Mexico Under Siege

MOST-WANTED MEXICO DRUG TRAFFICKER IS FOUND EVERYWHERE

Sightings, Real or Not, of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman Are Reported
Often, and the Kingpin Always Manages to Stay One Step Ahead of
Mexican and U.S. Law Officials.

He appears in a restaurant, picks
up everyone's tab, then vanishes with his many guards. He stars in his
wedding, government officials among the guests. He is captured, then
released. Twice.

Or maybe not.

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, Mexico's most-wanted drug-trafficking
fugitive, chalks up more sightings than Elvis. He is everywhere, and
nowhere, a long-sought criminal always a step ahead of the law, yet
always in sight or mind.

A mythology has developed around Guzman, the commander of Mexico's
most powerful narcotics network, the so-called Sinaloa cartel, named
for the Pacific coast state that is the historic cradle of Mexican
drug trafficking. Narcocorridos, popular songs about traffickers,
lionize him.

Whether any of his reported exploits -- the brash strutting, the
narrow escapes -- actually happened is almost beside the point. They
add to the mystique around a man who, though reviled and feared by
most Mexicans, is admired by the loyal cadres dedicated to tending,
processing and transporting marijuana, opium poppy or cocaine.

U.S. authorities have placed a $5-million bounty on Guzman's head,
accusing him of smuggling tons of cocaine over the border.

And yet El Chapo is still at large.

In the old style of swaggering kingpins, Guzman cultivated support in
his native Sinaloa by handing out money and favors to hardworking
villagers. There is little doubt that those villagers now help hide
him and alert him to the presence of soldiers or police.

"He is very agile and, of the kingpins, is the one who moves around
the least," said Ismael Bojorquez, editor of the newspaper Riodoce in
Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa. "He has a natural space for
operating." That space is the so-called Golden Triangle: a desolate
patch between Culiacan and neighboring Durango and Chihuahua states.

A more fundamental explanation for Chapo's elusiveness, however, could
be that few have the political will to catch him.

"He cannot survive without the support of the state, its institutions,
police or army," Bojorquez said. "That's obvious."

A Reported Sighting

Riodoce published an account of one of the legendary Guzman sightings
at a restaurant in Culiacan late last year: A group of men entered Las
Palmas, a lime-green eatery with an ersatz tile roof on a busy street.
They cased the joint, then ordered everyone in the crowded room to
remain seated and to hand over their cellphones. Guzman made his
entrance. He went from table to table, greeting and shaking hands with
the diners before retiring to a private room, where he ate his
favorite meal of steak and other red-meat dishes. He departed with
less of a flair, discreetly exiting through a back door. Customers
discovered their bills had been paid.

Later, the restaurant's proprietors denied that Guzman had been
there.

A story that surfaced this year in Ciudad Juarez, a city in Chihuahua
across the U.S. border from El Paso, had the same elements: the
cellphones confiscated, the tabs paid.

Guzman's appearance at the red-stucco Aroma Restaurant in Juarez was
especially provocative because the city is headquarters to a rival
drug organization that Guzman has been trying to supplant.

A short time later, even as the Aroma's managers insisted that Guzman
was never there, the restaurant was torched.

Guzman, 51, has close-set eyes and stands about 5 feet 6, earning him
his widely known nickname "El Chapo," Spanish for "Shorty."

Last year, he reportedly married his third wife, Emma, on the summer
day she turned 18. Local officials attended the wedding, the stories
go, and a local military commander set up security for the event in an
isolated mountain village deep in the Triangle.

There have been other reports widely circulated in Mexico that Guzman
was detained by police twice in the last few years but then allowed to
slip away. A senior government official said that on another occasion
troops reached his hide-out minutes after he apparently fled; food on
a table was still hot.

Building an Empire

Guzman got his start as a lieutenant and air logistics manager for
Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the spiritual godfather of today's
cartels. After Felix Gallardo's arrest in 1989, Guzman inherited some
of Felix Gallardo's territory and began building an empire that is
probably the country's largest cocaine smuggling operation.

A significant part of the violence that is jolting Mexico involves
Guzman's henchmen in turf wars with other criminal networks. The most
far-reaching internal feud came when Guzman's long-trusted aides, the
Beltran Leyva brothers, broke with him early this year. In May, gunmen
killed Guzman's son, Edgar, and war between the rivals escalated.

U.S. officials insist that Guzman's network of support will eventually
fail as President Felipe Calderon presses a 2-year-long offensive
against the drug networks that have seized control of parts of the
country, and as those organizations duke it out among themselves for
diminishing territory.

In fact, one senior U.S. law enforcement official said, Guzman may
fear death at the hands of rival dealers more than at the hands of
authorities.

"The narcos are far less forgiving than some police," the official
said, speaking on condition of anonymity for his safety. "There is not
an occasion where a major trafficker doesn't try to bribe his way out
of jail."

Bribery has worked for Guzman. He was captured in Guatemala in 1993
and transferred to a maximum security prison in Mexico, where he
proceeded to regularly receive lovers and direct his drug business
from behind prison walls. Until he got tired of the life. Eight years
after his incarceration, he paid guards to smuggle him out of the
prison in a laundry truck.