'El Chapo' has left the building

Culiacan, Mexico — 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.