherever you’re going. And off we went….Smooth flight to Atlanta, and then I had two-hour layover, and it’s Albany.”

Actually, Angela said, “I was worried about making it home because of the [snow]storm. I kept saying to my husband, you think I’m gonna make it home with the weather? And then it was like, oh, you think I’m gonna make it home with the cartel?”

Angela says, “I love Mexico. I’ve been going there 45 years and I’ve never felt unsafe. There’s been little things. This was a huge deal. They killed one of the biggest drug traffickers, head of one of the largest, most dangerous cartels in Mexico. Like when you talk about cartels, this guy was the most dangerous, ruthless one in the whole entire country.

“So, the thing that I don’t think that the Americans understand is when these things happen, Mexicans do not want to mess with the Americans, because they open a can of worms that they don’t want to deal with.

“When something like this happens, everybody, all the cartel and the police, they’re all fighting for power…They’re not fighting [ordinary people]….One civilian has died. They’re saying 35 to 40 cartel, 50 to 65 police and one woman civilian got caught in the line of fire.”

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Of her calm during the chaos, Angela says, “I definitely feel, from just experience being there, [knowing] the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do. Like, I wasn’t going to take a taxi to the airport. That was not an option. If my friend wasn’t going to drive me in my mom’s little Honda CRV with Mexican plates, I probably wouldn’t have been coming back yesterday.

“I had one person that I knew would get me there safe, and I wasn’t going on any type of public transportation. Those were the cars they were burning. Public vehicles. So, it just happened that everything lined up perfect and I made it back.

“My husband said, well, you had some street smarts. But I owe that to living down there. I truly think that that’s a big part of why you can navigate things that [other] people would be like, ‘I don’t know what to do in this situation.’”

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