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 News from Around the Americas | March 2008 
Guatemala Checks Shootout Dead for Mexican Drug Lord
 Mica Rosenberg - Reuters
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| | Map locates Teculutan, Guatemala, where at least nine people were killed in a shootout. | | |
Guatemala City - Guatemalan police are running blood tests on the charred bodies of two victims of a violent gun battle to see if Mexico's most-wanted drug lord could be among them, officials said on Wednesday.
Eleven people died in a shootout with high-caliber weapons and grenades on Tuesday. Eight were killed at the scene near a weekend holiday spot in the eastern state of Zacapa, and three others died later in hospital.
Two of the victims' bodies, still clutching M-16 assault rifles, were burned beyond recognition and police were taking blood samples to see if either could be Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the fugitive head of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel.
"We are not ruling anything out. They are in the process of doing blood tests to see if it is him," Luis Ixmatul, a spokesman for the attorney general's office, told Reuters.
The shootout in front of a hotel, near the border with El Salvador, was probably a drug deal gone bad, Ixmatul said.
Burned-out cars, an arsenal of weapons, unexploded grenades and close to 500 bullets were found at the scene, he said.
One Mexican has been identified among the dead, and a rumor began circulating in Guatemala late on Tuesday that Guzman, whose nickname means "Shorty," might be among the victims.
"We are exchanging information with the Guatemalan authorities to figure out the identity of the dead and captured," Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told reporters at an event in the State of Mexico.
Three Mexicans and four Guatemalans were arrested near the site of the shootout, apparently fleeing the scene.
Separately, a group of local newspaper reporters working in the area said their car was hijacked on the road to Zacapa soon after the gunfight by a heavily armed group of men with Mexican accents. The car was abandoned further down the road.
Guzman has been on the run since 2001, when he escaped from a maximum-security Mexican prison in the back of a laundry van. The last time he was arrested was in Guatemala in 1993.
His cartel is famous for digging elaborate drug-smuggling tunnels under the U.S.-Mexican border. Police say he pays million-dollar bribes to avoid capture and may have had plastic surgery to disguise his face.
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.
South American cocaine is often smuggled to the United States through Central America countries and Mexican cartels are thought to control most of the trade in the region.
(Additional reporting by Herbert Hernandez; Editing by Catherine Bremer and Todd Eastham) |
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