Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, August 6, 2026 – Merchants in Las Juntas are pressing Puerto Vallarta authorities to increase police patrols after another armed robbery was captured on surveillance video, adding to a series of attacks on businesses and workers in the delegation in recent weeks.
The latest incident occurred Tuesday morning at a Kiosko convenience store near Joaquín Amaro and Aquiles Serdán. Surveillance footage reviewed by local media shows two men arriving on a black motorcycle. One remained outside while the second entered the store with a firearm and removed the cash register.
About 3,500 pesos was reportedly inside the register. Police responded and searched the surrounding area, but no arrests were reported.
Workers connected with Lala were also targeted during the incident, although local accounts differ on exactly what happened. NotiEspacio reported that delivery workers at the Kiosko were robbed of cash. Tribuna de la Bahía reported that the same suspects later targeted a nearby Lala location. Authorities have not publicly clarified that part of the sequence.
A day later, merchants and residents stated that robberies have become recurrent in the delegation and said they want a greater police presence in commercial areas.
Their concern follows another significant armed robbery in Las Juntas less than a month ago.
On July 12, two armed men entered a motorcycle business in a commercial plaza along Federal Highway 200. Employees said the attackers threatened them with firearms before taking approximately 85,000 pesos in cash and their mobile phones. Police launched a search after that robbery, but the suspects were not located at the time.
The individual incidents do not establish a crime wave in Las Juntas on their own. Municipal-level data, however, showed business robbery moving upward earlier this year.
Puerto Vallarta recorded 66 reported business robberies between January and April, compared with 55 during the same four months in 2025, according to figures from the Jalisco security platform and the federal public-security database. That represents an increase of 20 percent. A review of those figures counted 389 robberies across all categories during the first four months of the year.
Those statistics cover the municipality as a whole and do not show whether Las Juntas itself has experienced a statistically significant increase. The recent incidents nevertheless give merchants a concrete basis for their request that more officers be visible in the delegation.
The demand also comes shortly after Puerto Vallarta substantially expanded its police fleet. The city placed 35 additional patrol vehicles into service in June, an expansion intended to improve coverage and response times across the municipality.
That investment now puts attention on where the additional patrol capacity is being deployed and whether neighborhoods reporting repeated robberies are seeing increased police presence.
Public concern about security has also changed sharply. The latest INEGI urban security survey found that 65.4 percent of adults surveyed in Puerto Vallarta considered the city unsafe in June, compared with 27.3 percent one year earlier. PVDN reported on the change last month.
The figure measures perception rather than the number of crimes committed, an important distinction. But repeated surveillance videos and reports of armed robberies can influence how safe people feel even when individual cases are confined to particular neighborhoods.
What remains unclear is whether the municipal police plan to adjust patrol assignments in Las Juntas in response to the merchants’ complaints. As of Thursday morning, no specific change in police deployment tied to the latest robberies had been publicly announced.
