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 News from Around the Americas | March 2008 
Guatemala Says Mexico Drug Lord Not in Shootout Dead
 Mica Rosenberg - Reuters
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Guatemala City - Mexico's most wanted man is not among 11 victims of a drug gang shootout this week in Guatemala as had been suspected, a presidential spokesman said on Friday.
Two of the bodies found at the scene of the gunbattle were charred beyond recognition and investigators had been testing blood samples to see if either could be Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the fugitive head of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel.
"The information we have is that he was not among the dead and that neither of the burned bodies is him," Rolando Robles, a spokesman for Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom told Reuters.
The attorney general's office said investigations continue and authorities were waiting for full forensic results.
Police say the battle with high-caliber weapons and grenades in front of a hotel near the border with El Salvador was probably a drug deal gone bad. One Mexican was killed and three others were arrested fleeing the scene.
Rumors circulated in Guatemala that Guzman, whose nickname means "Shorty," might have been among the victims.
"I was with the investigative team in the morning and we believe that Guzman is Honduras," Colom told a local paper.
Guzman, a folk hero to some poor Mexicans living in poppy- and marijuana-growing regions, has been on the run since 2001, when he escaped from a maximum-security Mexican prison in the back of a laundry van. He was last arrested in Guatemala in 1993.
The left-leaning Colom took office in January faced with the difficult task of reining in the powerful drug traffickers that control large swathes of Guatemala's territory.
South American cocaine often is smuggled to the United States through Central American countries and Mexican cartels are thought to control most of the trade in the region.
Mexico's government has dispatched 25,000 troops and federal police to battle drug cartels, whose turf wars have killed more than 700 people in Mexico so far this year.
(Editing by Catherine Bremer and Bill Trott) |
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