Was it Elvis? How about D B Cooper? Or could it have been Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the world’s most wanted man? Supposed sightings of the fugitive Mexican drug boss are growing in frequency, adding to his legend.
The latest swirl of rumours erupted when Guatemala’s interior minister said a victim of a firefight in that country resembled Guzman, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. On Friday, Guatemala did a U-turn. Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez said he couldn’t even confirm that a firefight had occurred in the remote Peten region, much less that Guzman was dead.
“I apologise if there was a misunderstanding,” Lopez told Guatemala’s Emisoras Unidas radio network.
It marked another false alarm for a fugitive listed by Forbes as having a $1bn fortune - with $7mn in bounties on his head. The Obama administration calls him “the most powerful drug trafficker in the world.”
Guzman hasn’t been seen since in public since early 2001, when he escaped from a Jalisco, Mexico, prison in a laundry basket and slipped away from a 20-year jail term.
Since then, he has built the Sinaloa cartel into a worldwide criminal enterprise with tentacles in 48 countries in Europe, Asia, Australia and throughout the Americas.
The US government has offered $5mn for a tip that leads to his capture and the Mexican government has put up another $2mn. Only dated photos of Guzman exist. The most widely circulated one was taken in a rainy prison yard more than a decade ago.
Drug lords in Mexico commonly undergo plastic surgery to alter their appearances, and no one seems to know what the once-stocky 5-foot-8 Guzman might look like today.
Rumors abound of his whereabouts. The drug lord, whose age may be 55 or 58, is from the town of Badiraguato in Sinaloa state, where loyalty to him is strong and visitors rarely get past gunmen.