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Officials: Drug lord hid in US

Wire services
March 26, 2005

Mexican authorities suspect that fugitive drug kingpin JoaquÃÂ*n "El Chapo" Guzmán may have hidden out temporarily in the United States, according to an assessment by law enforcement authorities reported on here Friday by the local press.

Guzmán, the head of the notorious Sinaloa cartel whose extradition has been requested by Washington, also has moved through various regions of Mexico over the past few months, the confidential report by the federal Attorney General's Office, known as the PGR, said.

The U.S. government is offering a US5 million reward for the capture of Guzmán, who in January 2001 escaped from a high-security prison in the western Mexican state of Jalisco and teamed up with Juárez cartel drug trafficker Ismael Zambada to launch a vicious turf war against rival drug-running groups.

In addition to Jalisco, Guzmán and his gunmen recently have been operating in the northern border states of Baja California, Sinaloa, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, as well as in the capital region and the southern state of Oaxaca, where authorities are currently hot on their trail.

PGR prosecutors suspect that Guzmán eluded the intense search for him by the security forces and temporarily went to ground in the United States, but they believe that after a while he returned to Mexico, the local press said.

Both governments "have recognized the great mobility of the leader of the Sinaloa cartel," the report leaked to the media said.

A week ago, authorities raided a home in the border city of Mexicali after receiving a tip that Guzmán was hiding there, but all they found were two persons thought to be his accomplices, whom they arrested.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Guzmán used a system of tunnels leading into Arizona to smuggle cocaine across the border into the United States.

Top organized-crime prosecutor José Luis Santiago recently said that authorities were closing the noose around Guzmán and were continuing to raid both rural and urban houses to try and find him.

Santiago said that federal authorities were hoping to receive more information about the kingpin's movements and whereabouts following the recent arrest in Guadalajara of one of his sons, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, who stands accused of drug trafficking and money laundering.

The violent turf war has left dozens of dead all across northern Mexico in the last six months.



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