Seven women have been murdered across the Mexican state of Jalisco in recent months, and a state legislator says the evidence points to a serial killer stalking victims in and around the resort city of Puerto Vallarta, a claim local prosecutors are actively working to discredit.
Yussara Canales, who represents Puerto Vallarta's 5th district in the Jalisco state legislature, told the New York Post that a disturbing pattern connects several of the killings: victims' blouses had been pulled up or removed from their bodies.
Five women have been killed in Puerto Vallarta alone during the first five months of 2026. Last year, the city recorded just three female homicides total. The spike, and the grim details surrounding the bodies, has generated international headlines and put pressure on Jalisco officials who would rather the world focus on the four FIFA World Cup games Guadalajara is set to host in June, just 52 minutes by air from Puerto Vallarta.
Canales laid out the common thread she says links the cases. In her words:
"This appears to be a common denominator among the femicides that have occurred recently. It was this specific detail that initially led to the suspicion of a serial killer."
She went further, describing what investigators found at the scenes:
"In every instance, the victims' blouses had been pulled up. In two, possibly three, of the cases, their blouses were found in this raised position."
The Jalisco State Attorney General's office has gathered evidence that, according to reporting, reveals a disturbing pattern among the femicides. But the state prosecutor's office concluded Wednesday that there was no link between certain killings and the death of 25-year-old Elizabeth Galindo, whose body was found May 21 in Puerto Vallarta bearing multiple signs of violence and bruising on her face. Galindo had been reported missing April 29 from the State of Mexico, hundreds of miles away.
Breitbart reported that Mexican police have pushed back against U.S. media coverage framing the deaths as the work of a serial killer, an effort Canales herself views with deep skepticism.
The timeline of killings stretches back to January. On January 20, a 73-year-old woman was stabbed to death inside her home by her 47-year-old son, who then killed himself. On March 31, the body of 29-year-old Kitzia Montes was found on the side of a highway in the municipality of Autlán de Navarro.
On April 23, a 50-year-old woman was gunned down in broad daylight while riding her motorcycle. Then came the cluster that drew international attention.
On May 10, an unidentified woman believed to be around 30 years old was discovered dead on Victor Itiburde Avenue near El Pirulí ranch. She wore a blue blouse. She was found lying on her back, with cuts on both wrists. Five days later, on May 15, a second unidentified woman, aged 35 to 40, wearing a black blouse, turned up dead near the Hyatt Ziva Puerto Vallarta resort. She showed signs of blunt force trauma to the head and had been dead for several hours.
The Post had earlier reported that all three women found within those 11 days were in their early to mid-30s and had tattoos. Mexican prosecutors told local outlet Reporte Diario that "the preliminary information does not indicate that they are linked," while also stating that "all lines of investigation are being exhausted to find the persons or persons responsible."
Mexico's broader crisis of official corruption and cartel influence raises obvious questions about whether prosecutors can be trusted to follow evidence wherever it leads, or whether political considerations shape the conclusions they announce.
Then came Elizabeth Galindo on May 21, and, most recently, Dr. Dalia Cortés, a 43-year-old physician found stabbed to death inside her home in the town of Zapotiltic. Her former boyfriend was arrested on Friday. Authorities also mentioned a 13-year-old boy in connection with her killing, though the details remain murky.
Canales does not mince words about why she thinks the prosecutor's office rushed to declare the cases unrelated. With Guadalajara preparing to host World Cup matches in June, the last thing Jalisco's political class wants is a serial-killer narrative attached to the state's crown jewel tourist destination.
She told the Post:
"Let me tell you why I think they did it: because, sadly, this news is making international headlines. It is leaving our port city in a very bad light. Perhaps this is the attorney general's office's way of trying to counteract all the negative notoriety our municipality is currently receiving."
That is a sitting legislator accusing her own state's law enforcement apparatus of shaping criminal investigations around tourism revenue and international sporting events. Whether she is right or wrong about a serial killer, the accusation itself is damning, and it tracks with a familiar pattern in Mexican governance, where elected officials at every level have been caught subordinating public safety to political and financial interests.
The prosecutor's office has offered no detailed public explanation of what evidence led it to rule out connections between the killings. It has not released autopsy findings, named suspects in the May 10 and May 15 cases, or addressed the blouse detail that Canales describes as the common thread. The gap between the certainty of the office's conclusion and the thinness of its public explanation is striking.
Canales, speaking during a break from a legislative session, made clear the toll the situation is taking on women in her district:
"I do believe this is something that puts us very much on alert, something that compels us women to be far more cautious and, sadly, to live in fear."
Puerto Vallarta is not some remote border town. It is one of Mexico's most famous coastal resorts, known to American tourists as the port of call from "The Love Boat." Bodies turning up near four-and-a-half-star hotels and on well-trafficked avenues is not a problem officials can wave away with a press release.
The violence in Jalisco exists within a larger landscape of lawlessness across Mexico and Latin America, where criminal organizations operate with impunity and governments struggle, or refuse, to protect their own citizens. The United States has taken direct military action against narco-terrorist targets in the region when allied governments have asked for help, underscoring just how deep the security crisis runs.
Several critical questions hang over this case. Are the January stabbing, the April motorcycle shooting, and the Cortés killing, all of which appear to have identified perpetrators or domestic motives, genuinely part of the same pattern, or has Canales cast the net too wide? What specific forensic evidence did the attorney general's office gather? Why have the two women found on May 10 and May 15 still not been publicly identified? And why did the prosecutor's office move so quickly to declare the cases unconnected without offering the public a substantive explanation?
The answers matter, not just for the families of the dead, but for the thousands of American and international tourists who visit Puerto Vallarta every week. If a serial killer is operating in a major resort city, the public deserves to know. And if prosecutors are burying that possibility to protect a tourism brand and a soccer tournament, the cover-up is its own crime.
When officials care more about headlines than homicides, the women who live, and die, in their jurisdiction pay the price.